How the competitor scan is scored

You type in a website. The scan finds the businesses you are actually competing with for search traffic, pulls the same set of numbers for each of them, reads every site for the offers buyers look for, and turns all of it into one score out of 100 plus a category breakdown.

It takes about a minute and it runs on public data. Nothing is self-reported and nothing is based on what a business tells us about itself.

The competitor list is not chosen by hand and it is not the businesses you think of as rivals. It comes from organic search overlap: which other sites rank for the same searches yours ranks for, pulled from Ahrefs.

National brands get dropped. If you sell HVAC service in one metro, Home Depot ranking for “furnace repair” is not a competitor you can do anything about, and leaving it in the set would flatten every number next to it.

• Domain Rating, organic traffic, ranking keywords and referring domains, for you and for each competitor
• Paid search activity: whether the site shows paid keywords or paid traffic
• A crawl of each homepage for five offer signals, ad pixels, and review counts
• The keyword gap: searches competitors rank for that you do not
• A diff against your last scan, if you have run one before

Each category is scored 0 to 100 on its own, then weighted into the overall number. Reviews are only scored when review counts can actually be read from the sites, and when they cannot, the remaining weights are renormalized so the overall score is never penalized for data we could not get.

The five offers

Financing, free estimate, 24/7 or emergency availability, online booking, and a guarantee. These are the five things a buyer scans a service website for before calling, and a gap only counts against you if a competitor is already showing it. If nobody in your market promotes financing, not promoting financing is not a weakness.

Why advertising is scored in three steps and not on a curve

Paid search data from Ahrefs is reliable. A Meta or Google ad pixel sitting in someone’s page source is a softer signal: it means the tag is installed, not that money is moving through it today. So the category answers a yes-or-no question rather than pretending to measure spend we cannot see.

The same bands apply to each category, which is what makes the breakdown useful: a B overall sitting on an F in offers tells you where to start.

The score is relative to your competitor set, not to a national average. This is the thing most people read wrong. A 50 does not mean an average business. It means mid-pack among the specific sites that compete with you for search traffic.

That has two consequences worth knowing. A strong business in a competitive metro can score lower than a weak business in a quiet one. And the score moves when your competitors move, not only when you do, which is why the scan diffs against your last run instead of showing one number in isolation.

Search visibility carries 45% because it is the category with the most room in it. Offers and advertising are close to binary: you either show financing or you do not. Traffic and authority are where the distance between two businesses in the same market actually shows up, and where it takes the longest to close.

Stated plainly, because a score with unknown edges is worth less than one with known edges.

• Ad spend. We can tell you a competitor appears to be advertising. We cannot tell you how much they spend or what it returns.
• Reviews that only live on Google. Review counts are read from websites. A business with 400 Google reviews and no review widget on their site reads as having none.
• Anything behind a login. Booking systems, portals and gated pricing are invisible to a crawler.
• Offline demand. A company running on 20 years of referrals can look weak here and be fine.
• Brand searches. Organic traffic includes people searching for you by name, which inflates visibility for established names and understates newer ones.