Every dog boarding, daycare, training and grooming business we could identify across all 50 states and DC. We checked whether they had a website, whether it loaded, and what a search engine would find when it got there. Here is what the industry actually looks like.
235 of the 1,446 businesses had no website we could find, by any route. Not a thin site or an outdated one. Nothing. For a service people research before handing over their dog, that is the single largest gap in the industry.
Of the 1,211 businesses with a website on record, 108 failed to load: 88 returned an error, 10 timed out, and 10 had a broken SSL certificate. These are businesses that believe they have a website. Their customers are finding a dead page.
This surprised us. Of the 1,092 live sites, 95.2% run on HTTPS, 94.9% are mobile ready, and the median HTML response came back in 284 milliseconds. Only 18 sites took longer than 3 seconds. The common claim that small pet businesses have slow, broken, unusable websites is not what the data shows.
26.0% of live sites have no structured data, and 23.3% have no meta description. 141 sites have neither, which leaves search engines and AI assistants guessing at what the business even does. 403 sites, 36.9%, have a title tag too long to display fully in search results.
266 of the 1,092 live sites published no email address we could find across the homepage and the usual contact pages. Separately, 268 businesses use a free Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail address as their published business contact.
| Measure | Sites passing | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Loads over HTTPS | 1040 of 1092 | 95.2% |
| Mobile viewport present | 1036 of 1092 | 94.9% |
| Has a title tag | 1074 of 1092 | 98.4% |
| Has a meta description | 838 of 1092 | 76.7% |
| Has structured data (schema) | 808 of 1092 | 74.0% |
| Responds in under 3 seconds | 1074 of 1092 | 98.4% |
Median HTML response time was 284 milliseconds and the median HTML document was 150 KB. Both measure the initial document only, not fully rendered page weight or Core Web Vitals.
We assembled a list of US pet boarding, daycare, training and grooming businesses from
the OpenStreetMap animal_boarding layer and the public IBPSA member
directory, then reverse geocoded each record to a city and state. Businesses whose names
indicated a different industry, equine boarding, veterinary practices, and a handful of
mistagged records, were excluded, leaving 1,446.
Where no website was listed we searched for one before recording the business as having none. Each site was then requested once with a standard desktop browser user agent, a 20 second timeout, and redirects followed. We recorded the final URL, HTTP status, response time, document size, and the presence of a title tag, meta description, mobile viewport and structured data.
Sites returning 401, 403 or 429 were recorded as having refused an automated request and are excluded from the technical results rather than counted as broken. There were 11. Fieldwork ran in August 2026.
These findings are free to quote, in full or in part, with attribution and a link. No permission needed.
Writing about the pet care industry and want a cut of this data we have not published, by state or by service type? Email hello@dogtailmarketing.com and we will pull it for you.
We will run the same checks on your website and send you the results. Free, no obligation.