One rule runs through all of it. If we could not measure something, the report says so. It never fills the gap with a guess.
The grid
We build a square grid of points centred on the business, with an odd number of points along each side so the premises always sit in the middle. Grids run from 3 × 3 up to 15 × 15, depending on your plan.
- ¼ mile
- ½ mile
- 1 mile
- 2 miles
- 3 miles
- 5 miles
- 10 miles
You can also shape the area yourself in the map designer: a circle, a square, or an outline you draw around the streets you actually serve. Distances can be set in miles or kilometres. What you see in the designer is exactly what the scan checks.
Default spacing is tighter than you will find in American tools, because British towns are denser: half a mile for dense city centres, 1 mile for urban areas, 3 miles for suburbs and 7 for rural areas. Longitude is corrected at every point for how far north the business is, so grids stay square from Cornwall to Caithness.
Map zoom is fixed for each spacing bracket and stored with every scan, so results stay comparable week to week. At each point we read the top 20 results and match the business on Google's own ID for it, never on its name.
Points in the sea
Before a scan, we check every point against UK postcode data. A point with no postcode nearby, such as open water, a harbour or empty country, is left out of the scan and out of every score. Nobody searches from the Solent, so nobody should be marked down for not ranking there. If the postcode lookup is unavailable, every point is scanned as normal.
The numbers
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Top-three share | The share of grid points where the business appears in the top three, the map pack. This is the headline. |
| Average position | The average position across every point. Anywhere the business is not in the top 20 counts as 21. Lower is better, and it is the honest figure. |
| ARP | The average across only the points where the business does appear. It flatters: visible at 2 points out of 49, both in first place, scores 1.0. We show it, but never on its own. |
| Top-ten coverage | The share of points in the top ten. It tends to move before the headline does, so it shows early progress. |
| Blind spots | Groups of three or more neighbouring points where the business does not appear at all, named by compass direction. |
We keep two kinds of gap apart. Not found means we looked and the business was not in the top 20. No data means we could not get an answer for that point. The first counts against you. The second is shown as missing and is never scored as a bad ranking.
ChatGPT
We ask ChatGPT the kind of questions a customer would, built from the business's category, town and services: “best plumber in Portsmouth”, “who should I call for a boiler repair near Southsea”, and so on.
Language models rarely give the same answer twice, so a single question is noise. We ask each question three times and report how often the business was recommended, with a 95% confidence range. That is why you will see “22%, likely between 14% and 32%” rather than a bare figure that jumps about every week.
We also record which businesses were recommended instead, and which websites ChatGPT cited. That second list often matters more: if it keeps reading one directory for your trade, being missing from that directory is the real problem.
Search demand
For each search you track, we show how many people search for it each month in your area, taken from Google Ads data. Being first for a phrase nobody types is worth very little, so where demand is low, Kerbrank suggests searches that are worth tracking instead.
Your website
We fetch the business's website and read what is really there: its structured data, name, phone number and address. We then compare that with the Google profile. If we cannot load the site, the report says it could not be checked. It does not guess.
The to-do list
Findings come from the business's Google profile, the profiles of the competitors around it, the grid results, the website check and the ChatGPT answers. Each one is ranked by how serious it is, then by likely effect against effort. The report opens with one sentence and the top three jobs.
Likely effects are a guide, not a promise. They are weighted by the published local search ranking factor studies, in which primary category, distance and being open at the time of the search count for most.
If you connect Google Search Console, we read clicks and searches for your website from it to add context. The connection is optional and read-only.
Every figure carries the date it was measured. We keep the raw results of each scan, so if we add a new measure later we can work it out across your history rather than asking you to start again.
What we don't do
We don't sell citation building, we don't keep a database of scraped personal contacts, and we don't write your review replies for you. An obviously automated reply to a customer does more harm than no reply at all.
Questions about any of this? If a number cannot be explained in one sentence, it should not be on the screen, and we would like to know.