How the report measures a business

September 3, 2026

The free report scores a business in six areas: trust, findability, reputation, speed, social and conversion readiness. This post is about where those scores come from, because a number is only worth reading if you know what was measured to produce it.

It starts with the website

The first thing the report does is read your site the way a visitor's browser does. It fetches your pages, follows the links between them, and records what it finds: the titles, the headings, whether a contact route exists, whether the pages that matter are reachable at all. That crawl is the foundation for most of what follows. If it cannot read your site, the report says so at the top, before any score, because a grade built on nothing would be worse than no grade.

Trust: the things a visitor never sees but a browser checks

Trust is measured from the plumbing. Whether your certificate is valid and when it expires. Whether your domain's registration is in order. Whether Google's Safe Browsing service has flagged the site. Whether the email records that stop other people sending mail as you are in place. None of these is visible on the page, and all of them decide whether a browser, a mail server or a search engine treats you as legitimate.

Findability and reputation: what Google shows next to you

Findability looks at whether the pages you have can be found: the signals a search engine reads first, and whether your Google Business Profile exists and matches your site. Reputation reads that same profile for your rating and review count, and then looks up the businesses Google places nearest to you, so the report can show your numbers beside theirs rather than on their own. A rating means little without the rating next door.

Speed: measured, not estimated

Speed comes from two sources. One is a fresh measurement of your pages, run the way Google's own tools run it. The other is what real visitors' browsers have reported back to Google about your site over recent weeks, where enough of them have visited for that data to exist. When the second source is empty, the report says it is empty rather than filling it in.

Social: only what can be confirmed

The report checks whether the profiles you list actually resolve. Some networks make that easy to confirm and some do not: a few answer identically whether a profile exists or not. Where a network cannot be verified, the report records the handle and says the check could not be completed. It does not guess, because a guess in your favour is still a guess.

Conversion readiness: can someone act?

The last area asks whether a visitor who is ready to buy can do something about it. Is there a way to get in touch on the page they are on? Is it obvious? This is the area most businesses score worst on and fix fastest, because it is usually a page edit, not a project.

When a check cannot be completed

Every one of these checks can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with your business: a service is down, a request times out, a network refuses to answer. When that happens the report does not drop the check and quietly score you on the rest. It lists what could not be verified, and if enough was missing that the overall grade would be misleading, it withholds the grade and tells you why. A report that hides its gaps is not a report you can act on.

That is the whole method: measure what can be measured, compare it with what is next to you, and say plainly what could not be checked. The report is free and takes about two minutes, and you can run it here.