For independent shops in the United States
When someone nearby searches for what you sell, do they find your shop?
A customer pulls out their phone, types “[your category] near me”, or asks ChatGPT for the best shop in town. A short list comes back — usually three or four names. We help you find out whether your shop is on it, starting with a free assessment of your website and how it is described to search engines.
8 of the 23 checks run automatically on your live site. The other 15 need a person. Nothing here is a full technical audit, and none of it is implementation work.
The moment
Two ways a nearby customer finds a shop now
Both happen on a phone, in seconds, and both are decided by information about your shop that you may never have looked at.
Searching “near me”
The map and the three results under it
Someone standing two streets away searches for what you sell. They see a map with a few pins and a handful of listings beneath it — hours, a photo, a rating, a line about what the shop does. If your hours are wrong, there are no photos, or the listing barely says anything, they scroll past without ever knowing you were the closer option.
Your Google Business Profile is what shows there. Most of it is information only you can supply.
Asking an assistant
“What's the best shop in town for…?”
A customer asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview or Perplexity instead of scrolling results. The answer is a couple of sentences naming a few shops, and it changes with the model, the town and the day. We cannot make an assistant name your shop. We can check, by hand, what it says about you today and what it is reading when it answers.
Assistants describe a shop from what they can read about it: your site, your listings, your reviews. Thin or contradictory information is what they get wrong.
No one can guarantee a place in those results, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can do is measure what a machine currently finds when it looks for your shop, and fix the parts that are wrong or missing.
What the free assessment checks
What the free assessment actually runs
You enter your website address, your shop's name, your trade and your town. The assessment then runs 8 checks automatically against your live site — 8 of the 23 in a full visibility review — and shows you what it found before asking you for anything.
Whether your site loads securely
Browsers warn people away from a site without HTTPS, and the warning appears before your shop's name does.
Whether it works on a phone
Most “near me” searches happen on a phone. Without the right setup, your shop's page shows up tiny, with buttons too small to tap.
The title and description in a search result
That is the line a customer reads before deciding whether to click. Missing or overlong, and it gets cut off or replaced with something you never wrote.
How the page is structured
Whether the headings describe what the shop sells, or are just styled text a machine cannot follow.
Whether your details are machine-readable
Structured data is how a site states plainly: this is a shop, this is its address, these are its opening hours.
Whether you have pages for what you sell
A shop that repairs bicycles and also sells helmets needs a page for each, or it only ever appears for one of them.
Whether someone can reach you in two clicks
A phone number, a form or a direction link — reachable from the page they land on, not buried.
Whether your social profiles are linked
It is how a customer checks that a shop is real, and how a search engine connects the pieces.
The other 15 checks need a person
These cannot be checked by software honestly, so they are not scored on the free page. They are what the detailed report covers.
No score is shown for AI search visibility on the free page, because nothing was measured there. It is assessed by hand, and it is in the detailed report.
- Your Google Business Profile as it actually appears — categories, hours, photos, the description, and whether reviews are being answered.
- Your listings on other directories, and whether the address and phone number agree everywhere.
- How AI assistants describe your shop today, recorded with the date and whether your shop was cited.
- Your content and enquiry path read by someone who understands what a shop needs a customer to do.
No website?
A shop with a Google profile and no website is not a lost cause
Plenty of good independent shops live entirely on their Google Business Profile. Say so on the form and no website checks run, no score is invented, and a person assesses the profile by hand instead. We would rather tell you what we can actually see than give you a number we made up.
Free AssessmentWhat happens next
A score first, an email second
The free score is produced by software, so it is never described as human-reviewed. The detailed report is prepared by hand.
- 1You enter your website address and a few details about the shop.
- 2The automated checks run, and you see your score — points earned out of points checked — with no email address needed.
- 3You see the findings themselves: what was measured, what came back, and why it matters for a shop like yours.
- 4If you want the rest, you request the detailed report by email. That is where a person covers the checks above and tells you what to fix first.
Limits
What this is not
- Not a promise of a ranking, a map position, or a mention by an AI assistant — nobody can honestly promise those.
- Not a full technical audit, and not free implementation work.
- Not a sales call. There is no call booked and no report delivery date given, because neither would be true.
- Not a reason to panic. A finding is a fact about your site, not a deadline.
See what a customer's phone shows when they look for a shop like yours.
The Free Visibility Assessment runs 8 automated checks against your live site and shows you the score before it asks you for an email. The rest needs a person, and that is what the detailed report is for.