Over the past months, I’ve been collecting and structuring public US business data at scale as part of a side project.
What surprised me wasn’t the volume, but the patterns.
A significant number of active businesses still don’t have a website. Entire industries lag far behind in basic online presence. Some niches are saturated with outreach, while others appear almost untouched.
The hardest part wasn’t collecting the data. It was cleaning it, normalizing categories, deduplicating entries, and deciding what actually matters to someone who wants to use the data.
This post summarizes what stood out once the dataset grew large enough for patterns to become obvious.
Happy to answer questions or clarify methodology in the comments.