We Scraped 159 Georgia Carriers' Websites. Here's What We Found.

Moving companies are under financial pressure. As housing activity has slowed, many household goods carriers are diversifying into adjacent services to fill idle truck capacity and maintain revenue. Junk removal. Auto transport. Appliance delivery. Most do this without updating their federal cargo classification or their insurance coverage.

We wanted to see how widespread this is. So we built a tool that scrapes moving company websites, extracts the services they advertise, and compares them against what they've declared to FMCSA. We ran it on every registered household goods carrier in Georgia.

We started with 159 FMCSA-registered carriers operating in Georgia with valid DOT numbers. For each, we attempted to find and scrape their website. We discovered 25 additional carrier websites using FMCSA registration data, bringing the total to 36 carriers with scrapeable web presences.

For each website, we extracted every service advertised on the site, including sub-pages linked from the main navigation. We then compared those advertised services against the carrier's FMCSA cargo classification, the federal record of what type of freight they're authorized and insured to haul.

A carrier registered to haul "Household Goods" that advertises junk removal on its website is operating outside its declared scope. That's not necessarily illegal. But it almost certainly means their insurance policy was priced for a different risk profile than what they're actually doing.

Of the 36 carriers we scraped, 10 are advertising services on their websites that do not appear in their FMCSA cargo classification. That's a 28% drift rate.

Nine of the 10 are advertising junk removal. One is advertising auto transport. One is advertising appliance delivery and installation. All 10 are registered with FMCSA exclusively as household goods carriers.

This matters because junk removal, auto transport, and appliance delivery carry meaningfully different risk profiles than residential moving. A crew trained to handle furniture is not the same as a crew hauling construction debris to a landfill. The insurance policy that covers a broken dining table during a residential move does not necessarily cover a back injury sustained while hauling a 300-pound safe down a flight of stairs for a junk removal job.

The carriers' insurers priced their policies based on the declared operation. The declared operation no longer matches reality.

Two Men and a Truck (DOT 958316, Alpharetta) is the most diversified. Their website advertises junk removal and appliance delivery alongside standard moving services. Their FMCSA filing lists only Household Goods.

American Van Lines (DOT 1031126, Columbus) is advertising auto transport. They have General Freight and Household Goods on file but not motor vehicles.

The remaining nine, Atlanta Moving Solutions, Atlanta Home Movers, Crown Transfer and Storage, Atlanta Moving and Storage, Midtown Moving and Storage, Peach State Moving Company, Serna Elite Movers, and Zip Moving and Storage, are all advertising junk removal on their websites while registered exclusively for Household Goods with FMCSA.

We only scraped 36 of 159 carriers because the remaining 123 don't have discoverable websites. Many are small operators, one truck and a phone number, that get work through platforms like Thumbtack and Angi rather than their own web presence. If the drift rate holds across the broader population, roughly 50 carriers in Georgia alone may be operating outside their declared scope.

The industry data supports this. According to SmartMoving's 2024 State of the Moving Industry Report, 24% of moving companies planned to expand their service offerings in response to revenue pressure. Our findings suggest many have already done so, without telling their insurers.

This isn't a story about bad actors. Most of these carriers are legitimate moving companies making rational business decisions in a difficult market. The problem is structural: underwriters price risk at renewal based on a declared operation, then have no visibility into how that operation evolves over the following 12 months. By the time drift becomes visible through a claim, the damage is done.

This was our first scrape. It establishes a baseline. We'll re-scrape these websites weekly. When a carrier that was clean in June starts advertising junk removal in September, we'll surface the change and the date it appeared.

Recency of drift is a signal. A carrier that has always done junk removal is a known quantity. A carrier that added it last month, in the middle of the slowest moving market in 30 years, is worth a phone call.