140 websites scanned. 58 had no vector logo

This site claims that brands come apart slowly and that it is almost never a decision anyone made. That is an easy thing to claim. So I measured it.

Between March and August 2026 I scanned the websites of companies named in Dutch acquisition and merger reports. Of the 163 sites I requested, 140 came back usable. These are the results.

What I found

Of the 140 websites scanned:

• 58 (41 percent) have no vector version of the logo. There is only a PNG or a JPG. Anyone who wants that logo on a building or an exhibition stand has to have it redrawn.
• 50 (36 percent) serve the header logo as a raster file. Enlarge it and the edges visibly soften.
• 35 (25 percent) have no logo identifiable as a logo at the top of the page.
• 68 (49 percent) have no og:image. Share one of those pages on LinkedIn or in WhatsApp and a grey rectangle travels with it instead of the brand.
• 42 (30 percent) load their logo from the theme folder rather than the uploads folder. A theme update can take the file with it.
• 34 (24 percent) have no canonical.
• 15 (11 percent) have no favicon, or one smaller than 32 pixels.
• 20 (14 percent) show a copyright year older than the current one in the footer.

40 out of 140 (29 percent) had all three basics in place: a vector logo, an og:image and a canonical.

One relationship stood out. Among sites with a vector logo, 44 percent are missing an og:image. Among sites without one, that rises to 55 percent. Whoever lets one slide usually lets the other slide too. It is rarely a single mistake; it is a folder nobody maintains any more.

How it was measured

The order matters more than the outcome, because without the order a percentage is just an opinion with a number attached.

The trigger. I collect transaction reports from a fixed list of Dutch sources that publish acquisitions, mergers and changes of ownership. For each report I record the title, the date, the text and the company names it mentions.

The filter. From those companies I keep the technical and industrial sectors: engineering, industry, construction and infrastructure, installation, transport, horticulture, food, metal, wholesale. IT, software, web and marketing agencies and design studios drop out, because they have this capability in house.

The scan. For each website I fetch the homepage and establish: which file serves as the header logo and what type it is, whether an SVG version of the logo exists anywhere, whether there is a favicon and how large, what year appears in the copyright line, whether og:image, og:title and canonical are present, and whether the logo comes from the theme folder or the uploads folder.

What does not happen. Nothing is scored, ranked or judged. A field that cannot be established stays empty. That is a result too.

The boundaries. One row per website, deduplicated by domain name, only the most recent scan counts. Sites returning a 403 or a timeout are excluded: 23 of the 163.

What these numbers do not say

This is the most important section, and usually the missing one.

It is not a cross-section of Dutch business. These are companies that appeared in an acquisition report. That group is by definition in motion, and maintenance is exactly what slips around a change of ownership. If the numbers are skewed anywhere, they are skewed high.

It is not a measurement of small and mid-sized companies. I did not establish the size of these businesses. Small family firms are in there and so are listed groups. Claiming this represents the mid-market claims more than the data carries, so I do not.

It is not exclusively Dutch. Seventy of the 140 domains do not end in .nl. Dutch acquisition reports regularly cover foreign buyers or foreign subsidiaries, and those were scanned along with the rest.

It does not measure quality. A missing og:image says nothing about the design, the revenue or the craftsmanship of that company. It says one file is absent. Nothing more.

It is a snapshot. The scan ran between March and August 2026. A site repaired today still appears here as broken.

Why I name no companies

The companies in this scan consented to nothing. They appeared in a news item about their own acquisition, and that gave me a list of domain names. That is enough for a percentage and too little for a name.

A list of companies that have not got it in order is not research anyway, it is a pillory, and no argument here gets stronger by attaching a name to it. The percentages do the work.

If you want to know how your own site scores, you can check it yourself in two minutes. Open your homepage, right-click your logo and see whether it says .svg. Share the page with yourself in WhatsApp and see whether your brand appears in the preview. Those are the two heaviest items on the list.

What I take from it

I started this scan to find leads. That is the honest reason. What came back was something else: confirmation that the problem I built this practice on is neither rare nor visible. Four in ten companies cannot supply their own logo at size, and almost none of them know it.

That is not a design problem. It is a file problem, and it only becomes expensive at the moment something is asked of the brand: a building, an acquisition, an exhibition stand, a new supplier.

It is published here because a claim about the market should come with the measurement underneath it. Even when the measurement delivers less than the claim.