The free scan

What it does

The free scan takes a domain, asks the assistants ten buying questions about your category, and reports how often the answers named you, which brands were named instead, and which sources those answers cited.

It is a single measurement, taken once. That is enough to tell you whether you have a problem, and not enough to tell you whether you are fixing it.

If you sell in one city

The city field is optional and it changes the questions, not the assistants. Leave it empty and the questions are national ones. Fill it in and most of them name your city, the way a person there actually asks.

This matters more than it sounds. A clinic, a law firm or a restaurant loses every national question to chains with a hundred locations, so a national scan of a local business reports a low number that says nothing about it. The question that decides whether such a business exists for an assistant is the one with a place in it.

A few questions stay without a city on purpose. A local business can surface in an answer to a question asked without a place - and if it never does, that is worth seeing.

What it is not

• Not a trend. One measurement cannot separate a real gap from a bad draw. The same question tomorrow may name you.
• Not your questions. The scan guesses the category from your website. A paid project tracks the questions you choose.
• Not all assistants. The scan uses 3; a project tracks up to 5.

The email

The scan needs a work address - one on your company's domain - and one ticked box. The report goes to that address, and you may get a single follow-up 7 days later with a 10% discount code valid for 14 days.

That is one message, not a mailing list, and every one of them unsubscribes in a click.