Your Locale Score is one number from 0 to 100 and one letter, built from six parts that spell L-O-C-A-L-E. Each part measures one thing about how your business shows up — to customers, and to the AI assistants customers now ask.
One rule runs through all of it: measured, never guessed. If we can’t check a part, we mark it not measured and leave it out of the number. It is never counted as zero, and it is never filled in with a guess. Your result always tells you how many of the six parts were measured.
The ring is the scale: it starts red at the top, climbs through orange and yellow, and reaches electric green only at a perfect 100. A graded business’s ring stops at its own score — the color at the tip is the score’s own color, and the part of the ring ahead shows where the climb still has to go.
Every place your name, address, and phone number appear — checked against each other, so a customer never finds two different businesses wearing your name. And checked for a ghost: a second listing that answers to your phone number, in another town, under another name, collecting your calls and its own bad reviews. The check starts there — hunting for a second listing that answers to your phone number.
MeasuredWhat the neighborhood says about you: your reviews and ratings, counted across the places we check today. A business with four hundred happy customers and eleven reviews has an opinion problem, not a service problem — and that’s fixable.
MeasuredHow you stand next to the shops around you. This letter is on the build list. Today’s grade does not claim it — the report marks it not measured and leaves it out of the number, instead of guessing at it.
Not measured yetFive AI assistants, asked the way your customers ask, for a business like yours in your town — and see who they name, and who they name instead of you. It asks a second question too: could they name you? An AI can only recommend a business it can describe, so the grade checks whether a clear description of you — what you do, who you serve, where — exists anywhere for it to use. How we ask, and how we count the answers, is below.
MeasuredWhere you turn up, street by street across your own neighborhood — strong on your block, invisible three streets over. Coming, and not in today’s grade. When it isn’t measured, the page says so, in so many words.
Not measured yetAll of it agreeing: the same name, the same hours, the same story in every place you’re seen. This letter completes as Compared and Located come online — today it is marked not measured and left out of the number. And this is where the walk ends: everything, working together. That total is your Locale Score.
Not measured yetThe Score grades your digital footprint. The Ledger keeps it — every account, listing, and review your business stands on, written down in one place, with its papers. (In the pilot — building now.)
Your website is the one place you put money into something you actually own. Everything else is rented ground.
Your Google profile, your Facebook page, your Yelp listing — a landlord holds every one of them, and a landlord can evict: a suspended profile is exactly that. The Ledger sorts everything your business stands on by the only question that matters when something goes wrong: can it be taken away?
Your domain, your website, your phone number, your customer list. Nobody can suspend these. This is the ground you build on — the only ground that’s really yours.
Ads, sponsored listings, paid directory tiers. They work while the money moves — this is where push lives: the day the money stops, they stop.
Your Google profile, your social pages, your free listings. Ground a platform lends you for free: you build on it, they can take it — a suspended profile is exactly that. The Ledger records who holds each one, when it was claimed, and whether it’s still standing.
Reviews, links, mentions, reshares — what others say about you, in places you don’t control. You can’t buy these outright and nobody can hand them to you. They’re earned slowly, and they’re the part that compounds.
Which login claimed it. How it was approved — the phone call, the postcard, the confirmation. What it cost, if it cost anything. When it was last checked, and who holds the keys. Your passwords stay in your own password manager, where they belong — the Ledger keeps the record of where everything lives, never the keys themselves.
A link from a site that vouches for you is an asset. A bad link is a liability — it can hurt you. So is a ghost listing, a stale address, a key nobody recorded. Equity is the bottom line: what you own, minus what can hurt you. The Ledger keeps both columns, on the record, with dates.
Ads are push, and push lives in Paid: the day the money stops, they stop. Reviews, listings, and a name the AI can describe are pull: they keep working while you sleep. The Ledger is built to grow the pull side — because it’s the only side you keep.
It happens — an injury, a lost phone, a bookkeeper who left. The Ledger records who can get into each account and how recovery works for it — and the date that path was last checked. A recovery path nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan; the record shows which ones have actually been walked, and which are still only written down.
Yours, whoever services you: if your business ever changes agencies, your page, your score, and your history continue. The record belongs to your business — that is the rule this product is built on, not a favor an agency grants. The handover is drilled before the first client launches, so it is a tested thing, not just a promised one.
A grade by itself changes nothing. Here is how a score becomes work — and who does the work.
Your grade, your record, and the fixes come through them, in their name — that’s how this instrument is built to be served. If your agency isn’t on Locale Score yet, the score you ran here is the conversation starter: it’s real, it’s dated, and it’s yours to show them.
Run it free, keep the result, fix what you can yourself — every finding on the report is written to be acted on, not just admired. And when you want the record kept month over month and the fixes done for you, that’s the work agencies do with this instrument.
Run an agency, or thinking about serving your town? There’s a page for that side of the house: the agency page →
Every question is asked twice. Each question goes to the assistants in two separate runs, and both answers are kept. AI answers vary from one ask to the next; a single strange answer should never decide your grade, so no single answer does.
We count only the answers we get. Your result says it in plain words: Named in X of Y answered — for example, “Named in 2 of 5 answered” means five assistants answered the question and two of them named your business. An assistant that doesn’t answer isn’t counted against you. Silence is not a zero.
You see the question before we run it. The exact phrase we’ll ask about — your trade, in your town — is shown to you first, and you can correct the trade before the run. The town stays the one on your listing.
The score is built only from the parts we actually measured, weighted by what each part carries. When a part isn’t measured, the number says so, and the parts we did measure carry the grade between them. Run it again later and you can watch it move as you fix what it found.
It is not a ranking promise, and it is not a guess about your business. It is a measurement of what a customer — or an AI — can see today.
Your listings, your reviews, and what five AI assistants say when a customer asks for a business like yours — three of the six parts today. The other three are marked not measured and left out of your number until they are built.
That part of the grade is not measured yet. It is printed as not measured, left out of the number, and never filled in with a guess.
We could not match the phone number on your website to the business, so the phone part of the check is not measured. Your score still runs — it just is not stamped Verified.
Your first score for a business is free, and re-running that same business is free. Scoring additional businesses is paid, when paid scores open.
A scan you run is kept, so a later run connects to it and you can watch the number move. Score records are deleted 24 months after your most recent run. The full rule is on the data handling page.