Online presence audit and fix
Google ranks you.
AI describes you.
Those are two different jobs and you need both. Your listings, your metadata, your location pages and your reviews still decide whether you rank — and now a second machine reads all of it and tells your customer, in a sentence, who you are and whether to call you.
I check everything either one of them can see about your business, show you the dated screenshots, and then fix what’s wrong. The checking part is free.
Two things just happened: a shortlist got built without you on it, and somebody’s hours got stated wrongly with total confidence. Both are fixable.
Why now, and not in two years
You’ve already lived
through this twice.
Nothing about this is new. It’s the third time the same thing has happened to local business, and the pattern hasn’t changed once.
The late nineties — you needed a website
Plenty of good companies waited, because the phone was ringing fine and the whole thing looked like a fad for people with too much time. They spent the next decade paying somebody to catch them up.
The twenty-tens — you needed the map listing
Correct hours, real photos, a service list, reviews you actually asked for. The ones who set it up early still outrank the ones who got to it in 2019, and both of them do the same quality of work.
Now — you need to be legible to a machine that talks
Your customer asks an assistant what a service like theirs costs and who’s worth calling. It answers from whatever it can piece together about you. Same choice as the other two: get it right early and cheaply, or pay somebody later to undo years of it.
It doesn’t matter how you feel about AI. Your customers are already using it to decide who to call.
Where the work actually is
Two questions.
Two different machines.
Here’s the part most people selling AI panic have backwards, and it’s worth knowing before anybody takes your money.
“hot tub repair near me”
The local pack still owns this one. An AI Overview shows on roughly 15% of these searches; the map pack shows on 93%. Your listing and your rankings still matter enormously, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling you something. Whitespark
“how much should this cost, and who should I hire?”
An AI Overview shows on roughly 92% of research questions like this one. It happens one step before the near-me search, and it’s where the shortlist gets built — before your name is ever typed. Whitespark
You’re not losing the search. You’re losing the sentence that decides who gets searched for.
Of AI answers about small businesses contain a false fact — against 32% for large firms. The smaller you are, the less there is out there to check you against, so one wrong page carries more weight. Searchable, July 2026
What we’re actually looking for
Three ways this
goes wrong.
You’re not grading the writing. There are exactly three failure modes, and any one of them is worth an evening of your time.
Wrong
It states a false fact. Wrong hours, wrong service area, a service you dropped two years ago, a price you don’t charge. Delivered with total confidence, which is what makes it expensive.
Absent
You never come up. Somebody asks who to hire in your own town and your name isn’t in the answer. That’s not a ranking problem — it’s a described-well-enough-to-be-recommended problem.
Confused
It answers about you using a competitor’s facts, or merges two companies with similar names. Rarer, and the worst one to leave sitting.
The part you can’t do from a search box
Then I go looking
for the skeletons.
The scorecard is the first sweep — it catches what’s on the surface, and you can run it yourself tonight. The rest of the audit is me going through the places nobody thinks to look, because that’s where the credibility problems actually live. Four real ones, from real audits:
A website we’d retired years earlier
Not linked from anywhere, no URL in circulation, effectively invisible to us — and an assistant surfaced it anyway. It quoted prices we’d stopped charging and contradicted our live site on what we offer and where. That was my own company, and it had been undercutting our credibility for months.
Two different phone numbers
Same business, listed with two different numbers across separate directories. Both technically ours at some point. Neither the machines nor a careful customer could tell which one was current.
Search Console never set up
A client’s site had been live for years with no Search Console at all. Google had been trying to tell her about problems that whole time and had nowhere to send the message.
Every image mislabelled
Alt text wrong on every photo on the site. It reads as a small thing until you realise it’s one of the few places you get to say, in plain words, what a picture is actually of.
None of those show up in a scorecard, and none of them would show up in a generic AI-visibility report either. You find them by going through a business the way a suspicious customer would — which is the whole job.
The Front Porch Sweep
Find out. Fix it.
Then check again.
One pass over everything either machine can see: what AI says about you, what search says about you, and every place the two disagree.
The Answer Test, and the deep sweep
Eight real buying questions run across five AI engines, logged out, with dated screenshots — then the part above: retired pages, duplicate listings, conflicting numbers, directories you forgot about, anything saying something about you that you didn’t authorise.
A Porch Score, and the fix list
One baseline number across six sections, and a plain fix list sorted Now / Next / Later, split into what I do and what you do. Nothing on it is a guess — every finding traces back to a screenshot.
The work, actually done
Metadata, location pages, headings, redirects, Search Console, review placement, alt text, broken forms, dead click-to-call links, booking links that go nowhere, wrong hours. Then a punch list: page speed, rich results, every form submitted as a test, every phone link tapped on a real phone.
A re-test at 90 days
Same eight prompts, same five engines, fresh sessions, dated screenshots, scored against your original baseline. Either the number moved or it didn’t, and you get to see which.
$1,500, once. Not a retainer, and nothing you have to buy afterwards.
Start before you spend anything
Score yourself first.
Free, and nothing’s gated.
Eight questions to ask AI about your own business, then a twenty-question scorecard that gives you a number out of a hundred and names the one thing to fix first. No form in front of the questions. If it comes back clean, you’re in better shape than most and you can stop thinking about this.
These are the same eight questions I start the paid audit with. The difference is what happens next: five engines with dated screenshots, six sections scored properly, the deep sweep for everything the scorecard can’t see, and then the fixing.
Where this came from
I run a service company.
Mine got audited first.
My husband and I own Innovo Spa — hot tub and swim spa concierge service across Michigan and South Florida. Every process I sell got run against our own business before it got sold to anybody, which is how I know what to look for and roughly where it’s hiding.
Straight answer on those last two: they’re operations findings, not search results. I include them because it’s the same job. Most of what’s broken in a service business is something nobody has counted or checked lately — and what the internet says about you is the one almost nobody checks at all.
What it costs
One price. Published,
so you can do the math.
The Front Porch Sweep
Where everyone startsThe Answer Test across five engines with dated screenshots, the deep sweep for retired pages and conflicting listings, your Porch Score across six sections, the fix list, the fixes actually made, the punch list, and the re-test at ninety days. What’s in it.
There are steps after this one — there usually are, once I’m inside and can see what’s actually costing you money. But nobody needs to decide that today, and I’d rather quote it when I know what I’m quoting on.
Why the audit comes first
I fixed how people saw us
before I fixed the phone.
Call the number on this page and you’ll get Stella. She’s an AI receptionist I built for Innovo — she picks up, pulls the customer record, works out what the job is, and books it. She runs our phones today, and yes, you can have one.
But she came second, and deliberately. While I was busy making sure we answered faster, a retired website was quoting old prices to anyone who asked, and two different phone numbers were sitting in two different directories. A better-answered phone doesn’t help when the version of you people find is wrong — or when the number they call isn’t the one that rings.
So: front porch first. If the phone turns out to be your real problem too, we’ll get to it — but I’d rather find that out from inside your business than guess at it from a sales page.
Straight answers
The five questions
I actually get asked.
Is AI actually sending anyone customers yet?
Not the way the map pack does, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Near-me searches still run through the local pack roughly 93% of the time, which is exactly why the audit covers your rankings and listings too. What’s changed is the question one step earlier — “what should this cost and who should I call” — where an AI answer shows up about 92% of the time and quietly builds the shortlist. That part is cheap to fix now and expensive to fix in three years.
Is this an AI thing or an SEO thing?
Both, because they read the same material. Correct hours, real location pages, clean metadata, consistent listings and honest reviews are what made you rank in 2019 and they’re what a machine reads to describe you in 2026. The difference is that a wrong fact used to cost you a position and now it gets repeated to a customer as though it were true.
Can I just do this myself?
The first sweep, yes, and I’d rather you did — the eight questions and the scorecard are free and ungated, no email in front of them. What you’re paying me for is the rest: five engines with dated screenshots, six sections scored, the retired pages and duplicate listings you don’t know exist, the fixes actually made, and a re-test at ninety days against your baseline.
What if I score well?
Then don’t buy this yet. Run the same eight questions again in ninety days, because hours change and service lists change, and spend the fifteen hundred on something that’s actually broken.
I run more than a couple of locations. Is this still for me?
Probably not this page. Three or more locations, a franchise system, or a public agency is Stella Implementation — same owner, same standard, built for buyers with locations rather than a single operation.
Start with the free one
Ask it about your
own business.
Ten minutes, no email, and you’ll know whether you have a problem. If you do, I’ll fix it for $1,500. If you don’t, I’ll tell you to keep your money for now. Stella answers the phone and books the time — I don’t keep office hours worth relying on.