RankingLocal is built around a practical question: when someone searches for a local service, can they find a useful page, understand the business, and take a clear next step? Rankings, AI answers, website checks, and actual inquiries each reveal a different part of that journey. We should not collapse them into one score.
What a website check can tell us
We can inspect whether important pages are reachable, whether their service and location details are clear, whether structured data matches visible facts, and whether customers can contact the business. Our REAL Method groups these checks under Recognize, Evidence, Answer, and Link. It is our editorial framework, not an official ranking system or a probability of AI recommendation.
The standalone tools answer narrower questions. The Robots Check reads published crawler rules. The GEO Grader applies website rules to page signals. The AI Visibility check estimates website readiness and may include a limited Perplexity query. None of these prove that seven assistants recommended the business.
What needs separate evidence
Search Console can show whether Google reports a page as indexed and whether queries led to impressions or clicks for a defined property and period. Analytics can show visits and tracked actions. A qualified inquiry needs a business definition and a record that removes duplicates. A completed SEO task needs an actual page or configuration change and a readback.
If someone wants to know whether an AI assistant named their business, we need the exact questions, engine, date, region, repeated runs, and saved answers. A website score is a useful starting point for investigation, but it cannot answer that question on its own.
The service decision
The Free Report Preview offers a broader private website diagnosis after business-email verification. Ongoing work has its own published scope and prices, with the site and permissions confirmed before work starts. We want a customer to know which finding is a diagnostic estimate, which action was delivered, and which outcome has actually been observed.