FOR OWNERS AND FOR THE PAW PARTNER TEAM
How this grade is built
The full report is free. There is no email gate and no card step. A saved snapshot is reused for 7 days when the same name, city, website, and profile link are graded again, so a refresh does not pretend to be a new lookup.
Which ranking you are looking at
Ranks are the Google local map pack: the map results inside Google Search. Positions 1, 2, and 3 are that pack. Position 4 and lower come from the expanded Google Maps list, the one you see after opening the map. They are not the blue website links under the map. The report says which of those two sources a rank came from.
Search volume
Google Maps does not hand back monthly search volume. Live reports request monthly estimates from DataForSEO's Google Ads search-volume endpoint and local map positions from DataForSEO Maps. City terms use the business city. In a large city, two neighborhood terms are added. Outside a large city, one nearby-city term is ranked inside that city when one sits within 275 miles. These are provider estimates, not values returned by Google Maps itself.
Click rates and dollars
The money math uses one shared set of rates, stored in the database rather than copied into the page. Current clicks are monthly volume times the click rate for that map position. The gap is volume times the difference between today's rate and the target seat (#1 if you are already in the pack, #3 if you are not). Dollars are that click gap times the lead rate times the average new-customer value.
| Input | Rate | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Map position 1 | 14.8% | Best seat in the local pack |
| Map position 2 | 12.6% | Still a high-converting seat |
| Map position 3 | 11.9% | Last seat in the pack |
| Map position 4 and lower | 0.5% | Outside the pack. Treated as nearly invisible. |
| Positions 1 to 3 combined | 39.3% | Share of map clicks the pack takes |
| #1 website link under the map | 6.2% | Ordinary website SEO, not the map listing |
| Calls from a map click | 38% | Share of map clicks that become calls |
| Direction requests | 33% | Share that ask for directions |
| Website visits | 29% | Share that tap through to the site |
| Lead rate | 10% | Default when a business has not given its own |
| Average new customer | $850 | Used only to turn clicks into dollars |
What a run costs
A live report calls Google Places to identify the business, DataForSEO for listing details, review samples, keyword volume, and local map positions, then Claude to draft analysis and recommendations. Request costs and provider estimates are stored in the admin usage ledger. Unknown fields stay unavailable instead of being filled with guesses.
When live lookups are turned on, budget from Google's published Places API prices (first paid tier, after the free monthly caps). A useful grade needs review and photo fields, which land in the Enterprise + Atmosphere SKU:
- One Text Search to find the business and nearby competitors: about $0.04.
- Place Details for the business plus about five competitors: about $0.025 each, roughly $0.15.
- Current request charges are recorded per provider in Admin → API settings. The app applies no spend cap; provider account balances and billing apply.
- Map-pack position checks from a SERP provider are usually well under $0.01 each.
Plan on $0.30 to $0.60 per new grade once the free monthly caps are used up. That range includes the extra neighborhood or nearby-city checks. Google's free cap on the expensive Place Details tier covers on the order of a hundred or so full grades a month if that billing account is not shared with another product. Repeat views inside 7 days should keep serving the saved snapshot and should not call the APIs again.
Grades saved this month: 1. At the planning range, that is $0.30 to $0.60. Recorded provider spend this month is $0.20.
How to bill for it
Keep the first report free for the prospect. Paw Partner should pay for the lookup as a sales tool. At well under a dollar a grade, a few hundred reports a month is a small cost next to one boarding client. Do not put a card form in front of the report.
Add an internal monthly cap and an alert when live APIs are connected. Later, a paid “refresh this listing every month” plan can carry the ongoing cost. Price that above the API cost, per location. The same inputs already saved on every grade (name, city, website, profile link) are the ones a later AI-visibility or website grader can reuse.
Field masks matter. Ask only for the fields the report shows. Do not request photo files. That is a separate Google charge, and the report only needs counts and categories.