GBP Audit

Summary#

GBP Audit pulls a business's live Google Business Profile and its Map Pack position, then shows what a customer sees: the categories, address, hours, photos, rating, review count and the competitors sitting alongside it on the map.

Purpose#

For a business with a physical location or a service area, the Google Business Profile is the storefront. It is where most local searchers stop. Yet it is edited rarely, often by whoever set it up years ago, and nobody checks it until rankings drop.

This tool exists to make that check take ten seconds. It answers three questions at once: is the profile complete, where does it sit in the Map Pack, and how does its reputation compare with the businesses ranking around it. Those three answers decide almost everything about local visibility.

Overview#

Enter a business name and a city. Metric Vault queries Google's business data live for three things in parallel:

• The business profile itself — name, categories, address or service area, phone, website, description, claimed status, opening hours, photos and attributes.
• The Map Pack, up to 20 local results for that query, which gives both your own position and the competitors around you.
• Extended reviews, which produce the real rating distribution and recent review text.

Everything factual on the screen comes from that live data and is written straight onto the result: the business details, the rating, the review count, the rating distribution, the review text, the Map Pack rank and the competitor list cannot be altered by the language model.

A smaller set of fields is an AI reading rather than a measurement: the overall local score, the citation consistency grid, the review-history trend, the local keyword table and the recommendations. Those are interpretation, and the article flags them where they appear.

Benefits#

• The real profile, not a description of one. Hours, photos, categories and review text are the live values from Google.
• Position and competition in the same view. You see your Map Pack rank next to the ratings and review counts of the businesses ranking above you.
• Rating distribution, not just an average. A 4.5 built from mostly fives and a handful of ones is a different problem from a 4.5 built from fours.
• Cheap to run repeatedly. One credit, and results are reusable for seven days.

Use Cases#

• New client onboarding. You take on a local business and need a complete picture of their profile before you promise anything.
• Map Pack investigation. Calls have dropped; you check whether the business has slipped out of the top three and who replaced it.
• Reputation benchmarking. You compare rating and review volume against the four businesses ranking above you to see what you actually have to beat.
• Profile completeness sweep. You check hours, description, photos and attributes across a portfolio of locations, one at a time.
• Multi-location consistency. You run each branch and compare what Google holds for each one.

Requirements#

• A paid plan. GBP Audit costs 1 credit, and the Free plan cannot run any tool that costs credits.
• A signed-in account with at least 1 credit's worth of allowance.
• A query that maps to a single real business. A brand name or a bare domain usually does not.
• No integration and no verified domain. You do not need to own the profile you audit.

Permissions#

Available to every team role on a paid plan. On the Free plan the run is refused with:

This tool needs a paid plan. Free includes the 10 technical SEO tools; upgrade to Pro to unlock the rest.

Because the tool costs 1 credit, it sits below the premium threshold of 3, so on a paid plan it is never blocked by your monthly quota. Each run still adds 1 to your recorded usage. See Quotas and rate limits.

Cost#

1 credit per run. The run button says Audit Local SEO · 1 report.

A run that is served from the shared seven-day data cache is still charged the credit. The saving is on the data provider bill, not on your allowance. Reopening a saved result from your Library is always free. Both behaviors are explained in Result caching and freshness and How credits work.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Local → GBP Audit

Inputs#

The topbar country selector is sent with the request but does not change the Google location used for this tool. See Limitations.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Site Health in the left rail, then select GBP Audit.
2. Type the business name followed by its city, for example Blue Bottle Coffee San Francisco. Or select one of the TRY: chips.
3. Select Audit Local SEO · 1 report, or press Enter.
4. If you have audited this exact query before, the You already ran this prompt appears. Choose Open saved result to reopen it free, or Run fresh (1 credits) for new data.
5. Wait while the panel reads Analyzing local SEO....
6. Read the Local Pulse tiles first, then Map Pack Visibility, then the Google Business Profile card for anything missing.
7. Export with Export PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV, Export JSON or Share public link at the top of the card. The profile card also carries its own Export CSV.

Reading the Results#

The hero#

A banner carrying the business name, a LOCAL SEO AUDIT badge and a LIVE GOOGLE DATA badge. Under it, the category and location Google holds for the profile. If the name here is not the business you meant, stop and re-run with a more specific query — everything below is about whatever profile Google matched.

Local Pulse tiles#

Four numbers, and the first is the only interpreted one.

Map Pack Visibility#

A gauge rendering the local score, with the Map Pack position beside it. Read the two together: a high score with a rank outside the top three usually means the profile is in good shape but the competition is simply stronger, and the lever is reviews rather than profile edits.

Citation Heatmap#

A grid of directories — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places and Yellow Pages — each marked consistent or not, under the subtitle NAP consistency across directories. NAP means name, address, phone.

This grid is generated by the language model, not fetched from those directories. It is useful as a checklist of where to look, and you should verify each one by hand before acting on it. Inconsistent name, address or phone data across major directories genuinely does suppress local rankings, so the checklist is worth working through — just not worth trusting blind.

Rating Distribution#

The five-star breakdown, built from real review data when Google returned it. What to look for: a heavy one-star tail behind a decent average. Twenty fives and four ones average out respectably while telling you there is a repeatable failure mode in the business. Read the review text below to find what it is.

Review Trend (12M)#

Review volume over the last twelve months. A flat or declining line means no active review generation, which is the single most common cause of a slipping Map Pack position when nothing else has changed. This series is modelled rather than measured per month, so read the shape, not the individual points.

Top Local Keywords#

A table with Keyword, Volume, Organic, Map Pack and Local impact columns — the queries the business could rank for locally and where it currently sits in each surface. Use it to find terms where the organic listing is fine but the Map Pack presence is not, which points at profile categories rather than at the website.

Competitor Local Comparison#

The businesses appearing in the Map Pack for your query, up to eight, each with its rating, review count and rank. This is the most directly actionable block on the page: it tells you the exact rating and review count you have to reach to be credible in that pack. If every competitor sits at 4.7 with 300 reviews and you are at 4.4 with 60, no amount of profile editing closes that gap.

Google Business Profile#

The profile card, all live values, with a verified badge when the profile is claimed. Rows: Business, Category, Address (or Service area for a service-area business), Phone, Website, Google Profile (a link through to Google Maps), Hours with the current open or closed status, Description, Photos with the total count and a link to view them, and Services as attribute chips.

An empty row is the finding. A missing description, no attributes, no website or a thin photo count are each a completeness gap you can close the same day. An unclaimed profile is the most urgent: it means you do not control what is shown.

Customer Reviews#

Up to six recent reviews with the author, star rating, relative time, review text and any owner response. Read these before the recommendations. They tell you what customers actually complain about, and the presence or absence of owner responses tells you whether the profile is being managed at all.

Recommendations, What this means for Local SEO, and Sample Queries to Try Next#

The closing blocks: an ordered set of suggested actions, a plain-language summary, and a few related queries worth auditing next. These are AI-written from the measured data above.

Below them, the Get recommendations panel can turn the whole result into a prioritized, step-by-step plan. That is a separate paid feature; see Get Recommendations.

When no profile is matched#

If Google returns no business data for the query, you get an honest empty state headed Let's find the right business rather than an invented profile, with a tip: "Local SEO works best with a real business name + a real city." It offers one-click sample queries — Starbucks New York, Dentist Miami, Pizza Chicago, Gym Los Angeles, Hair Salon Austin, Coffee Shop Seattle — so you can see a populated report immediately. Nothing is fabricated in this state.

Examples#

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Always include the city. Joe's Pizza matches hundreds of businesses; Joe's Pizza New York matches one.
• If the hero shows the wrong business, re-run with the street name added rather than trying to interpret the report.
• Audit your three closest competitors as well. Their profiles cost 1 credit each and tell you exactly what you are being measured against.
• Re-run monthly rather than weekly. The data cache holds for seven days, and local metrics move slowly.

Best Practices#

• Claim the profile first. Everything else is advisory until you control it.
• Set the primary category precisely and use additional categories for genuine secondary services only.
• Keep hours current, including holiday hours. Wrong hours generate one-star reviews faster than almost anything else.
• Respond to reviews, especially negative ones. The owner-response field in the review list is visible to every customer reading it.
• Build review volume steadily rather than in bursts, and use the competitor table to set a realistic target.

Common Mistakes#

• Entering a domain instead of a business. paypal.com does not map to one Google Business Profile, and the tool will tell you so rather than guess.
• Treating the Citation Heatmap as a verified audit. It is an AI estimate of where to look. Verify each directory yourself.
• Reading LOCAL SCORE as a Google metric. It is Metric Vault's composite, useful for comparison between locations and over time, not a figure Google publishes.
• Fixing the profile and ignoring reviews. When the competitor table shows a large review gap, profile completeness will not close it.
• Running it on a national brand. The tool is built for a single location or service area.

Limitations#

• Google data is queried against the United States location in English, regardless of the topbar country selector. Businesses outside the United States can still resolve, but Map Pack position reflects a US query context.
• The Map Pack is read to a depth of 20 results, and the competitor list shows up to
• A business ranking below 20 reports as OUT OF MAP PACK.
• Up to 6 recent reviews are shown. This is not a full review export.
• Citation consistency, the local score, the review-history trend, the local keyword table and the recommendations are AI-generated interpretations, not measurements.
• Map Pack rank is matched by business name. An unusual or heavily punctuated name may not match, in which case the competitor list still renders but your own rank shows as unknown.
• Data is shared from the cross-customer cache for up to 7 days. See Result caching and freshness.
• The tool audits a profile; it does not edit one. All changes are made in Google.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Do I have to own the business to audit it? No. The tool reads public Google Business Profile and Map Pack data, so you can audit a prospect or a competitor exactly as you would your own.

Does it change anything on my profile? No. It is read-only. Every change it suggests is made by you in Google.

Why is my rank different from what I see when I search? Google personalises local results by the searcher's exact location, and this tool queries a fixed location context. Use it to track direction over time rather than as a substitute for a rank tracker; for keyword positions on the website itself, use Rank Tracker.

Is this metered against my monthly report allowance? It costs 1 credit and adds 1 to your recorded usage, but tools under 3 credits are never blocked by the monthly quota on a paid plan. See Quotas and rate limits.

Can I audit several locations at once? Not from this screen; it takes one business per run. Run each location separately — at 1 credit each, a ten-branch portfolio costs 10 credits — and compare the LOCAL SCORE tiles.