Digital Report Costa Blanca 2026
For this report I opened the websites of more than 4,400 businesses, first on the Costa Blanca, then across the whole Comunidad Valenciana, up through Valencia and Castellón. 3,850 of them had a reachable website whose values can be measured, and every percentage here refers only to those 3,850. The result: half are missing exactly what a customer or a search engine looks for first. And it is the Costa Blanca, the province with the most tourism, where the gap is widest.
Across 3,850 reachable business websites in the Comunidad Valenciana: 50% had no locatable legal notice, 48% showed no cookie notice on the homepage, and 39% emitted no structured data that machines can read more easily. Only 119 of 3,850 use FAQ markup for AI search. Full method and sector-by-sector numbers below.
What is the state of business websites on the Costa Blanca?
Eight findings from 3,850 websites, ordered by the damage to the business: first what costs customers today, then the legal exposure, and finally what gets expensive tomorrow. Each entry links to the section with the details.
The guest books anyway: through the portal, which keeps 15 to 25 per cent, or with the house next door, where booking direct works.
Someone is right there, ready to ask a question, and finds no way to ask it. They do not search for long: they ask the next business.
A customer searches for you on their phone in the evening, waits, sees nothing, and taps the entry above yours. That is the competitor.
The click from Google or the maps app leads nowhere. To the person searching, you are closed.
Day to day, nobody notices, until someone complains. Cases start with a complaint, not an inspection. Fines up to €30,000, in serious cases up to €150,000.
On every visit, right in the address bar. Hardly any customer can place the warning, but every one of them reads it.
Without numbers you never learn whether the site is working or merely existing. Every decision stays a guessing game.
Not an urgent problem today. It becomes one as soon as customers start their search with ChatGPT or an assistant instead of Google.
The order weighs what a gap costs a typical business that lives on enquiries or bookings. What comes first in your case depends on your sector: for a dental clinic the booking path matters little, the missing legal notice does.
Why I do this
I build websites. It is my profession, and it is the reason this report exists. You should know that before you read a single figure, not after.
That is exactly why I lay my method fully open. You can repeat the test on your own site any time with Google's free tool, and the steps I used to reach these numbers are further down. A report that wants to sell you something while hiding its method would be worthless. This one you can check.
How I tested
So the numbers hold up, here first is where they come from and what they do not say.
- Where the businesses come from. From three sources: open geodata from OpenStreetMap, a contact list from my own work, and a targeted web search. Every address was opened and checked before testing. This is not a random sample, which is why I call it an analysis, not a representative study.
- Which way the selection leans. Anyone findable through these sources usually already has some online presence. The truly invisible businesses, with no website or listing at all, are necessarily missing here. So the numbers most likely paint the situation better than it is, not worse.
- What was measured. One fetch of the home page per business, plus a mobile measurement with Google PageSpeed Insights. I checked whether the legal notice, privacy policy and cookie notice are findable, how fast the page loads on mobile, whether structured data is emitted, and whether there is a direct booking path.
- Limits of the measurement. A single reading per page, not an average of many runs. The fetch sees the page as it is delivered on the first load. A cookie notice that loads late via script can be missed. I cross-checked this against samples; the error rate was around seven in a hundred. The fetch was a plain, public page visit with no login; a robots.txt that restricts automated access I did not evaluate separately.
- What it all refers to. All percentages apply to businesses with a reachable website. Anyone without a website does not appear here. Fetch period: 6–7 July 2026.
- What I protect. I publish no personal data about individuals, only totals and proportions. For no sector and no region do I give a percentage if fewer than 30 businesses sit behind it; in that case I show absolute numbers. That way no figure can be traced back to a single business.
The numbers by sector
Ten sectors, sorted by number of websites tested. Each column shows how many are missing something. The higher the value, the bigger the gap.
| Sector | Websites | Speed (median) | under 50 | no legal notice | no cookie notice | outdated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants & dining Bars, cafés | 832 | 62 | 16% | 58% | 54% | 19% |
| Hotels & lodging Hotels, hostales, B&Bs | 470 | 57 | 30% | 47% | 52% | 18% |
| Real estate Agencies | 340 | 58 | 23% | 60% | 66% | 10% |
| Dental clinics Dental clinics | 288 | 61 | 16% | 39% | 31% | 26% |
| Health & practices Physio, optics, vets | 282 | 60 | 13% | 40% | 41% | 24% |
| Law firms & advisers Lawyers, gestorías, tax | 266 | 63 | 15% | 44% | 42% | 21% |
| Building & renovation Reforms, trades, pools | 252 | 64 | 13% | 50% | 51% | 23% |
| Leisure & activities Diving, boats, golf, tours | 197 | 58 | 26% | 54% | 48% | 26% |
| Holiday rentals Apartments, villas | 160 | 59 | 23% | 52% | 61% | 18% |
| Beauty & grooming Hair, cosmetics, spa | 151 | 63 | 13% | 51% | 42% | 23% |
| Language & driving schools Language schools, driving schools | 146 | 62 | 11% | 51% | 44% | 23% |
| Auto & garages Garages, dealerships, tyres | 141 | 61 | 18% | 55% | 39% | 24% |
| Fitness & yoga Studios, yoga, pilates | 106 | 60 | 16% | 46% | 45% | 18% |
| Insurance brokers Brokers | 81 | 64 | 17% | 35% | 35% | 19% |
| Removals & relocation Movers, relocation | 57 | 66 | 7% | 40% | 35% | 14% |
| Wineries Bodegas | 49 | 61 | 16% | 47% | 45% | 27% |
| Pet care Pet supplies, grooming | 31 | 58 | 26% | 45% | 58% | 29% |
Speed (median) is the middle PageSpeed score for mobile, from 0 to 100. under 50 is the share of pages that do not reach that score, i.e. that load noticeably slowly. outdated means: the copyright year in the footer is before 2025, a hint that the site has not been touched in a while. The two smallest sectors, real estate and wineries, have only 45 and 41 websites; their percentages swing more and should be read with more caution. All shares refer to the figure in the "Websites" column.
The legal notice, privacy policy and cookie notice are not a formality: they are legally required in Spain (LSSI, Ley 34/2002). Day to day, nobody notices they are missing, and that is exactly what makes it treacherous: a case almost always starts with a complaint, not an inspection. One angry customer or one competitor is enough. Depending on severity, the breach counts as minor or serious, with fines up to €30,000 or up to €150,000.
Then there is the quieter damage: many customers, German ones especially, look for the legal details before they transfer money or book. If they are missing, the business feels less tangible than the next one, and the enquiry goes there.
The weakest sector almost everywhere: 66% with no cookie notice, 60% with no legal notice, and not one of the 45 sites emits structured data for AI search.
Your sector? I check your site for free →The largest group in the test. 58% of 832 have no findable legal notice, more than half no cookie notice.
Your sector? I check your site for free →Weakest on privacy: 61% with no cookie notice, even though booking and payment data is handled precisely here.
Your sector? I check your site for free →One in two of the 252 sites with no findable legal notice (50%), and 36% show neither a contact form nor WhatsApp on the home page, in a trade that lives on enquiries.
Your sector? I check your site for free →Lost bookings
With hotels and lodging the gap can be put into money. Of 470 businesses tested, only 217 take a booking directly on their own website.
Priority 1 · Costing you customers todayThe same night, two routes: if the guest books through a portal, the portal keeps 15 to 25 per cent depending on the provider. If they book directly on your site, everything stays with the house. On €100 it looks like this:
The €20 or so is the commission at a mid-range rate. Reckoned across a season, that difference is often more than the website would have cost that opens the direct path.
I looked only at the home page itself, not at what a business does on portals or by phone. A booking without an own path can run by email or by phone, and then the margin also stays with the house. Still, the direct path on the site itself is the only one that works around the clock, at night too, when the guest is planning the trip from the sofa.
For holiday rentals the same sum is more personal. Of 160 rentals tested, only 40 take a booking directly on their own site; anyone renting a single holiday home through portals gives up the same fixed share on every booking. On top of that: 61% of rental sites show no cookie notice, even though booking and payment data is handled precisely here.
Lost enquiries
Priority 1 · Costing you customers todayThe most expensive moment is the one where an interested customer is already there. They are on your page, they have a question about an appointment, a price or availability, and they find no way to ask it. They do not search for long: they tap back and ask the next business. The enquiry you never saw shows up in no statistic.
On a coast where guests and residents alike run their day-to-day over WhatsApp, only about two in ten websites show a WhatsApp contact. And 38% (1,447 of 3,850) offer neither a contact form nor WhatsApp on the home page; anyone who wants to get in touch has to search first. For restaurants it is 55%, for hotels 39%.
On the measurement limit: only the home page was checked. A form on a dedicated contact page does not count here, so many businesses do have a path, just not where the visitor lands. This barely affects the WhatsApp figure: such links usually sit on every page.
How fast the sites load on mobile
Measured with Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile. This is the number you can check for yourself most easily.
Priority 1 · Costing you customers todayThe number above counts upward. The bar below flips the direction and points to the slow pages specifically: 18% of all websites stay below a PageSpeed score of 50, and here, as everywhere else on this page: the longer the bar, the bigger the gap.
A guest searches for a table on their phone in the evening, taps your result and waits. A few seconds of blank screen is all it takes: they swipe back and pick the entry above yours, the competitor. You never hear about it, because someone who leaves before the page loads leaves no trace.
Speed is not an end in itself. Google confirms load time as a ranking signal (the metrics are called Core Web Vitals): a slow page ranks worse in search and loses visitors before it has even finished loading. With hotels especially, where the site competes with fast booking portals, the first second decides.
Dead addresses
Priority 1 · Costing you customers todayA dead address does not cost you some of your visitors: it costs you all of them. Anyone who looks for the business through an old listing lands on nothing, assumes it has closed, and books elsewhere. And nobody calls to ask whether you still exist.
That many domains were dead at the time of the test: the address still existed in directories but no longer served a page. That is almost one in thirteen, around 8%. Behind it is often the same pattern: a business has a website built once and then lets the domain lapse. The Google or maps listing stays, but the click leads nowhere.
A further 21 sites were reachable but blocked my automated fetch. I deliberately did not count these as dead: a blocked access is not a vanished business.
In the same vein, a smaller finding: 166 reachable sites still serve their content unencrypted over http. Modern browsers mark them in the address bar as "Not secure", right next to the company name. Hardly any customer can place the warning, but every one of them reads it, on every visit.
Four in ten fly blind
Priority 3 · Costs you tomorrowNot felt today, but expensive over time: you spend money on a website and never learn what it gives back. Whether the menu gets read, whether visitors give up at the contact form, whether that advert did anything, it all stays a guessing game. If you do not measure, you cannot get better, only more expensive.
That many websites embed no recognisable visitor measurement, no analytics, no statistics. These businesses do not know how many people visit their site, where they come from, or at which point they leave. For restaurants it is more than half (53%).
The measurement limit applies here too: analytics that loads only after cookie consent, or server-side, may have been missed, so the true share is likely a little lower. That changes little about the pattern.
Where the gap is widest
The report covers three provinces: Alicante, which forms the Costa Blanca, plus Valencia and Castellón. The comparison surprised me. You would expect the province with the most international tourism to be the furthest ahead online. It is the other way around.
On the Costa Blanca, 53 % of the tested websites have no findable legal notice; in Valencia, 46 %; in Castellón, 42 %. The province that lives most on visitors and buyers from abroad is the one that protects itself least in law.
The five coastal comarcas of the province of Alicante
Within the province of Alicante, 1,322 websites could be clearly assigned to one of the five coastal comarcas. Here is the distribution.
I show the regions only as a total, not by sector within a region. The reason is protection, not convenience. As soon as you combine region and sector, the groups become so small that someone with local knowledge could infer individual businesses. A report about totals must not become a way to trace individual businesses. So this is deliberately where it stops.
The gap in AI search
Priority 3 · Costs you tomorrowWhen a guest asks their assistant where to eat well in Dénia tonight, the machine answers from what it can read with confidence. Sites without machine-readable details are harder to capture for that answer, and more easily do not appear at all. Today that is the exception. But this shift is under way, and it will not wait until every website has caught up.
That many emit no structured data at all, meaning no machine-readable statement of what a business is, what it offers and where it sits. The other half at least supplies the basics. But only 119 of 3,850 go a step further and use FAQ markup, the particular format experts point to when a page is meant to show up in AI answers.
No provider publishes a fixed weighting, so I promise nothing here. All that is clear: anyone who does not supply these details makes it harder for services like ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI overview to capture their page cleanly. For most businesses on the Costa Blanca this is not an urgent problem right now. It becomes one as soon as more people begin their search not on Google, but directly with the assistant.
What is good, and what I did not measure
So the picture stays fair: on pure search-engine markup the median is 92 out of 100, and on usability 86. The technical basics are in order on most sites. What is missing is less often the technical fundamentals and more often the trust and legal signals: the legal notice, the cookie notice, and speed on mobile.
- Whether a site's content is good, current or correct. Structure was tested, not text.
- What happens beyond the home page: security, server, booking system in detail.
- How many visitors or how much revenue a site actually brings.
- Presence beyond the site itself, such as on Google, in maps or on social networks.
One related question I have since looked into separately: what AI assistants say about local businesses when people ask them for a recommendation. That is the AI Report Costa Blanca 2026.
The questions, briefly answered
- How many Costa Blanca businesses have no legal notice on their website?
- Of the 3,850 businesses with a reachable website in this analysis, 50% (1,936 of 3,850) showed no locatable legal notice on the first load of the home page. The figure covers the Costa Blanca and the wider Valencia region; on the Costa Blanca specifically the gap is larger.
- Statistics on the state of business websites on the Costa Blanca
- Across 3,850 reachable business websites: 50% had no locatable legal notice, 48% showed no cookie notice on the home page, and 39% emitted no structured data that machines read more easily. Only 119 of 3,850 used FAQ markup for AI search. Full method and per-sector figures below.
- Where do the tested businesses come from?
- From three sources: open geodata from OpenStreetMap, a contact list from my own work, and a targeted web search. Every address found was opened and checked before testing. It is not a random sample, which is why I call it an analysis, not a representative study.
- What do the percentages refer to?
- To the 3,850 businesses with a reachable website. Anyone without a website does not appear in the percentages. Every figure carries its base with it.
- How was it tested?
- Automatically: one fetch of the home page per business plus a mobile measurement with Google PageSpeed Insights, between 6–7 July 2026. A single reading per page, not an average of many runs.
- Are individual businesses named?
- No. The report shows only totals and proportions. No names, no addresses, no league table. Not on request either.
- "50% of 3,850 business websites tested across the Comunidad Valenciana show no findable legal notice in the first page fetch."
- "Only 217 of 470 hotel websites tested across the Comunidad Valenciana take a booking directly on their own site."
- "340 of 4,446 business web addresses found across the Comunidad Valenciana were dead, almost one in thirteen leads nowhere."
Source citation: Digital Report Costa Blanca 2026, webdesign-costablanca.es. Press enquiries to oliver@webdesign-costablanca.es.
Three things you can check yourself in ten minutes
For the most common gaps in this report you do not need me. Check it yourself first.
Where does your own site stand?
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Business data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL). This report publishes only aggregated values, no individual data. The method is in the open and can be reproduced independently; I do not release the raw data, so as not to expose individual businesses. If you do not want your business included in the analysis, write to me at oliver@webdesign-costablanca.es and I will take it out.
The figures may be quoted with a source citation ("Digital Report Costa Blanca 2026, webdesign-costablanca.es"); press enquiries to the same address. This is the first edition; I will repeat the measurement in 2027. The raw fetches of all tested pages are archived: the next edition will measure against them who has improved. And if you find a mistake, write to me and I will correct it. Legal details in the legal notice and the privacy policy.