What the PlaceOptimizer audit actually checks today (and what it does not)

This post is a plain-language inventory of what our Google Business Profile audit engine automates right now, category by category, and an equally plain account of what it does not automate yet. We built PlaceOptimizer for multi-location Indian brands, and we would rather you know exactly where the machine stops and human judgement begins than oversell a black box. If you are evaluating our free audit, this is the ground truth behind the score you get back.

We organise every check into an audit checklist across seven categories: Basic Information, Business Hours, Ratings & Reviews, Media, Categories & Attributes, Listing Health, and cross-location Consistency. Six of those run per listing; the seventh compares your listings against each other.

Why an honest inventory matters

A Google Business Profile is the front door to a local business. Google's own local ranking guidance names three factors, relevance, distance, and prominence, and states that complete, accurate information helps Google match your business to the right searches (Improve your local ranking on Google, accessed July 2026). Distance you cannot change. Relevance and prominence are largely a function of listing quality, and listing quality is measurable. That is what an audit is for.

The catch is that "measurable" and "automatable from public data" are not the same thing. Some quality signals are visible in the data Google returns through its Places API (New) (accessed July 2026), which exposes fields such as ratings, review counts, opening hours, and place types; others require a human to open the listing, read the reviews, and use judgement. An audit tool that pretends everything is automated is lying to you. Here is the real split. If you want the higher-level view of how our seven-category method maps to local ranking, the companion seven-category audit method walks through it, and how the audit runs end to end shows the flow from discovery to scored report.

Category by category: what runs automatically

1. Basic Information

For every listing we check the phone number, address, website, and description. A missing phone number or a missing address is flagged as Critical, because these are trust and contact essentials. A phone number that is present but malformed for Indian formats also flags Critical. A missing website is a Warning. A description shorter than 50 characters is an Info-level note, since a thin description is a soft signal rather than a hard failure.

• Automated today: phone presence and basic +91 format validity, address presence, website presence, description length.
• Manual verification recommended: whether the address components (building, street, locality) are structured the way Google prefers, and whether the website link actually resolves to a live page rather than a dead domain.

2. Business Hours

We check that hours exist and cover all seven days. No hours at all is Critical — Google may show "Hours unknown," which suppresses the listing and frustrates customers. Hours set for fewer than seven days flag a Warning.

• Automated today: presence of an hours object, and whether all seven weekdays are populated.
• Manual verification recommended: holiday hours and special-hours overrides. Google supports special hours for holidays (Edit your Business Profile hours, accessed July 2026), but a stale holiday override is not something we detect automatically yet. Check these by hand before major festivals.

3. Ratings & Reviews

This is the category where the mechanics matter most, so read carefully. We run three severity ladders here, and a ladder fires at most one severity, not several:

• Rating ladder: a rating below 3.5 stars flags Critical; a rating between 3.5 and 4.0 flags Warning. A listing cannot trip both — it lands on the worse-fitting tier only.
• Review-count ladder: fewer than 10 reviews flags Warning; between 10 and 50 flags Info. Again, one tier fires.
• Unanswered-review-risk ladder: a low rating combined with a low review count raises a Warning or Info flag that you likely have negative reviews going unaddressed.

The important honesty note: these are severity tiers on the same underlying number, not a stack of independent checks. If your rating is 3.2, you get the Critical tier and nothing more from that ladder.

• Automated today: star rating band, review-count band, and a heuristic flag for probable unanswered negative reviews.
• Manual verification recommended: actual owner-response rate, review recency (are reviews from this month or from 2023?), and the content of specific complaints. These need a human reading the review stream, so treat them as manual for now.

4. Media

We check photo count with a single severity ladder: zero photos is Critical, fewer than 5 is a Warning, and fewer than 10 is an Info note. One tier fires per listing.

• Automated today: photo count against the thresholds above.
• Manual verification recommended: photo freshness. Google encourages regular photo updates (Add photos or videos to your Business Profile, accessed July 2026), but whether your newest photo is 30 days or 3 years old is not part of the automated pass yet.

5. Categories & Attributes

We flag two things: a primary category that looks too generic, and the absence of any secondary category (fewer than two categories total flags Info).

Be aware of an important scope limitation. The "generic primary category" check today uses a mattress and furniture allowlist — it recognises mattress_store, furniture_store, and bed_shop as correct primary categories. That is because our first design partners are in that vertical. If you run a restaurant chain or a clinic network, this specific check will not be meaningful for you yet, and we would tell you so on the call rather than let a false Warning mislead you. Broadening the category logic to other verticals is on the roadmap.

• Automated today: primary-category match against the mattress/furniture allowlist, and secondary-category presence.
• Manual verification recommended (or roadmap): category correctness for any non-furniture vertical, and comparison of your category choice against the category most of your competitors use.

6. Listing Health

We flag a listing marked PERMANENTLY_CLOSED as Critical, and a listing that looks abandoned (zero photos and almost no reviews) as a Warning.

• Automated today: permanently-closed status, and an abandonment heuristic.
• Manual verification recommended: suspension risk and edit-conflict history, which are not exposed in the public data.

7. Cross-location Consistency

This is the seventh category and the one you genuinely cannot run by hand across a large estate. We compare every listing against every other on four axes: business name, primary category, website domain, and phone-number format. Name drift ("Brand Baner" vs "Brand - Baner Pune") flags a Warning; category drift flags a Warning; website and phone-format drift flag Info.

Alongside consistency, the engine runs a proximity-based duplicate-candidate detector. If two pins for your brand sit within one kilometre of each other, we surface them as candidates for review. We say candidates deliberately: proximity is a strong signal, not proof. Two genuinely separate stores in a dense market can sit close together, so a human confirms before anyone merges anything. Google's duplicate handling is a manual, review-based process (Remove duplicate listings, accessed July 2026), and our job is to hand you the shortlist, not to declare verdicts.

What a result does and does not tell you

A PlaceOptimizer result tells you, per listing and per brand, where your public GBP data falls short of a sensible quality bar, ranked by severity so operations knows what to fix first. It is fast, repeatable, and consistent across every location — which is its whole advantage over a manual eyeball pass.

What it does not tell you: it is not a live-ranking checker, not a review-sentiment reader, and not a substitute for opening a flagged listing and looking. A clean score means your data passes the automated checks; it does not certify that every review is answered or every photo is current. Those are exactly the items we mark "manual verification recommended," and we mark them that way on purpose.

If you want the checklist we run, in the same seven-category order, so your team can verify by hand, it is on the GBP audit checklist page. If you want to see how the individual severities roll up into a single number, read our companion post on the Brand Health Score methodology. And if you would rather just see your estate scored, start with the free audit — it applies every automated check above to each listing Google returns for your brand and gives you the ranked issue list in about a minute.

Frequently asked questions

Does the audit read whether I have replied to my reviews?

No. The engine flags probable unanswered-review risk from a heuristic that combines your star rating and review count, but it does not read your actual review replies. Real owner-response rate is a manual verification item. This matters because response rate is one of the few prominence signals you control directly, so we would rather you check it by hand than trust a number the engine cannot compute.

Why does the category check only recognise furniture and mattress stores?

Because our first design partners are in that vertical, the "generic primary category" check today uses a mattress-and-furniture allowlist. If you run a restaurant, clinic, or automotive network, that specific check is not meaningful for you yet, and we will say so on the call rather than let a false Warning mislead you. Broadening category logic to other verticals is on the roadmap.

Can the audit manage or edit my listings?

Not today. The audit is read-only: it scores the public data Google returns for your brand. Listing management (bulk edits, CSV import, review replies) is in early access, not part of the live audit. We keep the two clearly separated so nobody mistakes a diagnostic for a write action.

How does this differ from a duplicate check or a consistency check?

Those are two of the seven categories, and each has its own deep-dive. Cross-location name, category, website, and phone consistency is covered in the four consistency dimensions, and proximity-based duplicate detection is covered in duplicate detection across an estate and why duplicate listings split your rankings. Review signals get their own treatment in do Google reviews move local rankings in India. If you want to see where a city returns nothing, why some city audits return no data explains the provider-coverage mechanics.

Honesty is the product here. The audit is genuinely useful precisely because we are clear about where it stops.