SEO Basics on India's Most-Visited Business Websites (2026 Study)

Key findings

Share of the 760 audited homepages, except where noted.

1. 34.9%passed all five basics: a title, a meta description, exactly one H1, a mobile viewport tag and a canonical tag.
2. 28.7%have no meta description, so search engines write their snippet for them.
3. 49.5%don't have exactly one H1 heading in their HTML: 35.3% have none and 14.2% have more than one.
4. 35.3%have a title between 30 and 60 characters. The median title is 53 characters long.
5. 50.1%use structured data (JSON-LD), which search engines use to understand a business and show rich results.
6. 70.8%of the 665 homepages with images add alt text to at least 90% of them.

Every check, ranked

Share of audited homepages that pass each check.

* Scored on the 665 homepages whose HTML contained images; 95 had none.

Do the very top sites do better?

We split the audited sites by their position in the ranking: the 173 audited sites from the top 250 domains in our sample, and the 587 from the rest.

Audit scores

Our website audit starts each page at 100 and takes off 10 points for each failed check and 4 for each warning. The median homepage scored 82.

Grades: A 90+, B 75–89, C 60–74, D 40–59, F below 40.

What this means for your website

These are some of India's best-resourced websites, and many still miss basics that take minutes to fix. A smaller business that gets them right removes easy reasons for search engines to misread its pages:

• Write a title and meta description for every important page. Put the service and place people search for near the start of the title.
• Use one H1 that says what the page is about. Many homepages in the study had none in their HTML. A heading added only by JavaScript, or large text that isn't marked up as a heading, doesn't count.
• Add a canonical tag so search engines know which address to index when the same page is reachable in several ways.
• Add structured data for your business, services and FAQs, and keep it consistent with your Google Business Profile.
• Describe your images with alt text. It helps screen-reader users and image search.

Methodology

Sample

The 1,000 highest-ranked domains ending in .in in the Tranco research ranking (Tranco top 1M, list N2P2W), excluding government, education, research and other non-commercial second-level domains (.gov.in, .nic.in, .ac.in, .edu.in, .res.in, .org.in, .net.in and similar). Tranco ranks domains by combining several popularity lists, so the sample leans towards large brands, media and platforms rather than small businesses.

What we fetched

Each domain's homepage, once, on 2026-09-17, trying https://domain/, then the www address, then plain http. We followed up to three redirects and identified ourselves with the audit tool's user agent. The checks read the HTML as served, before any JavaScript runs, so sites that build their pages in the browser can fail checks their finished page would pass.

What we checked

The same rules as our free website audit: HTTPS, title tag and length, meta description and length, H1 count, viewport, canonical, Open Graph, JSON-LD structured data, image alt text, the lang attribute and the amount of text. Detection uses pattern matching on the HTML, not a full browser.

Excluded

240 of 1,000 domains returned no checkable page:

• did not resolve: 72
• blocked automated request (4xx/5xx): 72
• no web page returned: 34
• timed out: 31
• HTTP 4xx: 11
• connection failed: 7
• HTTP 5xx: 4
• HTTP 3xx: 4
• too many redirects: 3
• private address: 2

Many domains in popularity rankings are used for apps, APIs or content delivery rather than websites, and 72 sites refused automated requests.

Limits

Homepages only, one fetch per site, from one location in Delhi. Response times (539.5 ms median) depend on our connection, so we don't rank sites by speed. No results are published for individual websites.

Data and reuse

Download the aggregate results (JSON). You're welcome to use the figures with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0).