Methodology
How the Sweep Score works
Every weight, what it is worth, and why. A score nobody can check is a score nobody should trust.
The Sweep Score is out of 100. Those 100 points cover the factors a Business Profile tool can actually move — not everything that decides where you rank.
It is not a prediction of where you rank
Google says it ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. It publishes no weights for them, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Distance from the person searching cannot be changed by any tool. Your website’s content, your backlinks and your citations are real ranking factors that this product does not touch.
We leave all of that out on purpose. A score that includes things we cannot change would move when you change nothing and stay flat when you fix something, which is worse than having no score.
Your listing — 74 points
What Google can read on the profile itself, and what a customer sees when they find you.
- Primary category16 points
- The single strongest Business Profile signal in every published survey. Google matches a search to a category before it considers anything else about the listing.
- Phone, website and description14 points
- A listing missing contact details is both a weaker match and a worse experience. These are also the fields a stranger's suggested edit is most likely to change.
- Opening hours8 points
- Google filters on 'open now' and shows hours in the pack itself. A listing with none is dropped from that filter entirely.
- Photos14 points
- Listings with photos draw more clicks and direction requests, and those behaviours feed prominence. The public API stops counting at ten, so the target stops there too.
- Recent posts14 points
- A post is fresh content on the listing itself and the clearest signal that the business is currently trading. Posts expire, so recency matters more than the total ever posted.
- Details unchanged8 points
- Name, address and phone changing without the owner doing it is usually somebody else's accepted edit, and a wrong address is the fastest way to lose a listing's ranking.
Your reviews — 26 points
How many, how recent, how good, and whether anybody answers them.
- Number of reviews6 points
- Count matters, but far less than the pace: it is the one review number an established competitor will always beat a new business on, and it cannot be changed quickly.
- Review pace8 points
- The strongest review signal a business can act on this month. A steady flow reads as a business people are currently using; a large old total does not.
- Average rating6 points
- Scored from 3.0 upward, because the gap between 4.2 and 4.7 decides clicks while the gap between 1.0 and 2.0 decides nothing — a listing that far down has a different problem.
- Replying to reviews6 points
- Google's own guidance asks owners to reply, and it is the only review factor entirely inside the owner's control. Rate carries most of it, speed the rest.
Where the split comes from
The 74–26 split between listing signals and review signals follows the published industry surveys of local ranking factors, which put Business Profile signals well ahead of review signals within the part any tool can reach. Those surveys are estimates by practitioners, not numbers from Google.
The split inside each block is our own judgement. We have written the reason for every weight above rather than hiding it, so you can disagree with a specific number instead of distrusting the whole thing.
What full marks means
- Photos: 10 or more. Google’s public API stops counting there, so we stop there too rather than pretending to know your real total.
- Posts: something published in the last 7 days. The points fade to nothing by day 30, the way attention does.
- Reviews: 50 in total, and about 8 new ones a month. Pace is weighted higher than the total on purpose — a listing on 40 reviews earning four a month is doing better than one sitting on 300 earned years ago.
- Rating: scored from 3.0 up to 4.8, not from zero. The gap that decides whether somebody clicks is between 4.2 and 4.7. A listing at 1.0 has a different problem than a scoring one.
- Replies: 90% of reviews answered. Three quarters of the points are for answering at all and the rest for answering within a day.
What we do when we cannot check something
We leave it out of the total instead of scoring it zero. A listing connected this morning has no posting history and nothing to compare its details against, and marking it down for our own missing data would send you off to fix something that is not broken. Your score says how many points it was actually measured out of.
Check it yourself
The weights are served as data at /api/score/weights, open and without a login, so you can confirm this page matches what the product actually runs. The score itself is deterministic: the same listing always scores the same, so you can fix one thing and see exactly what it was worth.
Want the number without signing up? The free listing score checks the public view of any listing in about a minute.
See what your listing scores
Connect your Google Business Profile and get the breakdown, with what each fix is worth in points.