Evidence, download, and limitations
About the data
A preregistered, privacy-safe coding audit of 60 public business surfaces, balanced 20/20/20 across Klang Valley, Penang, and Johor Bahru.
What this does not cover
Search order varies by time, device, indexing, and location; the recorded snapshot cannot establish national prevalence.
What this does not cover
An absent item means it was not visible on the inspected surface, not that the business never provides it.
What this does not cover
Visible actions were not executed, so the study does not test fulfilment, response quality, booking success, demand, or service quality.
What the sample showed
The most consistent evidence in this sample was basic service and contact visibility. Visible pricing and a structured booking path appeared less often on the recorded surfaces.
These are counts within the audited sample. They do not estimate the share of Malaysian barbers with any feature.
- 16 of 60 records exposed an operator-controlled website, booking page, or social page under the study definition.
- All 60 showed service evidence, while 4 of 60 displayed service pricing on the inspected surface.
- 56 showed a public contact route, and 6 of 60 exposed booking as the strongest structured next action.
- 13 of 60 met the preregistered complete-readiness rule through visible pricing or a clear quote path; the other 47 were partial.
Method and sample
The question was deliberately narrow: could a visitor understand the service and take a structured next action from the business’s public digital front door?
Duplicates, permanently closed businesses, records without location evidence, and surfaces that required sign-in were excluded. No customer activity was triggered.
- Exactly 20 eligible, distinct public listings per area.
- Discovery used preregistered Google search phrases in a signed-out, read-only session.
- The first eligible records in result order were retained until each area reached 20.
- The snapshot was collected on 19 August 2026.
Codebook summary
Each observation also records an uncertainty level. The public CSV retains only stable IDs, area, coded fields, and uncertainty.
- Owned page: an official site or operator-controlled booking or social page—not a search, map, marketplace, or directory listing alone.
- Evidence fields: service, visible pricing, and public contact-route visibility.
- Structured action: booking, call, directions, form, message, none, or uncertain.
- Complete readiness required service evidence, pricing or a clear quote path, and a structured action.
Quality assurance
A checker who did not perform the primary coding independently recoded at least 12 records before seeing the primary codes. Any disagreement was reviewed against the recorded public surface and resolved explicitly before publication.
Before publication, the dataset was checked for sample size, area balance, valid codes, independent recoding, resolved disagreements, privacy, and agreement between the CSV and reported totals.
Source and privacy policy
Source URLs and discovery queries are retained only in the internal audit for reproducibility and QA. The public dataset omits them because combining a small location sample with direct URLs and coding notes would make businesses easy to identify.
The audit used only public, read-only surfaces. It did not copy contact values or customer content and did not call, message, book, request a review, or submit a form.
Conclusion and qualified next step
The sample suggests a practical self-audit: make the service, price or quote path, contact route, and next action easy to find on one operator-controlled surface. That conclusion does not require a particular vendor and does not show that software alone changes demand or conversion.
A qualified next step is to apply the same codebook to a business’s current public journey, repair one missing element, and measure whether qualified customer activity change before expanding the work.