How it works

Twenty-five real searches, drawn on your own streets.

Cairn doesn't estimate. It stands at points across your city, asks Google the question a customer would ask from each one, and shows you the answers on a map of real neighborhoods.

1. You pick the listing and the search

Type your business name. Cairn finds the Google listings that match — with each one’s real categories, rating and address — and you click yours. That’s the whole form. Cairn picks the search a customer would type, from your own Google categories, what your reviewers say you are, and real monthly search volume for your city — so you’re not scanning a phrase nobody uses. After the map, other searches are one click.

Scanning your own business name is the fake cairn of local SEO: you’ll rank #1 for it everywhere and learn nothing. Cairn suggests what customers actually search instead.

2. Cairn searches like a customer, from 25 places

A 5×5 grid around your business, sized to where your customers come from — 2.5 miles for a storefront, 5 for a place people drive across town for, 8 for a service business that covers the metro. Cairn picks a default from your category; you can change it. From every point, one real Google Maps search for your keyword, the way a person standing there on their phone would get it. That’s the local pack: the map results that decide who gets the call. Cairn records the top hundred at each point and where you land in them.

The center point sits on your front door. Standing at distance zero, Google shows the place you’re standing in first — so every business “wins” that point for almost any keyword. Cairn measures it and shows it (click your marker), but it never counts toward your map. Every number Cairn reports is over the 24 points across the city.

It takes about thirty seconds. You watch it happen point by point, and nothing is projected or smoothed — a point that fails to measure says so.

3. The map

Instead of dots on a grid, Cairn draws real boundaries — neighborhoods and city limits from OpenStreetMap and Census data — on real streets, and colors each area by the result at its nearest scan point:

  • Green — you’re #1 there.
  • Amber — #2 or #3. In the pack, not on top.
  • Orange — #4 to #7. Visible if they scroll.
  • Red — #8 or worse, or not in the top 100 at all (shown as “—”).

Click any area and the panel shows the actual five businesses a customer standing there sees — and whether you’re one of them. That’s the proof behind every color. Map share is simply the share of the 24 city points where you’re #1. More on the metric →

4. The fixes

Below the map, the fixes in order of impact — derived from your actual listing and the scan, not from a template: an unclaimed profile, a single generic category, a keyword no category mentions, a quiet review stream, a review-count gap against the businesses winning your areas, a name field that looks like it carries a tagline. Free ones first, with time estimates. If a check can’t run, it stays silent rather than guessing.

What Cairn can’t do

Google personalizes. Two people at the same corner can see slightly different packs depending on history, device, and the hour. Cairn measures a clean, anonymous desktop search in English at each coordinate — the fairest single snapshot there is, and the same method the professional tools use. Treat a single point’s rank as a reading, and the shape of the whole map as the truth. Re-scans show what moved.

Cairn doesn’t see inside your Google Business Profile account. It reads only what the public sees — which is exactly what your customers see.

See your own map.

Free, complete, about a minute. No email asked.

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