Begin with risk, not a raw accuracy percentage
A business listings audit compares public location information with an approved source of truth. The useful output is not simply the number of mismatched fields. It is a prioritised record of issues that could send customers to the wrong place, prevent contact, misrepresent availability, or weaken control of a profile.
Prepare the source record
Confirm the location list before inspecting publishers. Include active, temporarily closed, permanently closed, relocated, and soon-to-open locations. Record alternate names and previous addresses so that old profiles can be identified rather than mistaken for unrelated businesses.
Audit in four layers
1. Customer-critical fields
Check operational status, address, map pin, phone number, website, and opening hours first. Errors here can directly interrupt a visit or enquiry.
2. Discovery fields
Review primary category, secondary categories, services, attributes, business description, and relevant department information. These fields help platforms understand what the location is and when it is a suitable result.
3. Ownership and verification
Confirm that the organisation controls priority profiles through durable company accounts. Record verification state, primary owner, additional managers, and recovery options. A perfectly accurate profile is still risky if access depends on a former employee or agency account.
4. Duplicates and legacy profiles
Search by business name, phone number, address, previous name, and previous location. Label each duplicate by type: exact duplicate, former location, department, practitioner, service-area business, or unrelated result. The resolution differs for each case.
Use a severity framework
Classify each issue as critical, high, medium, or low. A false closure or wrong address is critical. A missing secondary category may be high or medium depending on the business. Minor punctuation differences are often low risk when the meaning is unambiguous.
This prevents teams from spending hours chasing cosmetic consistency while serious ownership and customer-access problems remain unresolved.
Record evidence and resolution
For every material issue, save the observed value, approved value, publisher URL, screenshot or retrieval date, severity, owner, and next action. Track whether the correction was submitted, accepted, rejected, or reverted later.
The audit is complete only when it creates a resolution queue and a repeatable monitoring baseline.