Paid plans, Starter and above
Reputation and sentiment
Reputation is the part of your brand you don't write. This category reads what other people have published about you.
What we check
- Review presence and volume on the platforms your buyers use
- Rating levels and recency of reviews
- Listings coverage and completeness
- Sentiment themes: what praise and complaints repeat
- Whether responses to reviews exist and match brand voice
Why it matters commercially
Reviews and listings are the highest-trust signals in the funnel and the ones AI systems weight most heavily when deciding whether to recommend a business.
Example findings
- No reviews collected in the last 18 months on the primary platform for the category.
- Recurring complaint theme directly contradicts the site's headline promise.
The checklist we run
9 fixed checks. Each one is graded pass, needs attention, failed or not applicable, with the fact we observed printed beside the verdict. The category score is the weighted pass rate of these checks — nothing is invented.
Reviews exist on major platforms
The brand has reviews where its buyers look.
high impact · high effort
Review volume is credible
Enough reviews to be meaningful in the category.
medium impact · high effort
Reviews are recent
Recent reviews show the business is active.
medium impact · medium effort
Ratings are healthy
Average rating is competitive for the category.
high impact · high effort
Reviews are responded to
Owner responses appear, especially on criticism.
medium impact · low effort
Listings are claimed
Key directory and map listings are claimed and complete.
medium impact · low effort
Sentiment themes are favourable
Recurring themes in reviews support the brand promise.
medium impact · high effort
The site asks for reviews
A visible route exists for happy customers to leave a review.
medium impact · low effort
Reviews are surfaced on the site
Real, attributed reviews or ratings appear on the website itself.
medium impact · low effort
Where the evidence comes from
Google Business Profile (Places)
Your listing as Google publishes it: name, address, phone, website, primary category, hours, photos, rating, review count and recent review samples.
Your connected Google Business Profile
The listing you own, read through your own connected account: verification state, categories, hours, phone numbers, address, services, photos and labels, plus review counts, average rating and whether recent reviews were answered. Read-only, and only when you have connected the account.
If a source is unreachable we mark it unavailable and exclude it. A blocked source lowers data coverage, never your score.
What the deep dive adds
On any paid plan you can run this category on its own. The deep dive re-reads the pages we retrieved with only these 9 checks in front of it, returns a verdict page by page, prints the measured data behind each finding, and orders the fixes by impact and effort. It uses one audit from your monthly allowance.
What you need to provide
your review and listing profiles Without it this category is marked Not assessed and excluded from your score rather than guessed at.
Industry brand audits
See how this section is scored for your sector: government & public sector brand audit, accounting & bookkeeping firms brand audit, architecture & design studios brand audit, automotive brand audit. Browse all industries.
Read more on this
Trust Signal Deficits in B2B Audits: Data from 300 Reviews
Aggregated research from 300 B2B brand audits reveals why mid-market websites consistently fail trust signal benchmarks and how to fix missing credibility proof.
How Technical Crawl Barriers Suppress Brand Visibility
Technical crawl barriers, rendering bottlenecks, and orphaned pages suppress brand discovery. Learn how architectural crawl issues block indexation and AI visibility.
Why Unmanaged Review Profiles Corrupt Your Brand Narrative
Unmanaged review profiles warp brand entity consensus for B2B buyers and AI search engines. Learn how neglected directories corrupt your brand narrative.
The other scored categories
Brand foundation
Reputation & social
Website experience
Paid media
Local presence
Editorial policy
Questions
Reputation & sentiment: common questions
Which review sources do you read?
Your Google Business Profile through Google Places where a listing is found, plus the review and listing profiles you supply at intake. Rating, review volume and recent review samples are shown as measured evidence.
Do you read every review we have ever received?
No, and we do not claim to. We report what the source exposes — rating, count and a recent sample — and say plainly what we could not see.
Why is this category sometimes not assessed?
Because it needs your review and listing profiles from the intake. Without them there is nothing credible to assess, so it is excluded from the score rather than scored as zero.
Which plan includes this category?
It is scored on paid plans from Starter upward. On the free scan it is shown locked, with the number of checks behind it, rather than partially guessed at.
What does the deep dive add over the overview report?
The overview scores this category in one pass over your site. The deep dive re-reads the same pages against all 9 checks on their own, returns a page-by-page verdict, prints the measured data behind each finding, and orders the fixes by impact and effort. It uses one audit from your monthly allowance.
Want it done for you?
The audit tells you what to fix. If you'd rather not do the fixing, The Branded Agency can take it from here.
Audit-holder rate
Copywriting rewrite
We take the findings from your audit and rewrite the messaging across your site: one clear promise, consistent supporting messages, and copy that search and answer systems can quote correctly.
Start the rewrite
Work with us directly
Strategic brand engagement
A strategist-led engagement that fixes the brand underneath the copy: positioning, story, personality and the message architecture every channel runs on.
Book your strategy call
The report identifies the signals. We find the causes.
Diagnosis is free. Fixing the cause is what our brand strategy and marketing services are for — see the results across our client work.