A visibility score is a single number out of 100 for how findable a local business is where its customers actually look: Google's map results, its Google profile, its reviews, and what AI assistants say when someone asks them who to call.
It is one blended number, not a grade for your website. A business with a beautiful site and no Google profile scores badly, and it should.
What a number means
Three bands, and they are the same thresholds the engine uses rather than a description written afterwards.
| score | what it means |
|---|---|
| 80 and up | Strong. You show up for the searches that matter, your profile is complete, and assistants name you. The work here is holding it, because competitors move. |
| 50 to 79 | Partial. The usual shape: findable if somebody already knows your name, missing when they search the service instead. Almost always two or three fixable things rather than twenty. |
| under 50 | Low. A customer searching for what you do will meet a competitor first. This is the band where the cheapest fixes move the most. |
What a real one looks like
A contractor in Brooklyn, scored this summer. Anonymised, real numbers.
| signal | result |
|---|---|
| Google profile Listed, but thin: no photos and one category. | partial |
| Map results Outside the top three for the service searches, present for the brand name. | low |
| Reviews Good rating, too few and too old to carry weight against neighbours. | partial |
| AI mentions Named in a minority of assistant answers for the category. | low |
| Readable by AI Site crawlable, structured data incomplete. | partial |
A 54 is not a bad business. It is a findable one that is being found by the wrong route: people who already know the name. The three cheapest moves here were photos on the profile, a second category, and asking recent customers for reviews.
The five signals and their weight
The composite is a weighted blend. If a signal cannot be measured, it is left out and the rest are reweighted; nothing is invented.
| signal | weight |
|---|---|
| Google profile Does the listing exist and is it filled in: website, hours, at least two categories, and real photos. |
25% |
| Map results For the searches customers actually type, where do you place. The top three is the map pack; that is where the calls go. |
25% |
| AI mentions When a customer asks an AI assistant who to call, how often you get named. Sampled with live web search on, up to two asks per question, reported as a rate. |
20% |
| Reviews Rating strength and review depth together. Two businesses side by side, the fresher review wall wins the tap. |
20% |
| Readable by AI Can AI assistants read the site: structured data, honest title and description, crawlers allowed, and an llms.txt file. |
10% |
The honesty rules
AI answers are sampled: the free snapshot asks every question twice per assistant and a paid audit asks six times, with live web search on, and reports a rate rather than a yes or no. Assistants genuinely disagree with themselves: on one question here, one assistant named the same business in both sampled runs and then named five different ones when asked again a few minutes later. Treat a rate built on two samples as a direction, not a position. If no AI signal can be collected at all, no composite is scored; a made-up number helps nobody. Site checks read the top 250 pages, not every page, and the report says exactly how many were read. Sampled and directional, not precise.
Site health deductions
Each issue deducts points scaled by the share of pages affected. Broken pages and dead canonicals are heavy, missing alt text is light.
| issue | weight |
|---|---|
| broken page | 30 points |
| dead canonical | 25 points |
| broken links | 15 points |
| title missing | 10 points |
| title duplicate | 10 points |
| meta missing | 8 points |
| meta duplicate | 8 points |
| schema missing | 6 points |
| h1 missing | 5 points |
| canonical missing | 4 points |
| h1 multiple | 3 points |
| images no alt | 3 points |
Common questions
- What is a visibility score?
- A single number from 0 to 100 that says how findable a local business is when a customer searches for the service rather than the name. Mine blends five measured signals: the Google Business Profile (25%), map results for real customer searches (25%), how often AI assistants name the business (20%), reviews, and whether the site itself is readable by Google and AI. Every weight is published above; nothing is invented.
- What is a good visibility score?
- 80 and up is strong: you show up for the searches that matter and assistants name you. 50 to 79 is the usual shape, findable if somebody already knows your name, missing when they search the service. Under 50 means the routes customers actually use mostly do not lead to you. These are the same thresholds the engine uses, not a description written afterwards.
- How is it different from an SEO audit?
- An SEO audit inspects your website. This measures where customers actually look: the map pack, your Google profile, your reviews, and AI answers, with the site as one signal of five. A business with no website at all can still be scored, because if a signal cannot be measured it is left out and the rest are reweighted.
- How do I find out my score?
- Ask for the free snapshot below. It runs the same checks on your business and shows the number with every input visible.
Why publish this
Because the score only matters if you can trust it. Any agency can hand you a mystery number; this page is the whole recipe. If you think a weight is wrong, tell me, and if you are right I will change it and say so here.