What golf course websites leave out: we read 568 of them

The short answer: most golf course websites cover their policies, practice facilities, and food, but only about a third say what to wear, how long a round takes, or publish a scorecard a golfer (or a search engine) can actually read. Only about a quarter explain what to do when you arrive. Just 6% of the 568 course websites we read answered all eight of the questions golfers most often ask before a round.

What we found

Share of 568 golf course websites that answered each pre-round question in readable text on their own site:

The typical site answered four of the eight topics (the scorecard is counted separately). 6% answered all eight, and 5% answered none of them in text, usually because the site was little more than a homepage and a booking button.

The gaps that matter most

• Dress code (37%). It's one of the first things a golfer visiting a new course wants to know, and getting it wrong is embarrassing at the first tee. Two sentences cover it: collared shirts or not, denim or not, soft spikes or not.
• Arrival and check-in (26%). Where to park, where the bag drop is, where to check in, and how early to arrive. Courses know this so well they forget to write it down.
• Pace of play (32%). “Rounds take about four and a half hours” sets an expectation and heads off a slow group's complaint later.
• A readable scorecard (32%). Many courses have a scorecard online, but as a photo, or not at all. Of the scorecards we could read on a course's own site, about half were PDFs. An image of a scorecard can't be read reliably by search engines or AI tools, and it's hard to read on a phone. How to fix it is in how to put your scorecard on your website.
• Carts and walking (57%). Better covered, but “can I walk?” and “is it cart-path only today?” are questions golfers ask before almost every round at a new course.

Why this matters more now

More golfers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode these questions instead of calling the shop. Those tools answer from what they can read on the web. When a course's own site doesn't say, the answer comes from somewhere else (an old directory listing, a review from three seasons ago) or the tool simply guesses. Every gap in the table above is a question someone is answering on your behalf. More on how that works in how golfers find courses in AI search, and how to show up.

A one-page fix

The simplest fix is one plain-text “know before you go” page, with a heading for each topic. If you add one page this season, make it that one, and cover the biggest gaps first:

1. Dress code
2. Arrival: parking, bag drop, check-in, and how early to come
3. Carts and walking, including cart-path-only rules
4. Pace of play
5. The scorecard, as a text table
6. Practice facilities and their hours
7. Rentals, food and drink, and your cancellation and rain-check policy

Put a “last updated” date on it, and review it whenever a policy changes.

How we counted

maps.golf writes free pre-round guides to golf courses at maps.golf/courses, and every guide starts with the course's own website: its homepage and the handful of pages most likely to hold pre-round information (FAQs, policies, practice, dining, rates, contact). For this count we used the 568 courses whose guide was drafted from their own site, read through October 2026. Most are in Florida (about 80%), with the rest spread across the US. A topic counts as answered only when the text came from a page on the course's own domain, so a dress code found on a third-party directory doesn't count.

Two limits are worth knowing. First, we read the pages most likely to answer each question, not every page of every site, so a few answers buried deep in a site will have been missed. Second, scorecards posted only as images count as not readable, which is the point: nobody else can read them reliably either. You're welcome to cite these numbers; please credit maps.golf and link to this page.