The Local SEO Audit Checklist for Agency Teams

A local SEO audit earns its fee when it produces the same list of checks every time, and an artifact for every check. Not an opinion — a URL, a validator result, a dated test record. This checklist covers six areas, in order: the business details Google already holds, technical eligibility, on-page targeting, structured data, visibility inside AI answers, and the handoff document. It is written so that any member of an agency team can run it and hand back the same shape of output.

What should a local SEO audit actually check?

Six areas, in this order:

1. Business details Google already holds about the client.
2. Technical eligibility — can the pages be indexed and shown at all.
3. On-page targeting — does each service and location have a page that answers for it.
4. Structured data — is the machine-readable layer present and valid.
5. AI answer visibility — what first-party data exists, and what a repeatable test looks like.
6. The handoff — the document the client actually receives.

The order is not cosmetic. Areas 1 and 2 are prerequisites, and for one surface Google states the hard version of that itself. In its guide to optimizing for generative AI features (updated July 2026), a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. That sentence is about Google Search, including its generative AI features. It is not a statement about how other assistants crawl, retrieve or cite, and this checklist does not stretch it into one — for any other assistant, treat indexability as a working assumption to verify against that provider's own documentation. Either way, auditing a page's wording before you know it can be served at all spends the hour in the wrong place.

How do you audit the business details Google already holds?

Start with what Google has, not with what the website says. Google's documentation on establishing business details names the mechanisms directly: claim the business through Google Business Profile, verify the site in Search Console, update the knowledge panel as a verified representative, and add structured data. It also notes that Google's algorithms find information such as a site's name, contact information and social profiles that is publicly available across the web — which means part of the client's entity record is assembled from sources neither of you controls.

Check and record:

• Is the Business Profile claimed and verified, and who holds the login? Agencies inherit this problem constantly: the profile exists, and nobody at the client remembers who set it up.
• Is the business name, address and phone number identical on the site, on the Business Profile, and on the directories the client already appears in? Write down each mismatch with the URL where you found it.
• Is the Search Console property verified, and does the agency have access?
• Which category does the Business Profile use, and does it match what the client actually sells?

Artifact: a table of every place the entity appears, the value found there, and whether it matches. This is often the single most useful page of a local audit, and it typically takes about an hour.

How do you check that the site is technically eligible?

Run Google's URL Inspection tool against the pages that matter — the home page, each service page, each location page — and record the result for each. You are looking for one answer per page: is this URL indexed, and is it eligible to be shown with a snippet.

Check and record:

• Indexed status per page, from URL Inspection.
• Anything in robots.txt that blocks a page you want indexed.
• Any noindex left over from a staging site. It is easy to ship and invisible to everyone who is not looking for it, which is why it belongs on a checklist rather than in someone's memory.
• Canonical tags pointing where you expect.
• Whether the page renders its main content without JavaScript that Google may not execute.

Artifact: one URL Inspection result per audited page, dated.

How do you audit on-page targeting without turning it into an opinion?

Keep this area mechanical, because it is the one that most easily degenerates into taste. For each service the client sells and each area they serve, ask one question: is there a page whose main content answers for that service in that area? Then record whether that page exists, and if it does, whether its title and first heading say what the page is about in the words a person would use.

Resist the temptation to rewrite copy inside an audit. An audit says what is missing; a content plan says what to write. Mixing them makes the document impossible to price.

Google's guidance here is less prescriptive than most agencies expect. Its advice for generative AI features is to create content people find unique, compelling and useful, to avoid commodity content that adds little insight, and to organize content in a way that helps readers. There is no word count to hit and no formula to apply.

What structured data belongs on a local business site?

Less than most audit templates claim, and the templates are usually out of date. The minimum that Google documents for a local business is LocalBusiness markup, which requires exactly two properties: name and address. Google's guidance adds two rules worth writing into the audit: use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible — its own examples are Restaurant, DaySpa and HealthClub — and, because LocalBusiness is a sub-type of Organization, follow the fields for Organization as well.

Validate with the two tools Google names for this: the Rich Results Test and URL Inspection. Paste the result into the audit. "We added schema" is not a finding; a validator screenshot is.

Do not audit for features that no longer exist. Google's Search Central changelog records that the FAQ rich result feature stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026, and that its documentation was removed afterwards. So a checklist row that scores a site on whether it has FAQ markup is scoring it against something the search engine retired. Which structured data still earns its keep is a longer answer than this checklist has room for — it is covered in Local Business Schema Markup: What Still Earns Its Keep.

How do you audit visibility inside AI answers?

Two sources, and they are not interchangeable.

The first is first-party. In June 2026 Google introduced Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, which show how often a site's URLs appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover, broken out by page, country, device and date. Google described these reports as rolling out to a subset of websites, so the honest audit row is either "report available, data attached" or "report not yet available for this property" — never a number you inferred.

The second is a test you run yourself: a fixed set of prompts, re-run on a schedule, with the date recorded every time. It is a supplement, not a substitute, and it needs its own method to be worth anything. That method is covered in How to Test Local Business Visibility in AI Answers.

One line belongs in every audit that touches this area, and it comes from Google rather than from us: be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use internal Google metrics, because no third-party tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems. If an audit cites a vendor's proprietary "AI visibility score" as fact, it is citing a model of the thing, not the thing.

How do you hand the audit to the client?

One row per check, with five columns: the check, the finding, the artifact, the owner, and the date. Nothing else. The value of the document is that a client can point at any row and ask "show me", and someone can.

Two habits make the difference between an audit a client keeps and one they file:

• Every finding carries its artifact. A row that says "structured data is invalid" with no validator output is an assertion. With the output attached, it is a fact.
• Every row is dated. Search results and AI answers both change without notice. An undated finding cannot be compared to anything later, which means it cannot show progress.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a local SEO audit take?

A repeatable local SEO audit of a single-location business is typically around half a day of work once the checklist exists, and most of that time goes to areas 1 and 2 — reconciling the entity record and inspecting pages. The first audit an agency runs always takes longer, because the team is building the template while using it.

Do I need to audit for AI search separately from SEO?

Not as a separate discipline. Google states that its generative AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant. What is genuinely separate is measurement: AI answer visibility has its own Search Console report and needs its own dated test record.

Should a local SEO audit include FAQ schema?

Not as a scored item. Google's changelog states the FAQ rich result feature stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026. Existing FAQ markup does not need to be removed — Google states there is no need to proactively remove it and that unused structured data does not cause problems for Search — but a checklist that awards points for having it is measuring the wrong thing.

What is the difference between an audit and a strategy?

An audit records the current state with evidence. A strategy proposes changes. Keeping them in separate documents is what lets an agency price them separately, and it is what lets a client accept one without the other.

Can I reuse this checklist across clients?

That is the point. A checklist that changes for every client is not a checklist, it is a series of opinions. The findings differ per client; the checks should not.

References

1. Google Search Central. "Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search." developers.google.com
2. Google Search Central. "Add Business Details to Google." developers.google.com
3. Google Search Central. "Local Business (LocalBusiness) Structured Data." developers.google.com
4. Google Search Central Blog. "Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console." developers.google.com
5. Google Search Central. "Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature" (changelog). developers.google.com
6. Google Search Central Blog. "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results" (the 2023 restriction that preceded it). developers.google.com