A business with no website and no Instagram can be found only on a friend's recommendation or in the directory. We have 6,404 such businesses out of 26,636 salons, studios, and clinics in Kazakhstan, almost a quarter
| city | businesses | no website and no Instagram | share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shymkent | 2,121 | 912 | 43% |
| Uralsk | 783 | 224 | 29% |
| Kokshetau | 493 | 123 | 25% |
| Aktau | 992 | 246 | 25% |
| Atyrau | 766 | 187 | 24% |
| Kostanay | 980 | 230 | 23% |
| Karaganda | 1,318 | 309 | 23% |
| Taraz | 552 | 125 | 23% |
| Semey | 461 | 104 | 23% |
| Almaty | 7,946 | 1,789 | 23% |
| Kyzylorda | 407 | 85 | 21% |
| Oskemen | 907 | 187 | 21% |
| Aktobe | 945 | 194 | 21% |
| Petropavlovsk | 394 | 75 | 19% |
| Pavlodar | 826 | 150 | 18% |
| Astana | 5,058 | 898 | 18% |
Shymkent stands out: its share is twice that of Astana and almost twice the national average. In the other cities the spread is small, from 18 to 29 percent
The spread across categories is wider than across cities
| category | businesses | no website and no Instagram | share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treatment rooms | 339 | 274 | 81% |
| Hair salons | 1,942 | 1,283 | 66% |
A treatment room and an ordinary hair salon work on the foot traffic of neighboring streets. A sign is enough for them, and until now it has been enough
Barbershops, hair-removal masters, and makeup artists, by contrast, live on Instagram almost without exception: their client chooses by the work, and the work has to be shown somewhere
If you have no friends nearby, the directory is what is left. Look at what is filled in: the schedule by day, the exact address with a building number, the phone. A business that filled in its hours usually picks up the phone too
A business without a single line about itself is not necessarily bad. Most likely it just never bothered with its own page
A person searches for "hair salon near me on Sunday." A page with a schedule and an address answers that query. A sign does not
The source is the open 2GIS directory, counted on August 24, 2026. We took 194 beauty and health categories and merged rows for the same business by its phone number. A business counted as invisible if both fields, "website" and "Instagram," are empty. Cities and categories with fewer than 300 businesses were left out of the tables: on small numbers the share jumps around
Numbers in this article come from our own database of public directories in Kazakhstan, counted on August 24, 2026. We count them ourselves and never take them from other reports