The Digital Presence Score. How we measure it, so you can trust the number.
Think of it as a credit score for how your business shows up online, with one difference: the whole method is on this page. What we measure, where the data comes from, and what each number means.
New to DPS? Start with the overview and sample scorecard.
What you control.
Things you or we can change directly. When a fix lands, the next measurement shows it.
How complete and accurate your Google Business Profile is: services, hours, photos, categories, and the product catalog.
Whether your own site says clearly what you do and where: titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, and thin pages.
How often you publish across your site, your Google profile, and social.
Whether you have claimed your listings across 40+ directories, and whether your name, address, and phone match everywhere.
Whether your bios, links, photos, and hours are consistent on every social profile.
The technical signals machines read first: robots.txt, sitemap, AI-crawler access, and share-card tags.
What the market gives you.
Built by customers and other sites, at their pace. We measure these honestly. We do not promise them.
Review volume, average rating, and recency across the platforms customers read.
Which other sites link to you, and how much those sites are trusted.
Where you are talked about on other sites, with or without a link.
Where you appear when people search for your name, and for the service you sell in your area.
Whether your audience actually responds: comments, shares, and replies relative to followers.
Why we never blend them.
A single number would be easier to quote. It would also hide the thing you need to know: which half is the problem.
Say a competitor has three times your reviews, but your Google Business Profile is complete and theirs is half empty. Averaged together, you might land on the same number. That number tells you nothing. Shown as two scores, it tells you two different stories: you are ahead on what you control, and behind on what the market has given you. Each one calls for different work.
The trade-off is real. Two numbers take a moment longer to read, and neither one alone is the full picture. We think that is the honest version.
How to read your score.
Each score runs from 0 to 100 and is read on its own. We don’t publish fixed cut-offs for labels like “broken” or “elite” yet, so we won’t claim them here.
What your audit does show: each score next to how many of its axes were actually measured, the source and date for every axis, and a ranked list of what to fix first. When we pin thresholds, they will be published on this page and noted in the changelog.
Where the data comes from, and how old it can be.
Data sources
Public sources and established data providers: your Google Business Profile, a crawl of your website, directory and review platforms, search results, and backlink data. The report lists the source for every axis next to its score, so you can check it yourself.
Freshness
Our ceiling is 14 days: data older than that is collected again before it is scored. Most sources are much fresher. Each report shows the date every axis was measured and how long any data was reused.
[NEEDS_DATA]
When we could not get real data for something, the report says so in amber instead of guessing. A missing measurement never counts as zero, and an estimate never appears as a measurement.
Same method, every time
Every axis counts equally within its score. Each audit is compared with the last one using the same method, and moves of three points or less are treated as noise. More on how we keep it honest.
DPS versions.
When the method changes, it is recorded here. Every report states which version produced it.
- A wider axis map: 46 axes in 13 categories, splitting today’s 11 axes into finer pieces (for example, AI readiness and domain trust as their own measures).
- Each new axis records which v2 axis it came from, so past audits can be compared with new ones.
- Not used in any score yet. This entry will be updated when it ships.
- Two scores, Controlled and Earned, reported side by side and never averaged into one.
- 11 axes (6 Controlled, 5 Earned), equal weight within each score, no industry multipliers.
- A coverage gate: if too few of a score’s axes can be measured, that score is not reported.
- Every axis records its source and the date it was measured. Moves of three points or less between audits are treated as noise.
- Newer signals (such as AI answer presence and review replies) are reported separately and do not count toward either score.
- First internal version. Scored a handful of components from data our SEO audit already collected, so a real number existed before dedicated collectors were built.
See both of your scores.
The audit gives you your Controlled and Earned scores, every axis with its source, and a ranked list of what to fix first.