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Visibility Audit
The Visibility Audit answers one question with evidence: why doesn't this location show up when people nearby search for it?
A grid scan shows you where a business ranks. It does not tell you why. The audit takes the scan you already paid for, adds what it can read about the listing, the website and the competitors around it, and produces a score, a list of findings, and — for each finding — one next step.
🚧 Coming Soon — the Visibility Audit is being rolled out to organizations one at a time. If you do not see it, it is not enabled for your organization yet.
Where it lives
- Client reports. Add the Visibility audit section in the report builder. The report shows the score with its working, coverage around the business address, what was found, and the agreed next step for each finding. See Reports.
- Run history. Audits are started and reviewed by the Local Visibility Lab team; each run is kept so a later report can show what changed.
What it measures
Each run scores the location out of 100 from the dimensions it can actually read:
| Dimension | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Home area | Are you found in the grid points closest to your own address? |
| Ranking across the map | How do you place across the whole scanned area? |
| How crowded the area is | How many competitors contest those same points? |
| Overlap with your other location | Are two of your own locations competing for the same points? |
| Profile completeness | Hours, categories, description, photos, services, attributes. |
| Search terms you appear for | Which queries bring up the listing, and where they sit. |
| Customer actions | Calls, direction requests, website clicks. |
| Website health | The landing page: does it respond, is it indexable, does it have a title, a description, one main heading, enough content, and does the name on the site match the listing? |
| Website authority | Links pointing at that page. |
| Listings elsewhere | Citations on other directories. |
What an unmeasured dimension means
A dimension that could not be read is named, with the reason, instead of being left out. If Search Console is not connected, the report says so beside that dimension rather than scoring it zero. A short list of findings is not the same as a clean bill of health, and the report never lets one look like the other.
The same rule applies to the score itself. When too little of the evidence could be measured to mean anything, the score shows — with the reason, never a 0. A zero would read as a collapse; "we could not measure enough" is the truth.
Reading the section in a report
The score and its working. The score never appears on its own. Under it are the dimensions that counted, each with its own value and how much of the score it carried, and then the dimensions that did not, each with its reason.
Around your address. How many of the grid points nearest the business you were found in, how many of those put you in the top three, and your average position there. This is the number that usually explains the complaint that started the audit.
What we found. Each finding is one sentence about one thing, worst first, with a coloured dot for severity. A finding that rests on partial data is labelled Partial data; one that could not be measured says so. Under most findings is a Next step — the specific change we recommend.
Your page. What the landing page actually returned when it was read: the response, whether search engines may index it, the title and meta description lengths, the main heading, the word count, the server response time, whether business details are marked up for Google, and whether the name on the site matches the listing. Problems are marked.
What the strongest nearby listings have in common. Numbers only: the share of the strongest nearby listings that have a given detail, and your own value beside it. If 80% of them have photos and you have six, that gap is the work.
About the recommendations
Every recommendation in the audit is checked twice before it is stored: once against Google's Business Profile guidelines, and once against a rule that stops it suggesting a second page or listing that would compete with your own (Google's guidelines explains why that matters).
The report's written summary can explain and introduce those recommendations. It cannot add its own. The narrative is checked against the stored recommendations after it is written, and any advice with nothing behind it is removed before the report is saved. If you read a recommendation in a report, it went through both checks.
What a client sees, and what they do not
A report shared by link, or downloaded as a PDF, carries the score and its working, the coverage figures, the findings and their next steps, your own page's facts, and the shared-traits table.
Two things never cross that boundary, and they are removed by the server rather than hidden by the page:
- The competitors we flagged and why. When the audit notices that a competitor ranking above you appears to be breaking Google's rules, that stays internal. It is an accusation about another business, and a share link can be forwarded anywhere.
- The platform's own provisional verdict. The audit forms a working theory about the cause. Only the reviewed decision reaches a report.
What it costs
The audit reads the grid scan you already have — it never runs a new one. Most dimensions are free to measure. Two are not: the website-authority check and the paid half of the website-health check. Both are metered against your data budget, and if the budget is exhausted the audit still completes and reports those dimensions as unavailable rather than failing.
Related
- Local Grid Rank Tracking — the scan the audit reads.
- Market Reach — who lives inside the area you can serve.
- Reports — where the audit section appears.
- Google's Guidelines — the rules the recommendations are checked against.