Published methodology · SS-VIS-1.0
How the Visibility Score is built.
Studio & Search uses a point-in-time, evidence-backed review. The score describes the business, market, questions, platforms, and date shown in the report. It is not a universal ranking, traffic forecast, or promise of future placement.
The nine weighted categories
Website foundation
Indexability, page structure, service clarity, structured data, mobile readiness, and crawl access.
Google organic discovery
Observed presence for the locked commercial-intent question set in the defined market.
Google Maps and local
Business-profile completeness, consistency, proximity context, reviews, and observed local-pack presence.
AI assistant discovery
Observed answers across the named assistants, with direct, secondhand, missing, and pending states kept separate.
Directory consistency
Name, address, phone, category, service, and URL consistency across relevant public sources.
Authority and citations
Independent, relevant sources that identify the business, expertise, service area, or reputation.
Reputation
Review volume, rating, recency, response coverage, and recurring customer themes.
Competitor position
Like-for-like comparison with named competitors using dated sources and the same question set.
Conversion readiness
The clarity and completeness of the path from discovery to inquiry or purchase.
Question-set lock
Before the first comparable visibility run, Studio & Search locks the commercial-intent buyer questions, named platforms, service area, and methodology version. Later runs are marked non-comparable whenever that set changes. Non-comparable runs remain visible, but they are not presented as an improvement or decline against the prior baseline.
Evidence standard
Every material observation must identify the source, observation time, result state, and an immutable SHA-256 evidence fingerprint. Pending, queued, blocked, and unverified checks do not count as found or missing. Sources can change after capture; the fingerprint and excerpt preserve what was reviewed.
Scoring
Each category awards observed points up to its published weight. The overall score is the sum of earned category points divided by the 100 available points. When a category cannot be observed reliably, the report identifies the limitation instead of inventing a result.
Quality control
A monthly report cannot be published as quality-approved until a reviewer confirms the locked question set, recalculates the score, samples the cited evidence, and checks that narrative claims match the recorded work and observations.
Score bands
75–100: Strong. The business has a comparatively complete and discoverable foundation. 50–74: Needs work. Meaningful visibility exists, but material gaps are present. 0–49: At risk. Important discovery signals are missing, inconsistent, or not verified.
Versioning
SS-VIS-1.0 is the first public version of this scoring standard. Reports retain the methodology version used at the time of publication. A future scoring change will receive a new version and will not be presented as directly comparable without recalculation.
Effective September 5, 2026 · Questions: info@studioandsearch.com