Is a free audit actually free, or is it a sales pitch?

Delilah's Free AI + Google Visibility Audit is $0, one-time per business, and the one-page report is yours to keep either way — no pitch deck attached and no obligation. Plenty of the findings are fixes an owner can make in an afternoon; the audit exists so you can see them in one place, in priority order.

What are the most common Google profile gaps an audit finds?

The usual stack: the wrong or overly broad primary category, no services list, stale or missing holiday hours, very few photos, reviews that stopped months ago while a competitor adds new ones monthly, and business information that differs between the website and directories. Individually small, together they are why a good business ranks below a mediocre one.

What should I do after the audit?

Fix the profile gaps first — category, services, hours, photos — because they are one-time corrections. Then put the recurring work on a system: asking every real customer for a review, keeping listings consistent, and publishing content that answers buyer queries. Owners who want that monthly work handled can have it run as Found Everywhere, Delilah's SEO and AI-search service at $199 per month.

Free Google Business Profile Audit: What It Checks and How to Read Yours

Q: What does a free Google Business Profile audit check?

A profile audit checks whether your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate: primary category and services list, hours including holiday hours, photos, business description, and Q&A. A full visibility audit adds your rankings on about ten buyer queries, your review count, rating, and recency against your top three competitors, your presence in AI answers, and whether your name, address, and phone match across major directories.

For most local businesses, the Google Business Profile does more selling than the website does. It is what appears in Maps, in the local results at the top of a search, and increasingly inside AI answers when someone asks who to hire nearby. Yet most profiles were claimed once, half-filled in, and never revisited — while the business wonders why a weaker competitor shows up first. A free Google Business Profile audit is a structured grade of that profile and everything around it. Here is exactly what it checks, what the findings usually mean, and the order to fix them in.

First: is the profile itself complete?

The audit starts inside the profile. Primary category is the biggest single lever: it tells Google what searches you are even eligible for, and owners routinely pick a category that is too broad or simply wrong. Then the services list — the specific things you sell, in the words buyers use — because a profile with no services is a profile Google has to guess about. Hours come next, including holiday hours, which go stale silently. Photos matter more than owners expect: a profile with three old photos reads as a business that may no longer exist. The description and the Q&A section round it out. Each gap is small; stacked together, they are the difference between showing up and being skipped.

Second: where do you rank for buyers who don't know your name?

A profile can be perfect and still invisible if nothing around it supports it. So the audit searches about ten buyer queries for your category and city — the phrases a customer who has never heard of you would type — and records your position, including the honest answer "not in the top ten." Ranking for your own business name is not visibility; your name is searched by people who already found you. The buyer queries are where new customers come from, and they are the ones most local businesses have never once checked. Our earlier guide on how to get your business to show up on Google walks through why those queries behave the way they do.

Third: reviews — against the three businesses beating you

Your review count means nothing in isolation, because your customer is never looking at it in isolation. The audit lines your count, rating, and recency up against your top three competitors — the comparison happening on the customer's screen in real time. The pattern that hurts most is not a low count; it is dead recency. A business with ninety reviews and none in four months loses to a business with forty reviews and five this month, on trust and on ranking signals alike. And one rule never bends in anything Delilah reports or sells: reviews must be real reviews from real customers. An audit that suggests buying reviews is telling you to risk the listing itself.

Fourth: do AI answers know you exist?

The newest layer of the audit checks question-style buyer queries — "best [category] in [city]," "who should I hire for…" — and records which businesses the answer-style results name. This is tracked honestly as a proxy: the check reads the organic results and answer-style summaries an AI answer would draw from, and reports whether you are among the sources. If competitors are named and you are not, that is not a mystery — AI answers are built from rankings, reviews, roundups, and well-structured pages, and the audit shows you exactly which of those inputs you are missing. You can see how the audit and the ongoing visibility work fit together on our marketing services page for Los Angeles and Orange County, and compare the full menu on the pricing page.

How to read the report — and what to fix first

A good audit fits on one page and ends in a priority order, not a pile of scores. Fix profile gaps first: category, services, hours, photos are one-afternoon corrections with permanent effect. Fix listing consistency second — your name, address, and phone should read identically on your site and the major directories, because disagreements quietly erode the trust rankings run on. Then systematize the recurring layer: a review ask that reaches every real customer, and content that answers buyer queries month after month. That recurring layer is the work most owners run out of week for, which is why it exists as a service — Found Everywhere, at $199 per month, runs the SEO and AI-search work monthly with plain-English reporting. If you want a sense of fit first, the kinds of local businesses we work with is a fair place to start. Either way, the audit itself is free, one-time, and yours to keep — guessing is the most expensive marketing strategy there is.

Frequently asked questions

What does a free Google Business Profile audit check?

Profile completeness — category, services, hours, photos, description, Q&A — plus your rankings on about ten buyer queries, your reviews against your top three competitors, your presence in AI answers, and listing consistency across directories.

Is the audit really free?

Yes — $0, one-time per business, report yours to keep either way, no obligation. It is the front door, not a contract.

What gaps does it usually find?

A wrong or broad primary category, no services list, stale hours, few photos, reviews that stopped months ago, and business details that differ between the website and directories.

What happens after the audit?

Fix the one-time profile gaps yourself in an afternoon, then decide whether the monthly layer — reviews, content, AI-answer tracking — is something you will run or hand off.

See your business the way your next customer does. Request the free AI + Google Visibility Audit — buyer queries, profile, reviews vs competitors, and AI presence, on one page.