Search a contractor's name, get a trucking database

We took 68,680 small contractors and carriers whose Google Business Profile carries no usable website, searched each one by business name and city, and recorded the results. For 65.1% of them a government registration record or a database that republishes one sits in the top three results, and for 36.5% it sits at number one. Narrowing to federal trucking records alone, an FMCSA page or a USDOT data mirror is in the top three for 61.6%, and safer.fmcsa.dot.gov holds the first result on its own for 24.8%.

These are the domains that turn up most often in the top three when a contractor is searched by name. The share is of all 68,680 businesses, counting each business once however many slots the domain holds.

SAFER is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's public lookup for registered carriers. Any business running a truck over a certain weight across state lines has to register, so a dump truck puts an excavation contractor in the same federal file as a freight company. The snapshot page carries the registered legal name and the USDOT number, and 66.3% of the names we searched carry a legal suffix such as LLC, INC or CORP that the SAFER title carries too. The DOT mirrors underneath it ingest the same public file, generate one page per carrier, and inherit the same exact-name advantage across thousands of pages.

That mechanism is visible where it should break. Where a business trades under a name different from the one it registered, the match stops being exact. For the 52,965 businesses we searched under their registered legal name, a registry page is in the top three 71.9% of the time. For the 15,715 searched under a doing business as name it falls to 42.2%. The headline 65.1% is a blend of those two regimes.

Ten highest and five lowest of the 31 trades, by the share of businesses with a registry page in the top three. Trades below n=100 are excluded.

"Unclassified" is the label our source file uses for a business whose trade couldn't be read off its name or its Google category, so it's a residual rather than a trade.

The trades that lose the name query are the ones that run trucks and don't need a consumer licence. Excavation, crane work and material supply sit at the top because almost every operator in them has a USDOT number and few of them have a licence lookup or a review profile competing for the same query. Plumbing, electrical and cabinets sit at the bottom for the opposite reason. A consumer aggregator already holds a page about the business. In plumbing, an aggregator page carrying the business name appears for 90.8% of them, against 70.5% in excavation.

Ten highest and ten lowest by the share of businesses with a registry page at number one.

The West Coast is the softest ground for registries, and consumer aggregators are the reason. Yelp holds a top-three page for 40.8% of California businesses and 43.5% in Hawaii, against 22.9% nationally. State licence boards matter much less than we expected. A state or corporate-record page reaches the top three for 6.5% of California businesses, and effectively none of it is the contractor licence board, which appears for one business out of 4,710. It's Dun and Bradstreet and Bizapedia at 1.6% each. Licence lookups elsewhere stay small: Washington's L&I at 4.9%, Oregon's CCB at 6.3%, Florida's DBPR at 3.6%. Where a government record does answer the name query it's a business registry rather than a licence board: Florida 34.5% on Sunbiz, West Virginia 33.8% on the Secretary of State, Wyoming 26.1% on wyobiz.wyo.gov. Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and New York are where a business is most exposed and the counts are large enough to act on.

Excavation contractors lose the name query more often than almost any other trade. Across the 9,221 we identified, a registry page is in the top three for 76.0% and at number one for 40.4%.

We measured 37 states with 50 or more excavation businesses, running from 86.6% in Florida to 56.7% in Oregon. The twelve below are the states this directory publishes, ranked within that set rather than overall. West Virginia would sit second overall at 85.9%, n=177.

The federal census also lists registered businesses by address, so we can count the active carriers with an excavation name in a given county. These are the three deepest counties in each of the twelve states, website or not.

Your name search is your front door, and for most of the businesses here it opens onto a federal compliance record rather than anything about the work. The registry wins that query because little else carrying the business name is there to rank against it, and for 4.7% of these businesses nothing in the top ten carries the name at all. Claiming your listing on this site is free and always will be, and it takes a code sent to the email address on your federal registration. A listing is a page you control that carries your name, your phone number, your county and what you actually do, and a website of your own does more than that.

Population. 68,680 businesses drawn from the FMCSA Company Census File. Each one had a Google Business Profile lookup return no usable website, which is why a name search was run at all. About 5.6% did have some website address attached to the profile, splitting roughly into a social page (38%), another business's domain (32%) and a domain of their own (29%).

Query. One query per business, of the form business name plus city plus state. The name used is the one on file with FMCSA, and where a doing business as name is recorded it was used instead of the legal name, which is 22.9% of the time. Searches ran with gl=us, hl=en and no location parameter, so these are national results rather than what a customer standing in that town would see. SERPs were collected between 2 and 6 September 2026 across five verification runs.

Classification. Every domain in the top ten was classified once, by domain and not by page. "Registry" means an FMCSA host, a database that republishes USDOT registration data, or a state or corporate-record host. That last group includes commercial company-record sites such as Dun and Bradstreet and Bizapedia alongside state Secretary of State and licence lookups, so it is wider than "government". It is also assigned by host rather than by name, so a .gov site that turns up for enough businesses lands there, which pulls in a few federal sites such as osha.gov. Those account for 0.58% of businesses and move the headline by 0.2 points. Where a figure needs to mean federal trucking data, we give the narrower FMCSA and DOT mirror share. "Registry in the top 3" means at least one of positions one, two and three is a registry page.

Intervals. Wilson 95% intervals on every share reported with an n. Nothing here is modelled, adjusted or matched. These are raw shares.

Limits. The population is businesses with no usable website on their Google profile, so these figures are not a statement about contractors in general. Results are national rather than local, which understates the local pack and anything geographically personalised. "Top ten" means the organic results Google returned, which averaged 9.08 per search rather than a full ten. One query per business means no repeat sampling, and search results change. The excavation count of 9,221 comes from a pattern matched against the registered name and the Google category, and 11% of those businesses were tagged on the category alone. The pattern includes the word grading, which pulls in some mowing and landscaping firms. County counts are a different measurement. They come from the full federal census, match the registered name only, cover active carriers, and include businesses that do have websites, so they can't be compared directly with the search shares.

Every row printed above appears in these files, which carry the full tables.

The charts on this page are free to republish with credit to LeaderExcavation.com and a link back to this study.