A findability score is meant to tell you how easily people can find your business online, usually as a single number out of a hundred. Several companies sell one. We sell one, called the View Score.
The first thing you should know is that findability score is not a defined term. There is no standard, no agreed method, and no body that certifies one. Every score on the market is its owner's own recipe, and the recipes do not agree with each other. A business can score well on one and badly on another in the same week without anything about the business having changed.
The rule to apply, including to us
Google publishes a warning about this whole category, and we are going to put it at the top rather than bury it.
In its guidance on working with an SEO, Google says that it does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, that these tools do not have access to Google's internal ranking data, and that you should be wary of tools claiming to be acceptable or approved by Google Search. It adds that before you make significant changes based on a tool's audit, you should check its recommendations against official Google guidance and make your own informed decisions.
Apply that to the View Score. It is our own composite. It is not a Google metric, Google has not reviewed it, and it has no access to anything inside Google. Anybody who tells you otherwise about any score, ours included, is overselling.
What a score of this kind can honestly be is a structured summary of findings that were themselves checked. The number is a handle for the findings. If somebody gives you the number without the findings, you have been given a feeling, not a measurement. That is the question to put to anyone handing you a score, and you should put it to us too: show me what you checked, and show me where each finding came from.
Where the word actually comes from
Findability is older than SEO marketing and more serious than it sounds. It comes from information architecture, the discipline of organising information so people can locate it. Peter Morville, who co-wrote the standard text on information architecture, published a book called Ambient Findability in 2005, and the idea there is about whether people can navigate to and locate what they need, in physical space as well as online.
That tradition does measure findability, and it does it in a way worth knowing about, because it is the most honest version of the idea. You give real people real tasks, you record whether they succeeded, how long it took, and how hard they found it. The score is the proportion of tasks people completed. Usability researchers have been doing this for decades, and a typical study might show a navigation change taking task success from under a third to roughly three quarters.
Notice what that is not. It is not a crawler scoring your site in the background. It is people, trying to find something, succeeding or failing. If you ever want to know whether your own website is findable in that sense, the test costs nothing: give five people who have never seen it a task, watch, and count.
What the scores on the market actually measure
It is worth knowing what is behind the numbers you may already have been shown.
Some search visibility indexes are built by tracking a large fixed set of search terms and adding up where a domain ranks for them, weighted by how often each term is searched and how likely a click is at each position. The better ones publish their method in outline while keeping the formula. One of them states plainly in its own documentation that it is not a traffic index, that it measures search success rather than visitors, and that it cannot account for local variation, meaning results for a term like hotel differ city by city. For a Lagos business, that last limitation is not small.
Other visibility percentages are scored against a keyword list you chose yourself. That makes the number useful for tracking your own progress over time and useless for comparing yourself to anybody else, because a competitor tracking easier terms will score higher while being less findable.
Then there are the authority scores, where the arithmetic is on backlinks and the result is a number from one to a hundred. The companies that publish these are clear about what they are, and one of them states in its own documentation that its score is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on search results. They are also relative, which means your score can fall without your site changing at all, because everybody is being ranked against everybody else.
And there is at least one thing on the internet literally called a Findability Score which is an eight-question quiz that ends in a paid membership. If you search the term and land on something that asks you eight questions about your own business and then grades you, you have found a sales form, not a measurement.
Google does not give you a score
This surprises people, so it is worth being specific.
Google Search Console contains no visibility score, no findability grade and no index. It gives you four numbers. Clicks, meaning how many times somebody clicked through to you from search. Impressions, meaning how many times you appeared. Click-through rate, which is one divided by the other. And average position.
Average position is the one most often misread. It is the average position of the topmost result from your site across the times it was shown. It is not the rank you will see if you search for yourself, and Google says why: results are specific to the time, the place, the device and the recent history of the person searching. Two people in the same room can see different pages.
Those four numbers can be split by query, by page, by country and by device, and the country split is the one that matters most for a Nigerian business, because an average that mixes Nigeria with everywhere else tells you very little.
A Google Business Profile has its own performance data, available only once the profile is verified, covering views, searches, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Two caveats on it that are routinely dropped from agency reports. Views count unique people, capped at one per person per day, and they count views of the profile rather than everything about you on Google. And the performance data mixes organic results with Google Ads, so if you are running ads, that number is not a measure of your free visibility.
So is a findability score worth anything
It is worth exactly as much as the findings underneath it, and nothing on its own.
A number is useful for three things. It makes a complicated picture discussable with somebody who does not work in this field. It makes change visible over time, as long as the method stays fixed. And it forces whoever produced it to check the same things every time rather than noticing whatever catches their eye.
A number is dangerous for one thing, which is persuasion. A score out of a hundred feels like a fact. It is a summary of somebody's opinion about which things matter and how much. Ours included.
So when anybody hands you one, ask what was checked, ask to see each finding and where it came from, and ask what would make the number move. If the answers are specific and you can verify two or three of them yourself in ten minutes, the score is doing its job. If the answers are vague, or the only way to improve the number is to buy the thing being sold, you have been shown a sales form with a number on it.