When somebody asks an AI who to hire nearby, your Google Business Profile is very often what it reads before it reads your website. So we check it, and we keep the score separate from your site score, because they are two different properties that fail for different reasons.
What we read without asking you for anything
Everything on this list comes from what Google already shows the public, so it needs no permission from you and costs you nothing:
Whether a profile exists at all, and whether it is open for business
Whether it links to your website, and whether it links to the right one, which is the single most common thing we find wrong
Your category, opening hours, phone number, address and photos
How many reviews you have and how you are rated, measured against the businesses Google actually ranks alongside you rather than against an arbitrary target
How recently a review arrived
What connecting adds, and what it costs you
Three things are visible only to the account that owns a listing, so we cannot see them unless you let us: which reviews have gone unanswered, which questions on your profile have no answer, and your own description. Until you connect, those three are left out of your score rather than counted against you.
Google will ask you to grant permission to manage your listings. That wording is Google’s, not ours, and it is the only permission they offer for this. There is no read-only version. We only ever read. Nothing we do changes your listing, and you can revoke access at any time from your own Google account without telling us.
If customers do not choose you by location
Then none of this applies and you are not marked down for it. Tell us on your business profile that location is not part of how customers choose you, and the whole Local presence score is shown as not applicable rather than as a zero. A missing score and a zero mean different things here: a zero means we searched your trade in your town, under your name, and found no listing. That is the most useful free thing this product can tell a local business.
How current the figures are
Google’s licence limits how long anyone may hold on to their data, so we refresh what we show and discard anything older than four weeks rather than leaving a stale rating on your page. If you have just changed something on your listing and want the score to catch up, refresh your profile and we will read it again.