Business Assist Central

An owner's manual for the first three years

The instrument

Findability Checkup

Twenty-four questions about the surfaces where customers look you up. Answer honestly — nobody's watching. Your answers stay in your browser (nothing is sent anywhere, there's no email gate), and you get a score plus a fix list ordered by what's costing you the most, each item pointed at the manual page that walks you through it. When you're torn between answers: "Partly" means it exists but something's off — claimed but stale, right phone but last year's hours. "N/A" means the question genuinely doesn't apply to your business, not that you haven't gotten to it.

Time: about 20 minutes, including the three AI lookups in section E. Cost: $0.

A Core listings

The six places that feed nearly everything else — including the AI assistants. Answer for each: claimed, verified, and showing correct facts?

  1. Google Business Profile is claimed, verified, and the facts on it are current.

    Verified = Google confirmed you own it (video, postcard, or phone). If you can edit your hours from google.com/business, you're verified.

  2. Apple Maps listing (via Apple Business Connect) is claimed and correct.

    Check on an iPhone: Maps → search your business name.

  3. Bing Places listing is claimed and correct.

    Bing matters less for clicks, more because AI assistants read it.

  4. Yelp page exists with correct facts (even if you don't love Yelp).

  5. Facebook page shows current hours, phone, and address.

  6. Your industry's one directory that matters (Angi, Avvo, Healthgrades, TripAdvisor, The Knot…) is claimed and current.

B Fact consistency

Machines cross-check you. When your facts disagree with each other, search engines and AI assistants either guess or go quiet.

  1. Your business name is written exactly the same way everywhere (no "LLC" here, "& Co." there).

  2. Address or service area is identical on every surface.

  3. One phone number, identical everywhere.

  4. Hours are current everywhere — including holiday hours.

    Wrong hours are the #1 source of angry one-star reviews.

  5. You have a one-sentence description of what you do and where, used word-for-word on every surface.

C Reviews

Your last ten reviews are doing more selling than your website — to people and to the assistants summarizing you.

  1. You have at least 10 Google reviews.

  2. At least one new review in the last 60 days.

  3. Every review — good and bad — has a response from you within a week.

  4. You have a standard, comfortable way of asking for a review (a script, a card, a text template).

D Your website

Its actual job: confirm, in one screen, that you're real, local, current, and right for the job — for humans and for the machines reading on their behalf.

  1. The first screen of your homepage says what you do and where you do it, in plain words.

  2. Your services are named — with prices, ranges, or at least "starting at" numbers — on a services page or your one-pager.

  3. Hours, phone, and address (or service area) appear in the footer of every page.

  4. The site is usable on a phone (text readable, buttons tappable, nothing sideways).

  5. There's an about page with a real human name and face on it.

E AI answers

Do these three lookups now — they take about ten minutes and most owners have never done them. Open any AI assistant — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or whatever is built into your phone — and ask. Haven't run them and not going to right now? Answer No — that's the honest score — then run them this week and re-score.

  1. Asked an assistant "What does [your business name] in [your town] do?" — and the answer was accurate.

    If it doesn't know you, or invents details, that's a No.

  2. Asked "best [your category] near [your town]" — you appear, or you understand why a competitor does.

  3. The assistant's description of you matches your one-sentence description and recent reviews.

  4. You've done this check sometime in the last 90 days.