A rank isn't a number. It's a map, and we measure it.
Most marketing tools estimate. They model your traffic, guess your rank, and score you with math nobody can check. We do something slower and better: we go look. This page goes through exactly how, signal by signal, in plain words, including the parts we can't know.
A rank isn't a number. It's a map with up to 81 points on it.
Google answers "plumber near me" differently on every street, because where the searcher stands is half the question. A single "you rank #4" is only true in one spot, so we don't stop there.
How we measure: every week we run your real searches as real Google queries from real spots across your service area, up to 81 of them, each placed inside the neighborhoods you actually serve (on Growth and Pro, your rankings are also checked every day). We record the position at every spot, which page of yours ranked, and what else was on the page: ads, and whether an AI answer box sat on top.
What we can't know: two searches minutes apart can disagree by a spot or two. That's Google, not us, so verdicts lean on multi-week trends, and single reads are presented as what they are: one real look on one real day.
An illustrative sample of the grid, three spots by three, just to show how it reads. A fifth color, gray, appears on a real scan when a search itself failed and that spot could not be measured at all. Real scans run up to 81 spots, and every customer sees their own.
We ask the assistants, and keep their exact words.
"Who should I call for pest control near me?" is being asked to ChatGPT thousands of times a day, and somebody gets recommended. That's the second search engine now, and most tools either ignore it or sell you an "AI visibility score" nobody can audit.
How we measure: the questions real buyers ask, put to the AI assistants. Each plan asks its own questions: three a week on Starter, five a week on Growth, ten a day on Pro. Every answer is kept word for word before anything is counted. Then we simply count: who got named, in what order, whether your site was cited.
The honesty rule: shares always come with their denominators ("named in 5 of 42 analyzed answers"), and an answer we couldn't fetch shrinks the denominator visibly. It never pads the score.
"For pest control in that area I'd suggest calling [a competitor] or [another local company]. Both have strong recent reviews…"
Your reputation, measured against your market. And when we couldn't check, we say so.
Everyone knows their star rating. Almost nobody knows the number that decides the map: how fast reviews arrive compared to your competitors'. We record both every week: yours, and the field's median and leader.
The directories: we check the 16 that actually carry weight (Google, Yelp, Facebook, BBB, Bing, Allbiz and ten more) and answer three questions per directory: are you there, is the information right, and if not, exactly where to fix it, with your correct details ready to paste.
The three states: found, checked-and-absent, and could-not-verify. That third state exists because pretending to know is worse than saying we couldn't check. Incumbents advertise "300+ directories"; most of those have never sent anyone a customer. Fewer, honest, weighted.
One real weekly check:
Google ✓ found and correct
Yelp ✓ found, but the phone number is wrong
BBB ✗ missing, with the link to claim it attached
Bing Places ? could not verify
Every "missing" comes with the link to claim it and your correct details. Every "could not verify" says so instead of guessing.
Your site graded on what moves local results.
The site: every week we grade the checks that actually matter for a local business: speed from Google's own test, the titles and headings that win clicks, whether Google is allowed in at all, security and structured data. Each finding comes with a plain explanation and a fix path.
The links: links from other sites are the web's votes. Your Lighthouse Authority score is computed from two independent crawls of the web.
Also checked: your top competitors' homepages, every week, so the week one starts investing in its site, it shows on your page.
Why our authority score has its own name:
Every big search tool sells an authority score of its own, each worked out on its own crawl of the web. Ours is Lighthouse Authority: computed from the open web graph plus a live link index, and defined publicly. The same kind of number, with its source named.
Who's winning your market's clicks, and which searches they own that you don't.
How we measure: one weekly check records every business that appeared for your searches across your service area, with positions, reviews and strength. From it we work out how often you show up against them (how the clicks likely divide, using public click-through curves) and the gap list: searches where a competitor ranks and you don't, sorted by how winnable they look.
The line we won't cross: we publish shares of a measured field, never invented visit counts. Independent studies put the big tools' traffic estimates at roughly 50-60% median error. A share of what we actually saw is defensible; a made-up absolute is marketing.
Demand we saw, not demand we imagined:
Keyword ideas come from what Google itself displayed in your market: the related searches and question boxes on your area's real result pages. Each one is sized from Google Ads search data, with the source named.
Somebody is paying to appear above you. Here is who.
How we measure: a real search on each of the terms you track, run from your own coordinates, and every advertiser on the page is recorded: what they say, what they offer, and where they send the click. An advertiser's state is read across three weeks rather than one page, because a business that genuinely advertises every day does not appear on every single search.
The honesty rule: how long each one has been running comes from Google's own advertising register, which proves a floor and not a start date, so it always reads "advertising since at least", and a business the register cannot answer for is reported as unread, never as one that does not advertise.
The promises, all in one place:
- Absence is data: not showing up gets recorded and shown, never hidden.
- Every share comes with its denominator.
- Shares of measured fields, never invented visit counts.
- AI answers stored word for word, and every score opens into its evidence.
- Could-not-check is always distinct from failed.
- Bad news is included. That's the product.
The method, applied to you, in sixty seconds.
The Free report runs a slice of everything above: your site, your Google profile, the directories, nine map searches and one Google search. Then it emails you what ChatGPT said.