Free diagnostic — the identity instrument
Local Presence Checker
Does the internet agree about who you are?
Your Google Business Profile says one thing. Your website says another — or says nothing machines can read. The Local Presence Checker reads both live and compares them field by field — business name, phone, address, website link, and the structured data underneath — with receipts for every finding. Free, three checks a day.
The check is the instrument. If it finds disagreement, the A.R.C. Report is the full diagnosis behind it — also free to request.
Five fields, two sources
Your Google Business Profile and your homepage, read live on every check and compared field by field. Five identity facts, one verdict per field.
Receipts, not opinions
Every finding shows what each source actually said, side by side, so you can verify the disagreement yourself before you change anything.
Reads like a machine
The check reads your site's static HTML the way most machines do first — visible text, tap-to-call links, and JSON-LD — not the page a person sees after scripts run.
What is a local presence check?
A local presence check is a field-by-field comparison of the identity facts the internet holds about your business, starting with the two records at the center of the question: your Google Business Profile and your own website. It answers one narrow question with evidence — do those two sources agree on who you are, where you are, and how to reach you?
The question sounds trivial until the two answers differ. A business is not one record online; it is a set of records that are supposed to describe the same thing. When the profile carries an old tracking number, or the website's footer still shows the address from two moves ago, or the name reads one way on the profile and another way in the page source, a machine assembling those records has to reconcile a contradiction — and it has no reason to prefer the version you meant.
The industry shorthand for the core of it is NAP — name, address, phone. Keeping those facts identical everywhere a machine looks is the unglamorous floor of local SEO, and it fails quietly. Nobody notices a disagreement the way they notice a bad review. The dead phone number is the classic case: every surface looks fine, the profile looks fine, and the calls go to a line nobody answers.
What a presence check is not: it is not a ranking report, it is not a directory crawl, and it is not a full audit. It is the first reading — the fast, free way to learn whether the two records that matter most are telling the same story, before you spend anything fixing the wrong layer.
What does the Local Presence Checker read?
Two sources, read live on every check: your Google Business Profile — the highest-confidence match for the business name and city you enter — and your homepage's static HTML. Five identity fields are compared across them, and every comparison ships with the receipt: what each source actually said.
| Field | On your Google Business Profile | On your website |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | The name on the matched profile — the version customers see on Google. | The name in your visible text and in your JSON-LD, if you carry it. |
| Phone | The number the profile publishes. | Visible numbers and tel: tap-to-call links — the forms a machine can actually parse and dial. |
| Address | The profile's listed address or service area. | The address as printed in your static HTML and as declared in structured data. |
| Website link | The URL the profile points customers to. | The site the check just read — whether the profile and the destination actually meet. |
| Structured data | The profile is itself a structured record machines query directly. | The JSON-LD in your page source — your site's machine-readable statement of who you are. |
Just as deliberate is what it does not read. It does not crawl directories — Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, or the data aggregators; that multi-directory picture is what the deeper audit is for. And it does not run your JavaScript. If your contact information only appears after scripts execute, the check reports it as not machine-readable in your static HTML — in the tool's own words, a readability finding, not an accusation that the information is missing. The homepage is the surface most machines meet first, which is why machine-readable contact facts are a launch item under website design rather than a patch afterward.
Why does it matter whether they agree?
Because the sources that recommend you check each other. Google's own guidelines ask a business to represent itself as it is consistently represented in the real world — and they name your website, alongside your storefront and stationery, as a surface your profile's name should match.
That is not our framing; it is Google's. Its guidelines for representing your business state that your name should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, and stationery, and that for the best results you should represent the business as it is consistently represented and recognized in the real world. Google, Guidelines for representing your business. The profile and the website are not two independent listings — one is used to sanity-check the other.
The same agreement is the floor of entity work. A machine deciding whether to recommend you first has to be sure you exist as one distinct business — same name, same number, same place, everywhere it looks. That confirmation problem is the subject of Entity Authority Building, and a two-source disagreement is the earliest, cheapest place to catch it: if Google's record and your own record differ, every downstream system inherits the confusion.
And the audience for these facts is no longer just a search crawler. The assistants answering "who should I call" draw on the same public record — the profile, the page, the markup — a pattern we see run after run in AI Visibility Score reports, which list the sources the engines read while answering. A wrong number on the winning surface does not read as a small inconsistency to the customer who dials it. It reads as a business that cannot be reached.
Run your presence check
Enter your business name and city exactly as they appear on your Google Business Profile — profiles often list the metro city rather than the suburb you would name yourself, and the check matches on those two fields. Capitalization, punctuation, and LLC don't matter. Three free checks a day, with the receipts on screen.
This instrument reads the identity layer. Its sibling, the AI Visibility Score, reads the layer above it — whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually recommend you. Run both and you have the two readings that matter: are the machines sure who you are, and do they say your name.
How do you fix what the check finds?
Field by field, at the source that is wrong — and then at the sources the check deliberately does not read, because a disagreement between your two most-trusted records rarely stops there. Each fix below maps to a finding the report can hand you.
Fix the profile
When the profile side is wrong — an old number, a stale category, an address Google formatted into something you don't recognize — Google Business Profile optimization corrects the record customers see first and keeps it corrected through Google's own edits and suggestions.
Fix the machine layer
When the website side fails — the number lives in an image, the address only exists after scripts run, the JSON-LD is absent or contradicts the visible text — that is technical SEO work: making the facts a person can see into facts a machine can read.
Widen past two sources
The check reads Google and your site. The rest of the record — Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, the data aggregators — is directory optimization: finding every listing that describes you, and making them agree with the two you just fixed.
Guard the reputation layer
Identity facts decide whether machines can find you; reviews decide whether the recommendation is worth having. A reputation management program keeps the record that sits next to your name as accurate as the name itself.
Feed the AI layer
A confirmable identity is the entry ticket to being named by AI assistants at all. The AI SEO work builds on exactly the facts this check verifies — which is why a failed field here is worth fixing before anything more ambitious.
Keep it from drifting
Agreement is a state, not an achievement. A rebuilt page, a plugin update, or a phone-system change can silently reopen the gap, which is why website maintenance re-checks the identity facts on a schedule instead of trusting last quarter's reading.
What we decline to tell you from one check
We will not tell you your rankings from this check. It does not measure position anywhere; it measures agreement between two records, and a business can rank well with a quiet disagreement costing it calls, or rank poorly with a spotless record.
We will not quote a revenue number from a disagreement. There is no published conversion relationship between a consistent record and closed jobs, and anyone who attaches a dollar figure to a NAP fix is estimating. What the check supports is narrower and more useful: which field disagrees, on which source, with the receipt attached.
We will not turn one reading into a verdict on your marketing. Two sources out of agreement is a finding worth fixing this week; it is not a diagnosis of everything else. The standard of evidence we hold ourselves to is the one in our case studies — the record before the work, and the record after it.
Evidence note. The fields compared, the two sources read, the daily free-check limit, and the name-and-city match method described on this page are taken from the tool's own on-screen copy, which any user can read before running a check. Statements about Google's guidelines and documentation are linked at the claim and listed below. This page carries no industry benchmark, no ranking-factor weighting, and no revenue estimate for consistency, because no issuing authority publishes one; the absence is deliberate. The work of fixing what a check finds is scoped from the service portfolio, not from a package.
- Google Business Profile Help — Guidelines for representing your business on Google
- Google Business Profile Help — How to improve your local ranking on Google
- Google Search Central — Introduction to structured data markup
- Google Search Central — Local business (LocalBusiness) structured data
- Google Search Central — Understand JavaScript SEO basics
Straight answers
What is NAP consistency, and does Google actually care?
NAP is name, address, phone — the three identity facts every record about your business is supposed to state identically, with your website link and structured data as the modern additions. Google's own local documentation says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local search results, and describes local results as based mainly on relevance, distance, and popularity — accuracy is the part of that equation entirely in your control. Google, How to improve your local ranking. The same facts feed the classic ranking work an SEO agency does, which is why the check exists as a first reading rather than an afterthought.
What does the check read on my website?
Three things, all from your homepage's static HTML: the visible text, the tel: tap-to-call links, and the JSON-LD structured data — the layer most machines read first, and the layer LLM optimization is built around. The structured-data part matters more than most operators expect: Google documents that with LocalBusiness structured data you can tell it business details directly, the kind of information that can surface in a knowledge panel when customers search for you. Google, Local business structured data. A site with no machine-readable identity is asking every machine to guess.
Is the Local Presence Checker free, and what happens to my information?
Yes — three free checks a day, no card, and the findings are yours whether or not you ever speak to us. The check itself runs on your business name, city, and website; your contact details are how the follow-up and the deeper findings are delivered, and the form's own privacy language states how the information is used, that it is never sold, and how to request deletion. What is not free is the work of fixing what the check finds, which we scope honestly from the service portfolio rather than from a package — and nothing about running a check obligates you to any of it.
Does it check Yelp, Apple Maps, or the data aggregators?
No, by design. The check reads two sources — your Google Business Profile and your own website — because those are the two records you can verify and fix fastest, and the pair Google’s own guidelines expect to agree. The multi-directory picture is what the deeper audit is for, and the wider set of listings that describe your business is its own program: the Multi-Source Citation Network work of finding every listing that describes you and bringing it into agreement. Fixing the two most-trusted records first is not a shortcut; it is the order the rest of the cleanup depends on.
My phone number is right on my site — why does the check say it isn't machine-readable?
Because visible to a person and readable by a machine are different tests. If your number is baked into an image, or only appears after JavaScript runs, a reader that consumes static HTML will not find it. Google documents that it processes JavaScript sites in three phases — crawling, rendering, and indexing — and that on some sites the initial HTML does not contain the actual content until scripts execute. Google, JavaScript SEO basics. Google eventually renders; many other machine readers do not. Putting the identity facts in plain HTML and markup is part of Technical AI Readiness — the cheapest fix on the whole list.
What is the JSON-LD structured data the check looks for?
It is your website's machine-readable statement of who you are, written in a format machines parse directly instead of inferring from your paragraphs. Google describes structured data as a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. Google, Introduction to structured data. For a local business, that means declaring your name, address, phone, and website in markup that matches your visible text — the check compares both layers, because a site whose markup contradicts its own paragraphs is disagreeing with itself. It is also the same markup layer that generative engine optimization builds on.
How is this different from the AI Visibility Score?
They read different layers of the same problem. The AI Visibility Score asks the answer engines real buyer questions and reports whether you or a competitor came back — it measures the recommendation itself, the surface that answer engine optimization exists to win. The Local Presence Checker reads the identity facts underneath: whether Google's record of you and your own record of you agree, field by field. A business can fail the identity check and still get recommended, or pass it and stay invisible — which is exactly why they are two instruments. Run both and you know whether the problem is who the machines think you are, or whether they mention you at all.
What should I fix first, and how often should I re-run the check?
Fix whichever source is wrong — the report shows you both sides of every disagreement, so the call is usually obvious: a dead number gets corrected wherever it appears, a stale address gets fixed at the source that moved, missing structured data gets added to the site. Then re-run the check to confirm the fix landed. After that, re-check quarterly, and immediately after anything that touches the record — a website rebuild, a phone-system change, a move, a rebrand. In engagements the re-check runs on a schedule and the identity layer is reported inside ASCENT™ alongside the rest of the account, because agreement is a state you maintain, not a box you tick once.
Get the receipts. Then fix the record.
Run the check, read what each source said, and decide. If the disagreement runs deeper than two sources, the A.R.C. Report is the full diagnostic behind it — the first deliverable of every engagement, free to request for qualified partners.
