§ I — What we measure
Score My Business measures how often AI assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — describe and recommend your restaurant or hotel when real customers search for places to eat or stay. The output is a single 0–100 visibility score, broken down by eight customer intents and ranked against your 3–8 closest AI-perceived competitors.
The eight intents we cover for restaurants:
- Comparison — broad "best [type] in [city]" queries
- Cuisine — specific cuisine queries (e.g., "where to eat pasta")
- Location — neighborhood and landmark proximity queries
- Occasion — first-date, anniversary, business-lunch queries
- Dietary — vegan, halal, gluten-free, kosher options
- Accessibility — wheelchair, kid-friendly, pet-friendly, parking
- Atmosphere — rooftop, intimate, design-forward, historic
- Recognition — Michelin, Bib Gourmand, James Beard, awards
For hotels, two intents change: cuisine becomes Amenities (pool, spa, gym, restaurant on-site) and dietary becomes Services (24h reception, airport transfer, concierge, room service). The other six intents are shared with restaurants. The scoring formula is identical.
§ II — How we measure
Each audit runs your business through a structured query library designed to test the breadth of how a real customer might ask AI for a recommendation. The library is fixed across all our audits — we don't customize it per business. That's the point: we measure how AI describes you when the user has no prior knowledge, asking the kinds of questions real customers ask.
Scan volume by tier
Different tiers run different volumes of scans. Higher tiers cover more audience profiles and additional AI platforms.
- Standard ($49) — 950+ scans · single audience profile
- Detailed ($99) — 2,500+ scans · two audience profiles
- Full Audit ($249) — 6,500+ scans · up to four audience profiles · expanded AI platform coverage
AI assistants covered
Every paid audit covers the major AI assistants — including paid-tier and free-tier ChatGPT and Gemini. Full Audit additionally covers Claude and Perplexity. Web search grounding is enabled across all platforms; without grounding, AI assistants answer from stale training data, which is not what your future customers actually see.
Variance handling
AI is non-deterministic — re-running the same query produces different results. We mitigate this by running each query multiple times across platforms and reporting citation rate (percent of runs that cite you), not a binary cited/not-cited.
Citation detection
Every AI response is passed through an independent detection pass that extracts citation data: was your business named? In what position? With what context? We never trust the source AI to detect itself — that would be like having the witness grade their own testimony.
Source-market IP routing
Each audience profile runs from the geographic region where its customers live when they're making the decision, not where your business is located. A profile measuring "international tourists" runs from outside your country (where the tourists actually search from before their trip). Your "Local customers" profile runs from within your home country.
Wall-time and delivery
Audits typically deliver in under 5 minutes (Standard), under 10 minutes (Detailed), or under 15 minutes (Full Audit) — once the scan completes, our pipeline drafts the report and renders the PDF automatically. SLA is under 24 hours; refund is automatic if the SLA is breached.
§ III — What we don't measure
For honesty's sake, here's what's outside our methodology:
- Grok — xAI's API isn't yet stable enough for production scanning at our quality bar. We'll add it when it stabilizes.
- Meta AI — no public API, despite ~1B monthly active users. We monitor the situation and will add coverage if access opens.
- Individual user personalization — we measure aggregate AI behavior (what AI assistants tend to say) rather than what any one signed-in user sees with their personalization profile applied. Customer-specific personalization is unobservable from outside the platform.
- Search ads — paid Google / Bing ads are out of scope. This is an organic-recommendation audit.
- Direct booking conversion — we measure visibility, not bookings. Visibility is upstream of conversion. The audit's actions help your visibility; tracking conversion is your CRM's job.
§ IV — Limits and caveats
AI is non-deterministic. Re-running the same audit on a different day will produce a slightly different score — typically within a small confidence interval. We mitigate via multi-run averaging across platforms.
AI assistants update their training data and grounding behavior continuously. Citation patterns can shift week-to-week, especially when platforms release new model versions. We re-validate the query library quarterly and publish library changelogs (available at /blog).
We can't tell you exactly why AI cites you (or doesn't) — that's inside model weights we can't inspect. We can tell you reliably whether AI cites you, in what context, and which signals correlate with citation across our customer base. Your action items are derived from those correlations.
§ V — Frequently asked questions
How is this different from SEO?
SEO measures how Google ranks your website on a results page — a 10-blue-link world. Score My Business measures something different and newer: how AI assistants describe and recommend your business in conversational answers. SEO is keyword-driven. AI recommendation is sentiment + reputation + grounding-data driven. Different game, different scoreboard. We measure the new one.
Can I actually improve my AI visibility score?
Yes — and your audit's action list explains how. The most common levers, ranked by impact across the 200+ businesses we've audited so far: (1) complete English-language Google Business Profile description, (2) review-language coverage in markets you want visibility in, (3) high-quality photos with descriptive metadata, (4) press mentions in trusted publications AI assistants are likely to cite, (5) consistent NAP (name/address/phone) across the web. Small businesses typically gain 8–15 points within 4–8 weeks of executing the top three actions.
How accurate is the free score?
The free score uses a narrower scan set than the paid audit — enough to give you a directionally-correct visibility number, but without the depth of intent breakdown, verbatim AI quotes, or competitor cluster analysis. Use the free score to learn whether you appear at all. Buy a paid audit when you want to know exactly where you rank, what AI says about you, and what to do.
What if my score is low?
That's the most useful version of the report. A low score means there's signal in the gap between where you are and where competitors with similar fundamentals already are. Every audit ships with 8–24 specific actions ranked by expected score lift, effort, and confidence (we tag each: "high-impact, 30-min effort, +6–9 points expected"). Low-score reports often deliver more value than high-score reports because every action moves the needle.
How long does delivery take?
Under 24 hours is our SLA. In practice, most Standard reports deliver in under 5 minutes, Detailed in under 10 minutes, Full Audit in under 15 minutes — once the AI scan completes, our Claude-Sonnet pipeline drafts the report and Puppeteer renders the PDF automatically. Refund window: if delivery exceeds the 24-hour SLA, we refund automatically.
What if my data isn't on Google?
We try Google Places first; if your business isn't listed, we fall back to manual entry. You provide the business name, address, and category. The audit still works — Google Places gives us slot data (cuisine type, neighborhood, landmark proximity) faster, but isn't load-bearing for the scan itself.
Are the AI quotes you show me real?
Every verbatim AI quote in your report is captured live during the scan and stored unmodified to Cloudflare R2 (every raw response, every audit, retained indefinitely). If you want to see the source response, ask support — we'll send the raw scan data. We don't paraphrase, condense, or invent quotes.
What's a "competitor" in this audit?
Two layers. (1) AI-detected competitors: the businesses ChatGPT/Gemini consistently mention alongside yours when answering "best restaurants in [your city]" type queries. We extract these automatically from your scan. (2) User-picked competitors: in Detailed and Full Audit you can manually add competitors to the comparison set. Both are scanned the same way against the same query battery.
Do you scan in different languages?
Standard: 1 language (auto-detected from your Google profile, usually local). Detailed: 2 languages. Full Audit: up to 4 languages. International tourist languages (English, Mandarin, Arabic, German, French, Japanese, Russian, etc.) can be added per audit at $15 each. The sample report shows Local + English (the most common pairing).
What about Yext, BrightLocal, or other GEO tools?
Yext is enterprise-priced ($10k+/year) and built around managing structured listings. BrightLocal is SEO-focused. Score My Business is purpose-built for AI-recommendation visibility specifically, designed to be affordable for independent restaurants and hotels (one-time $49–$249), and methodology-transparent (we publish exactly what we scan and how we score).
Does ordering an audit affect my AI visibility?
No. We're observers, not participants. The scan reads how AI describes you; it doesn't modify your business profile, reviews, listings, or any underlying signal. Your audit is a measurement, not an intervention. The intervention is what you do based on the action list.
Privacy — what data do you store?
We store your business name, Google Place ID, and every raw AI response from your scan, indefinitely (audit trail / re-run capability). We do NOT store payment data (Stripe-handled). Your email is used only for delivery and lifecycle communication (you can opt out anytime). We never sell or share data with third parties. GDPR + US privacy compliant. Details on the privacy page.
Can my agency white-label this?
Bundle packs (5-pack $189 / 10-pack $349) are designed for small agencies running quarterly audits across a portfolio. We don't currently offer white-label co-branded reports — your client sees "Score My Business" as the audit provider. If you need agency-tier features (custom branding, API access, multi-client dashboard), reach out about Citeabl SaaS instead.
What's Citeabl SaaS — should I buy that instead?
Score My Business is one-time. Citeabl is a recurring subscription ($19–99/month per location) that monitors your AI visibility weekly with a live dashboard, weekly delta alerts, peer-cluster tracking, and continuous action checklist. SMB buyers get a $49 credit toward Citeabl. Most owners start with one SMB audit, see what their score looks like, then subscribe to Citeabl when they want continuous tracking.
§ VI — Open the data
We publish quarterly summary statistics from anonymized customer audits (no business names, no identifying data). Topics covered: average citation rates by tier, intent distribution patterns, platform-specific behavior shifts, action-item lift correlations.
Full anonymized scan dataset available on request for academic research. Email support@scoremybusiness.ai with your institution and project description.
§ VII — Contact
Methodology questions, press inquiries, research access: support@scoremybusiness.ai
Response time: 1 business day.