The rules behind the numbers.

Plenty of businesses share a name. In this state alone, two roofing companies with the same name sit about two hundred miles apart. Quote an owner a review count that belongs to someone else and the conversation is over, because it's the one error they can spot in a second.

So the tool refuses to guess. If two results could plausibly be your business, it says it couldn't tell and a person decides. It rejects a match in a different state even when the name agrees, and it rejects a listing whose name is missing a word from the one we searched, because that missing word is often the whole difference between two real companies.

The town matters as much as the name. A search that comes back empty only tells you about the town you asked about, so your town comes from the address on your own listing, never from wherever we first came across your name.

Why it matters to you: every number in your report is attributed to your business, not a lookalike, and "we couldn't find a profile" is never sent to you until a person has checked it by hand.

Google doesn't always show the same things. Some days it serves the panel that carries a business's review count, some days it doesn't, for reasons the business can't influence. A tool that reads "not shown" as "none" will tell a business with 350 reviews that reviews are its biggest problem.

That's the worst thing a measurement can do: invent a zero. The owner knows it's wrong, and from then on nothing else in the report gets believed.

So when we can't read a number, it scores neutrally and the report says so in plain words, with the exact search we ran so you can check it yourself. On one real audit that was the difference between 50 and 64. A profile we genuinely couldn't find still scores zero, because that's a real finding.

Why it matters to you: when your report says "Unverified", it means we couldn't see it, not that it isn't there. "We looked and it isn't there" versus "we couldn't see" is the whole job.