Nearly Half the 'Near Me' Businesses Google Ranks Fail Its Own Core Web Vitals Test

Local search is where small businesses live or die: the plumber, the dentist, the roofer competing for near-me and city-plus-service queries. Everyone argues about reviews, citations, and Google Business Profiles, but almost nobody asks whether these sites are actually fast. So we checked, pulling the local businesses ranking across six cities and six trades and measuring their real-user speed. They turn out to be thoroughly average, with one specific weakness and one wide-open opportunity.

For a local business, the website is where the call starts. Someone with a burst pipe or a toothache searches, taps a result, and decides in seconds whether to phone this business or the next one on the list. A page that makes them wait is a job that goes elsewhere, and in trades where one job can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, that is real money leaking out of a slow homepage. Speed here is booked work.

The measurements join Ahrefs local search data to the Chrome User Experience Report, Google's record of how real visitors experience these sites on their own phones, across the local businesses ranking for six trades in six US metros. The most striking part of the result is not the pass rate. It is how many of these ranking businesses are too small for Google to measure at all.

"Near me" is its own kind of search: a person on a phone, usually outside on a specific block, typing a trade and a city and choosing whoever loads first. To measure that experience we pulled the domains that actually rank for those queries from Ahrefs local SERPs and joined them to the Chrome User Experience Report, Google's public log of how real visitors experience each site on their own devices. Six trades across six US metros produced 79 distinct ranking domains after directories and aggregators were excluded, and 46 of those had enough field traffic to report Core Web Vitals.

One methodology note. The 79 domains ranking for six service-plus-city "near me" queries across six US metros (only 46 had enough traffic for field data) are the competitive local set a searcher actually sees on page one, not a census of every local business on the web.

Passing Core Web Vitals means clearing all three of Google's thresholds together, at the 75th percentile on mobile: main content loading in under 2.5 seconds (good LCP), interactions responding in under 200 milliseconds (good INP), and a layout stable enough to score under 0.1 on cumulative shift (good CLS). A missing interaction score counts as a fail under this strict rule.

This study is the cross-trade view. Each vertical has its own field data and its own competitive shape:

• How fast are healthcare and local medical practice websites?
• How fast are local law firm websites?
• How fast are local real estate brokerage and agent websites?
• How fast are local bank and credit union websites?

Start with the number everyone wants: 52% of these ranking local businesses pass Core Web Vitals, within a couple of points of the web-wide average, which is itself the story. The sites winning local search are not the disaster the small-business cliche predicts, but they are not fast either. They are average, and in local search average is apparently good enough to rank.

Break it apart and the shape is distinctive. Local-business sites are excellent on the two metrics that are cheap to get right when a site is simple. Good INP runs 94% and good CLS 94%. A small brochure site with a few pages, a contact form, little JavaScript, and a layout that does not jump sails through responsiveness and stability almost by default. The weak spot is loading. Only 70% have a good LCP, and the median loads its largest content in 2.2 seconds, flirting with the 2.5-second line, the predictable cost of budget shared hosting and a big unoptimized hero photo of the storefront or the team.

Then the finding that reframes the whole exercise. Of the 79 ranking sites, only 46 had any field data at all. The other 33, more than four in ten, do not get enough traffic to meet the Chrome UX Report's reporting threshold. A large share of the businesses ranking on page one of local search are so small that nobody, not even Google's public field dataset, is measuring their performance.

The strict all-three scoring compounds it. Nearly a quarter of the sites that are measured have no interaction data, so they fail the combined test even when loading and stability are fine. One Chicago plumber in the sample loads in a fast 1.3 seconds but still fails, purely because it has no INP score to show. That is not a slow site being caught; it is a small site falling through a strict rule.

Web-wide, about 40% of sites pass. The strict no-INP-fails rule pulls the local pass rate below what loading and stability alone would produce.

The competitive picture in this sample is unusually simple. The 46 measured sites cluster right around the passing line at 52.2%, strong on the cheap metrics (94.3% good INP, 93.5% good CLS) and weak on the one expensive metric, with only 69.6% posting a good LCP and a median load of 2.2 seconds. The 33 sites with no field data, more than four in ten, are not even measured. That leaves a single, well-defined target: loading is the one metric standing between most local sites and a pass. The fix is correspondingly narrow. Move off entry-level shared hosting onto something that responds quickly, where our hosting study shows the spread is more than two to one, then compress and correctly size that storefront hero image and turn on caching. Each attacks a good LCP directly.

There is a measurement lesson underneath the numbers. Because 33 of the 79 ranking sites are too small to appear in the Chrome UX Report, and nearly a quarter of the measured ones fail only for a missing INP score (the Chicago plumber that loads in a fast 1.3 seconds and still fails is the clearest case), managing speed here is partly a lab exercise. Run Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights on the pages that carry the calls, the homepage and the main service and contact pages. A local business that gets its LCP under 2.5 seconds is not matching this field. With competitors bunched at the passing line and many not measured at all, it is stepping clearly ahead of it.