Claim your business profile
Your Google Business Profile: claimed, completed honestly, every field matching your website.
Free stack
The $0 AI-visibility starter kit for local businesses
Every step on this page costs zero dollars. Not ‘free trial,’ not ‘free with purchase’ — zero. They are also the highest-leverage AI-visibility steps a local business can take, because assistants describe businesses from evidence, and these five steps build the evidence. Each one is verifiable: you can check it yourself when it’s done.
What this gives you
Unify your listings
Name, address, and phone identical everywhere — the single highest-leverage free step.
Earn real reviews
Ask actual customers, on independent platforms. Never fabricated, never purchased.
Publish one clear page
A single page that directly answers what you do, in sentences an assistant can quote.
Step 1: Claim and complete your Google Business Profile
Go to Google’s business profile manager and claim your business. Fill in every field honestly: the exact business name, the real street address, the real phone number, your hours, your categories, your services. Add real photos of the actual business — not stock.
Verification may take time — ours was still pending video verification as of October 6, 2026, and the profile still did its corroboration work. Claim and complete it while verification is pending; never claim a verification badge you don’t have. Cost: $0. Verify it: search your business name and confirm the profile appears with correct information.
Step 2: Make name, address, and phone identical everywhere
Open your website, your business profile, and every directory and social profile that mentions you. Compare the business name character by character. Compare the address format. Compare the phone number digit by digit. Fix every disagreement until all of them are identical — same spelling, same punctuation, same format.
This is unglamorous and it is the highest-leverage step on this page. Inconsistent identity data is the main reason search engines hedge with ‘did you mean’ and the main reason assistants misdescribe businesses (our explainer covers the mechanics). Cost: $0. Verify it: four sources side by side, zero differences.
Step 3: Ask real customers for reviews
After a completed job or a satisfied visit, ask the customer — in person, by text, by email — to leave an honest review on your Google Business Profile or another independent platform. Make it easy: tell them where, not what to write. Thank everyone who does.
Two rules with no exceptions: never write reviews yourself, and never pay for them — not directly, not through ‘review services.’ Fabricated reviews are the fastest way to teach every system that your entity can’t be trusted, and platforms remove them in waves that take legitimate reviews down too. Real customers, real words, real dates. Cost: $0. Verify it: the reviews exist, publicly, with dates, written by people you actually served.
Step 4: Publish one page that directly answers what you do
On your own website, publish — or rewrite — one page that states in plain sentences: what the business is, what it does, where it operates, and how to reach it. Write like you’re answering a customer who asked ‘what do you do?’ No marketing poetry, no jargon: direct statements an assistant can lift accurately.
Include your name, address, and phone on the page, matching step 2 exactly. If you have one page like our company facts page — checkable statements about the business, on the business’s own domain — you have the canonical source every other profile should point to. Cost: $0. Verify it: read the page aloud; if a stranger couldn’t describe your business from it, rewrite it.
Step 5: Link your owned profiles back to your site
Every social profile you maintain — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, all of them — gets two things: the website field in the bio or About section pointing to your domain, and the same business name and description as your page from step 4. Same words, same link, everywhere. Our identity-web method documents the full ordering and what ‘link back’ means field by field.
Then close the loop: your website’s structured data should acknowledge those profiles. A profile that links to you while your site never mentions it is a one-way claim; closed loops are what crawlers can verify. Cost: $0. Verify it: click every bio link and confirm it lands on your site.
The weekly fifteen-minute habit
The kit isn’t a one-time project; it’s a habit. Once a week, fifteen minutes: search your business name, open what appears, and check that the name, description, and website link still agree with your page. Fix anything that drifted — an old address on a directory, a dead bio link, a profile you forgot.
Corroboration decays when sources drift, and engines re-crawl on their own schedules. Fifteen minutes a week is what keeps a $0 kit performing like one. When the free work is done and you want it measured — the assistants probed, the evidence scored, the remaining fixes prioritized — the Position Scan starts free and takes about sixty seconds. But the scan measures the work; this page is the work.
Your next move
Done the free work? Get it measured.
Direct answers
What serious buyers ask.
Is this really $0, or is there a catch?
Really $0. Claiming a business profile, editing your listings, asking customers for reviews, publishing a page on a site you already have, and adding bio links cost nothing. The price is your time: an afternoon to build, fifteen minutes a week to maintain.
How long until this works?
No guaranteed timeline — anyone promising one is guessing. The work follows crawl and reprocessing schedules; weeks to months is typical. Do the steps, then re-check: search your name, ask the assistants, compare your listings.
Do I need a new website for step 4?
No. One clear page on the site you already have is enough to start. What matters is that the page exists on a domain you control and states the facts plainly — not that the site is new or elaborate.
What if I have no reviews yet?
Then step 3 is your starting line, not your blocker. Ask your next five satisfied customers. A small number of real, recent, detailed reviews outweighs a large number of old or vague ones — and any number of real ones outweighs fakes.
When should I pay for help?
When the free work is done and you want measurement, prioritization, or scale: probing the assistants systematically, scoring the evidence, fixing structured data properly. Pay for the measured reading — never for promises about platform behavior no vendor controls.