How the scoreboard is scored

Pillars

What we measure

• Reputation uses Google rating and review volume, Bayesian-adjusted so a 5.0 from three reviews does not outrank a 4.7 from four hundred.
• Findability covers LocalBusiness structured data, whether the phone number on the site matches the one Google publishes, whether the city appears in the page title, and whether service-area pages exist.
• Content covers site depth, how recently the site appears to have been maintained, and basic on-page structure.
• Trust covers stated licensing, insurance, bonding or guarantees, and linked social profiles.
• AI visibility measures whether a business is legible to AI assistants: structured identity, stated services and hours, question-shaped content, and whether robots.txt blocks crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended.

Table stakes

HTTPS, mobile readiness, a tappable phone number and a visible booking path are not scored. Nearly every business passes them, so awarding points would only compress the range. They cost 12 points each when they fail and earn nothing when they pass.

Limits worth stating

• Google returns at most 60 businesses per query. In dense markets a scoreboard is a top 60, not a complete census, and the page says so where that applies.
• Scores describe public web presence. They are not a judgement of workmanship, service quality or value.
• A business can have an excellent reputation and still rank low here. That gap is the point of the exercise, not an error.
• Findings describe identified opportunity. They are not a projection or guarantee of revenue.
• Rankings change when the rubric changes. Scans are never compared across rubric versions.

Corrections

Every figure here comes from public sources and can be checked. If something is wrong, it gets corrected and the scan is re-run.