Local-SEO SaaS platforms charge $200, $500 a month for "GBP competitive insights" that, once you strip the dashboards, amount to a list of seventeen-ish signals you could check yourself in half an hour per competitor. The value isn't the data; it's the discipline of actually checking. Most small-business owners never sit down and go through it.
The GBP Competitor Audit is the structured version of that half-hour. Paste up to five competitor Google Maps URLs. Tick every signal you've already mastered on your own profile. Click generate. You get a side-by-side worksheet (Markdown, copyable into any doc or spreadsheet) plus an AI brief that takes your ticked-off signals, the untouched ones, and your competitors and walks Claude through producing a 90-day action plan.
The seventeen signals. Primary category, additional categories, services list, products, photo count and recency, virtual tour, review volume and rating, owner reply rate, seeded Q&A, attributes, GBP Posts cadence, booking integration, messaging, and the handful of smaller ones. Together explain ~80% of what decides map-pack inclusion for any given query. Fill them and you move up the pack; ignore them and you stay invisible.
Methodology: Chapter 10 of The $20 Dollar Agency, Business Listings. For industry-specific application, Chapters 18-23 cover hotels, restaurants, home services, salons, professional services, and e-commerce.