Why Are There Record Referral Percentages from Portals to Franchise Development Websites?
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
January 21, 2026 — An astonishing percentage of prospects who request information on franchise portal websites become a referral visit to a franchisor’s website afterwards. In our December 2025 survey, about 89% of portal lead submitters made post-inquiry visits to the corresponding franchise development websites of their interest. This referral percentage historically ranges from about 65-75% in over six years of monthly data.
What intent drives post-inquiry referrals from portals to the franchisor’s website?
We also routinely ask prospects why they visited franchisor site(s) after submitting an inquiry at a franchise directory website, or portal, to gain insight into this behavior. The overwhelming response, at 50%, was “I was very interested and just wanted to learn more.” Another 31.3% wanted to “prepare before having a conversation” with franchise representatives. For 18.8% of respondents, the portals, which are intentionally designed to generate awareness and consideration of options and make connections, didn’t provide “sufficient information,” leading to a franchisor site visit.
These highly-interested “referred” prospects may get attributed to the franchisor’s website, even though they originated on the portal. Referral visits are highly desirable, but it may lead to improper attribution of interested prospects to the “last touch” rather than the portal that was the source of the prospect lead.
About 50% of inquiring prospects proceeded to visit the corresponding franchise development websites largely because they were “very interested and just wanted to learn more.”
What explains this referral phenomenon?
Recent franchise brand awareness data shows that less than 10% of prospects are “very familiar” with the opportunities they inquire about on franchise portals, and about 15% are “somewhat familiar.” Over 45% of prospects are first introduced to an unfamiliar franchise on a directory or “portal” visit.
Brand awareness and referral value are keys to why third-party websites like franchise portals are important to franchise development, especially as consumers spend more of their time on fragmented social media, streaming platforms, and increasingly engage in AI-aided search. Prospects who take the time to research a franchise and visit its website demonstrate a level of interest and intent that can lead to more productive conversations with franchise representatives.
This additional referral value is a substantial component of the lifetime value of a franchise lead that should be considered in determining return on investment in portals.
Over 31% of portal inquirers who proceeded to the franchisor websites said they wanted to better prepare themselves before having a conversation with a franchise representative.
The “Mystery Shop” survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise inquirers across the Franchise Ventures franchise lead generation platform. The data presented here is from December 2025.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Tuesday, January 20th, 2026.