Google is one source. Your customers are checking eight others.

Ask an owner where their business is reviewed and the answer is almost always Google, sometimes Google and one other. Ask their customers how they checked before booking and the answer is a sequence — a search, a map listing, a specialist site, and frequently a directory the business does not know exists and has never looked at.

The gap between those two answers is where most reputation problems live, undisturbed, for years.

The trade decides the platform

This is the single most under-appreciated fact about local reputation. The platforms that matter are not a general list with Google at the top. They are specific to what you sell, and in several trades the decisive source is not a review site at all.

• A hotel is chosen on Booking.com, Expedia and Tripadvisor, where the review is attached to a verified stay and carries far more weight than an anonymous one.
• A clinic is checked on Healthgrades, Zocdoc or a specialty directory, and increasingly on a state licensing board before anybody reads a review at all.
• A contractor is checked on Angi, the BBB and — quietly and decisively — Nextdoor, where the recommendation comes from a neighbour rather than a stranger.
• A software or B2B services firm is shortlisted on G2 and Capterra, where a single detailed negative review from a recognisable company outweighs fifty generic positives.
• A trucking or logistics firm is checked against the FMCSA safety record, which is a public database and not a review site, and which will end a deal on its own.
• A restaurant lives on Google and Yelp, but is frequently decided on OpenTable or a delivery platform where the complaint is about the packaging, not the food.

Absence is a finding

The most common thing we report on a first issue is not a bad review. It is a missing listing: a business that is genuinely good, well reviewed on Google, and entirely absent from the two directories its trade is actually shortlisted on.

Absence is worse than a mediocre presence, because it is invisible from the inside. Nothing alerts you. No number moves. You simply do not appear in a comparison that happened without you, and the customer who ran it will never contact you to explain why.

The listing fields that still decide who gets called

Once you are present, most of the remaining difference comes from a short list of fields that are unglamorous, free to fix, and wrong on a startling proportion of profiles.

1. Hours, including exceptions. The single highest-frequency public complaint we count across trades is some version of it said open and it was closed. It costs nothing to fix and generates one-star reviews about your competence.
2. Primary category. The wrong primary category removes you from the comparison entirely, and it is one dropdown.
3. Service area and travel radius. Wrong or absent on most trade profiles, and it decides which searches you appear in at all.
4. Photographs with dates. A profile whose newest photograph is four years old reads as a business that may have closed.
5. Response rate and recency. Not the content of the replies — the visible fact that somebody is there. An unanswered negative review from last month is read as agreement.

How to audit this in an afternoon

Write down the three platforms your trade is actually shortlisted on — not the ones you have accounts with. Open each one in a private window and search for what you sell in the town you sell it in, exactly as a customer would. Note where you appear, where you do not, and what a stranger would conclude from the first screen.

That exercise takes about two hours and finds more than most reputation software does, once. The reason it is worth putting on a schedule rather than doing once is that every one of those pages changes without telling you, and the version a customer sees next month is not the one you looked at.