We are building an index of how findable Nigerian businesses actually are, category by category. Before any of it is published it is worth explaining what is being measured, because a league table nobody understands is a league table nobody should trust.
The question
The View Score answers one question and refuses to answer any other. How easy is it for a customer to find you?
Not how good your marketing is. Not how nice your website looks. Not how much you spend. Whether a person who wants what you sell can actually arrive at you, and whether the machines that increasingly answer that person’s questions know you exist and know what you do.
A business scoring badly is carrying what we call ghost demand. People who are already out there looking, who end up buying from somebody else because they never reached you.
The seven things it looks at
Foundations. Whether search engines can reach your site and file it at all. The most basic layer, and the one where failure is total rather than partial.
Machine readability. Whether a machine can describe your business correctly without guessing. This is what decides what an AI assistant says about you.
Search findability. Whether you turn up when somebody looks. Your own name, your name plus your category, and the searches a stranger makes who has never heard of you. Plus what the assistants say when asked who to hire in your city.
Social findability. Whether you can be found and understood on the platforms your customers actually use.
Share surface. What your link looks like when a customer sends it to somebody else.
Speed and weight. Whether the page arrives before the visitor gives up, measured on a phone rather than on a fast office connection.
Conversion path. Whether somebody who does arrive can work out what you do and reach a human being.
The seven carry different weight, because some things cost you more than others. Being invisible when somebody searches your category costs more than a missing favicon, and the scoring says so.
How it is built, and why
There is no formula and no weighting arithmetic. There is a fixed list of checks, each worth a set number of points, each one either passing or not. You add up what passed.
That is deliberate. A scored company should be able to recount its own number on paper, because a score nobody can recount is a score nobody can argue with, and an unarguable score is not worth publishing.
Every check is run the same way on every company, and the conditions are fixed in writing before any scoring starts. The same three AI assistants throughout a cycle, never swapped part way. The same two questions, word for word, with the city named rather than "near me", because near me resolves against wherever the person asking is sitting and cannot be reproduced next month. Every search logged out, in a private window, with no ad blocker.
None of that is fussiness. It is the difference between a measurement and an impression.
What it refuses to score
Backlinks, traffic estimates, domain authority, ad spend, follower counts, revenue and design quality.
Follower count deserves a specific mention because people expect to see it. A follower number tells you nothing about whether a customer searching your category can find you, and it is the easiest number in marketing to buy. The social checks ask whether the profile can be found and understood, not how big it is.
The rest are excluded because they either cannot be measured from outside without buying a tool’s guess and presenting it as fact, or they are not the question the score is asking. A business can have a beautiful website, a large following and a serious budget and still be invisible to somebody searching its own category, which is exactly the situation this exists to expose.
Nothing behind a login is scored, nothing on a staging site, and nothing a site’s own robots file asked us not to fetch.
Comparison, done honestly
A dentist in Ibadan is not competing with Nike, and a score pretending otherwise is useless. So every business is scored inside its own category and size band, and the highest score anyone in that band actually achieved becomes the benchmark for the band.
That benchmark is observed, never invented. It is a real number a real company in your position is really getting, which makes it a target you can argue with. The distance between your score and that benchmark is the number that matters, and it is the one we quote.
Right of reply, which is not a courtesy
No score is published before the business has seen it.
Every scored company receives its full scorecard at least seven days before publication. Every check, passed or failed, with the evidence for each failure. If a check was scored wrongly they reply with the evidence and it is rechecked. If we were wrong, we correct it and say so in the published index.
This is not politeness. A published ranking that companies cannot challenge is an opinion with a number attached, and we would rather not publish one of those.
What we will not claim
The score measures findability. It does not measure whether a business is good, whether its product works, or whether you should buy from it. A company can be excellent and score badly, and the score says exactly that and nothing more.
It is also a snapshot of a month. A company that fixes its problems scores differently next month, which is the entire point of publishing it.
Seeing the full method, or getting scored
The complete method, with every check and every point, is available on request. It is not posted publicly, and the honest reason is that a published check list invites people to game the checks rather than fix the problem, which would make the index worth less to everybody in it.
If you want to know your own position before any of this is published, the free deep digital audit is the long form of the same measure. Same seven areas, same questions, more detail, and the fix for everything it finds.
