How WebsiteGlue scores local SEO and local AI, point by point

Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for a plumber in your town and you get three or four names. Customers ask that question more each year. In BrightLocal's March 2026 survey, 45% of consumers said they used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. ChatGPT led at 31%, and Google's AI Mode came second at 23%.

WebsiteGlue gives your website an AI ready score out of 100 and scores 10 of your local competitors the same way. This post lays out the math, the research behind each part, and what the tool does to help you raise it. The calculator below uses the same point values as the scanner, so you can see where your points come from before you run a scan.

Where do AI tools get local answers?

BrightLocal's Local AI Visibility Study, published September 16, 2026, tracked about 200,000 local searches across 1,300 business locations over 60 days and analyzed 1.9 million citations from ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Business websites made up 42% of the citations. Google Business Profiles made up 28.5%, and they were the largest single source for AI Mode and AI Overviews.

Two more findings from that study matter if you track AI answers:

• Google Maps mentioned a tracked business in 66% of searches. The AI tools mentioned one in 32% to 38%. AI answers name fewer businesses, so each slot is harder to win.
• When the researchers ran the same search again, the AI answers overlapped by only 20% to 33%. An AI answer is a snapshot. A business can appear on Monday and miss on Tuesday.

Google's own help page says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and that "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." It also says more reviews and positive ratings can help.

Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey asked 47 local search experts to rank 187 factors. For the Google map pack, "open at time of search" ranked 5th, a high Google rating ranked 6th, review count ranked 9th and review recency ranked 11th. For AI search, the experts found that 3 of the top 5 factors were citations, meaning mentions of your business on other sites.

Your Google profile and your website do most of the work. The AI ready score weighs both.

Try the calculator

Pick an example or set your own numbers. The score, the part bars and the fix list update as you go.

The "Strong profile, thin site" example scores 80. Its Google profile scores a perfect 100, worth all 40 local points. It still gives up 20 points because the site answers one customer question and has no FAQ. The "Neglected listing" example scores 37. Its newest review is close to a year old, it has no photos of its own, and its site has no business schema and no answers.

The five parts of the AI ready score

Local presence: 40 points

This part is your Google Business Profile score multiplied by 0.4. The profile score runs to 100 and has four parts worth 25 points each.

• Rating: 4.7 stars or higher earns 25. The points step down at 4.5, 4.2, 4.0 and 3.5.
• Review count: 300 reviews or more earns 25. The steps sit at 150, 75, 40, 20, 10 and 1.
• Review recency: a review in the last 30 days earns 25. A newest review older than a year earns nothing.
• Upkeep: hours on Google earn 7, a phone number 4, a linked website 4, and three or more photos you posted yourself earn 10.

Rating, review count and recency get equal weight because Whitespark's experts ranked all three in the top 11 for the map pack. Hours get 7 of the upkeep points because a profile without hours can't answer an "open now" search.

Answers questions: 25 points

Headings written as customer questions earn up to 14 points: 5 for one, 10 for three, 14 for six or more. A visible FAQ section earns 5. FAQ schema on those answers earns 6.

Google discontinued the Q&A section on Business Profiles and retired its API on November 3, 2025. Google replaced it with Ask Maps, a Gemini feature that launched in March 2026. BrightLocal reports that Ask Maps builds its answers from profile details, reviews and websites. Answers to your customers' questions now have to live on your own site. Whitespark's experts ranked "FAQs on service pages" 43rd for AI search visibility, a new factor in the 2026 survey.

Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026. FAQ schema no longer adds the dropdown answers under your Google listing. WebsiteGlue still scores it because it labels each question and answer in a format any crawler can parse.

Facts AI can check: 15 points

Local business schema earns 7 points. A plainer Organization schema earns 3. A phone number on the site earns 3, a street address earns 2, and a site phone that matches your Google listing earns 3 more.

Google's LocalBusiness structured data guide requires an address and recommends a phone number and opening hours. When your site and your Google profile list different phone numbers, an AI tool has two answers to one question. The match check catches that.

Readable by AI: 10 points

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may read. WebsiteGlue checks eight AI crawlers. Allowing all of them earns 6 points. Blocking only the training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and Google-Extended) earns 3. Blocking a search crawler (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot) earns nothing.

The AI companies spell out the cost. OpenAI says "sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results." Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot to appear in its results.

The other 4 points go to sites that put their words in the page HTML. Vercel's crawler study found that "none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript," with Gemini (through Googlebot) and AppleBot as the exceptions. If your site builds its text with JavaScript after the page loads, the ChatGPT and Perplexity crawlers see little or none of it.

Clear and current: 10 points

Naming your service or city in the page title or main heading earns 4. A homepage with 400 or more words earns 3. A low staleness score earns the last 3.

Staleness is its own WebsiteGlue score. It counts signs of a site nobody looks after: an old copyright year, a sitemap with no recent changes, a missing mobile viewport tag, retired code. If the footer says 2019, a customer has reason to wonder whether the prices on the page still hold.

How does WebsiteGlue score local SEO?

The AI ready score is one of five scores WebsiteGlue gives every business in a scan:

1. Google profile: the 100-point profile score described above
2. AI ready: the score in the calculator
3. Staleness: signs the site has gone untouched
4. SEO effort: service and city keywords, titles, headings and inner pages
5. Mobile: whether the site works on a phone

A scan pulls the businesses Google returns for your industry and city, audits the first 10 with working websites, and runs more than 50 checks on each. WebsiteGlue then sorts each competitor into a tier: strong rival, wins on reviews, mid pack or easy to outrank. You see who leads your market, who wins on reviews alone, and which competitors have weak sites.

What WebsiteGlue does to raise your score

A score only helps if you know what to change. Paid plans (AI Insights and Pro) add the detail behind each number.

• Fixes ranked by points. WebsiteGlue lists the changes that would add the most points to your AI ready score, with the gain next to each one, the same way the calculator's fix list works.
• A live AI check. WebsiteGlue asks Perplexity the question a customer would ask, such as "best plumbers in Richmond, VA," and shows whether it named you and who it named instead.
• What helps and what holds back each business. You see the strengths and gaps for every competitor, so you can copy what the leader does.
• The questions each site answers. WebsiteGlue lists the question headings on every site in the scan. Your competitors' questions make a good starting list for your own FAQ.
• AI crawler access for every site. You see which sites block which crawlers, including yours.
• Your own listing, found. If your business doesn't show in the first page of Google results, WebsiteGlue runs its own lookup for your listing, so you don't lose your local points by mistake.
• A progress tracker. Scan the same site twice and WebsiteGlue charts your scores over time. Paying users can switch on a monthly rescan of their site, and it doesn't count against the scan allowance.
• CSV export and shared reports on Pro, for consultants who report to clients.

The free scan shows all five scores, the tiers and your AI ready part scores. It gives you enough to see where you stand before you pay for anything.

What the score can't tell you

WebsiteGlue can't promise an AI tool will name you. AI tools draw on many sources, and repeat searches in the BrightLocal study overlapped by a third or less. A higher score means your profile and site give AI tools more to work with.

The live check asks one engine, Perplexity. ChatGPT and AI Mode may name different businesses for the same question.

WebsiteGlue doesn't count your mentions on other sites, such as directories, local news and "best of" lists, even though Whitespark's experts put citations near the top for AI search. It doesn't see your Google Posts either.

The site audit reads the HTML your server sends, the same way most AI crawlers read it. If your site depends on JavaScript, WebsiteGlue sees the same thin page they do.

And each scan covers a small number of searches limited to the area you pick. A scan from another part of town, or on another day, can return a different list of competitors.