Findability Experts — Findability Score
Cheers — Boston, MA
Here’s where Cheers stands in the Boston pub market. Every number below is pulled from live data — Google Maps, a 95-point geographic ranking scan, citation directories, live search results, and AI assistant probes run against real “best pub in Boston” style questions.
Findability Score — Overview
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Core Visibility 53% On Track |
AI Visibility (AISO) 33% Needs Attention |
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Strategic Readiness 58% On Track |
Technical Maturity 70% Strong Foundation |
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Gaps Found 10 |
Critical Priority 5 |
Overall · On Track 52% 0.35·53 + 0.25·33 + 0.20·58 + 0.20·70 = 52 |
Not Appearing in the Map Pack
You do not rank in the top 20 for “pubs” across 99% of the search area.
The rest of this audit is scored on its own merits below, and the fundamentals may well be strong — but map-pack placement is how local customers actually find you. Until that changes, the strength of everything else is potential rather than traffic.
Cheers is a rare case: the brand is enormous, the reviews are enormous, and the website is technically in decent shape — but the reach is tiny. Technical Maturity is the strongest axis here, carried by an exceptionally strong link profile and clean on-page basics. Core Visibility is dragged down by one thing: outside the block the pub sits on, Google Maps barely shows you at all. And AI Visibility is the weakest axis of the four — the site gives ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity almost nothing to quote, and in live testing they recommended other Boston pubs instead of the most famous one in the city.
Score Breakdown — Core Visibility
| Dimension | Score | What the data shows |
|---|---|---|
| Google Profile Strength | 10/14 | A claimed profile at 84 Beacon St carrying a 4.4 rating across 10,268 reviews — a review base almost no local business in America can match, held back only by a rating that sits below the 4.7 mark top-band profiles clear. |
| Map Pack Visibility | 2/20 | Across 95 scanned points around Boston, Cheers is in the top 3 on 1% of them and not in the top 10 on 99% — the single weakest signal in this entire report. |
| Review Authority | 10/14 | 10,268 reviews against Patrick’s 165 — a 62x lead on volume — but Patrick’s rates 4.5 to your 4.4, so you lead decisively on one dimension and trail narrowly on the other. |
| Competitive Position | 5/12 | Cheers holds the top spot on 1% of the scanned grid; The Dooliner in Newton, Stewarts Pub in Everett and Renegade’s Pub each hold #1 on 1 pin of the 95 as well — nobody owns this market, which is why the gap is winnable. |
| Review Velocity | 10/10 | The newest review Google sampled landed 26 August 2026 — 21 days before this audit, inside the last 30 days. Reviews are arriving right now, and that freshness is one of the strongest ranking signals you already own. |
Where You Rank Across Boston
A live 11×11 grid scan of Google Maps ranking around your business. Each pin shows your position at that spot; the colour key is on the map.
Scanned for “pubs” · 11 grid
Open full interactive heatmap →
Ranking Breakdown — 95 pins scanned
99% not in top 10
This is the most important picture in the report, and it is stark: across 95 search points spanning the Boston area, Cheers appears at exactly one of them — and on that one pin, it ranks #1. Everywhere else, on 99% of the grid, it doesn’t surface in the top 10 at all. The average position across the grid is 19.8, a directional figure with unranked pins scored as 20. What makes this fixable rather than fatal is that nobody else owns the grid either: Patrick’s in Malden shows up in the top 20 on 22 of the 95 pins, The Dooliner in Newton on 20, Stewarts Pub in Everett on 19 — and The Dooliner, Stewarts and Renegade’s Pub each hold the #1 spot on just 1 pin apiece. This is a fragmented map with no dominant player, and the pub with 10,268 reviews and global name recognition is the one business best positioned to take it. Worth noting alongside this: in Google’s live local pack for “pubs” in Boston, Cheers currently sits at #3, behind The Dubliner Irish Pub and The Black Rose. You are strong at the dead centre and invisible a mile out.
3 Critical Gaps Holding You Back
Your Map Reach Stops at Beacon Hill
Cheers appears in the top 10 on 1 of the 95 points scanned across Boston. A visitor standing in Back Bay, the Seaport, Fenway or the North End and searching “pubs near me” is being shown The Dubliner, The Black Rose, Bell in Hand and Emmets — not you. Meanwhile the businesses picking up those pins are suburban pubs in Malden, Everett and Newton with under 200 reviews each.
Business impact: Boston’s pub market runs on tourists and walk-ins deciding in the moment on a phone, and you are being excluded from that decision on 99% of the map despite having more reviews than every competitor on this list combined.
AI Assistants Recommend Other Boston Pubs — Never Yours
We ran five “best pub in Boston” style questions across the major AI assistants. Cheers was mentioned in zero of them. The Black Rose came back in 4, Deep Ellum in 3, Mr. Dooley’s in 3, with Beacon Hill Pub — three blocks from your door — named in 2. The sources those assistants pulled from were Wanderlog, Time Out, Reddit, The Infatuation and Boston Magazine.
Business impact: The single most recognizable pub name in the world is absent from the answer when a traveller asks an AI where to drink in Boston, and a competitor three streets away is not.
The Homepage Says Almost Nothing — and Takes 23 Seconds to Say It
Your homepage body copy amounts to roughly 131 words across 7 headings — two taglines and three short link blurbs. There is no paragraph explaining what Cheers is, where it sits on Beacon Hill, what’s on the menu, or what the experience is. Compare The Black Rose, on the same website platform: its homepage names its street, the two T lines that stop nearest, its signature dishes and its live music schedule. Separately, Lighthouse measured mobile Largest Contentful Paint at 22,976ms — nearly 23 seconds before the main content appears — against a 2,500ms target, with Lighthouse Performance at 33/100 on mobile.
Business impact: Search engines and AI assistants have nothing substantive to read about you, and the visitors who do arrive on a phone are waiting 23 seconds for a page a competitor delivers in a fraction of that.
Your Top 2 AI Visibility Gaps
ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are becoming the first stop for travellers planning a night out. Here’s where Cheers is invisible to them right now.
Pillar 5 — Content Freshness & Depth
0 / 3 — Critical Status
None of the pages sampled on cheersboston.com carry a visible publication or updated date, and no most-recent publish date could be established anywhere on the site. There is no blog, news feed or dated content hub in your 17-page sitemap.
Business impact: AI models weight recency heavily when deciding which source to trust and cite, and with no dated content your site reads as static — so they reach for Time Out, Reddit and Boston Magazine instead, and those outlets are naming your competitors.
Pillar 2 — Content Structure for AI Citation
1 / 6 — Critical Status
Across 7 headings on the homepage, not one is followed by a direct, quotable answer, and the page contains no list blocks and just 2 paragraphs of body text. There are no question-format headings anywhere on the site and no FAQ section detected.
Business impact: An AI assistant answering “what’s the Cheers bar in Boston actually like?” has no clean passage on your own website to lift — so it quotes a review aggregator’s description of you, or skips you entirely.
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Strategic Readiness — 58% (On Track)
Strategic Readiness asks whether the site is built to meet the searches that actually matter — not how fast it loads, but whether the right pages exist at all. Cheers does well on the fundamentals: the sitemap returns 17 clean URLs with zero problem slugs, and the pages a visitor needs are all there — Menus, Hours & Location, Private Events, Happenings, Gift Cards, Contact. Transactional and brand intent are genuinely well served. Where it thins out is local build and depth: there is one location page and a footer address, with no neighbourhood or Beacon Hill-specific content, and no page anywhere targeting the way people actually search — “pubs near me,” “best pub in Boston,” “Cheers bar Boston.” The pages you do have are short on the specifics that earn a ranking.
BIGGEST STRATEGIC GAP
Nothing on the site is built for local discovery search — build a substantive Beacon Hill / Boston pub landing page that names the neighbourhood, the nearest T stops, what’s on the menu and why people come, so there’s a page to rank when someone searches by location rather than by brand.
Medium + Full audits dig into the 4 Strategic dimensions individually.
Technical Maturity — 70% (Strong Foundation)
This is your strongest axis, and the reason is mostly off-page: 1,547 other websites link to cheersboston.com across 6,073 backlinks — an authority profile that puts you in a completely different league from every competitor in this report. Positioning is the other standout: “the Boston pub that inspired it all” is differentiation no competitor can copy, and it’s stated clearly in your title tag and meta description. Conversion paths are solid too — the phone number (617) 227-9605 is click-to-call in both the header and footer, with the address linking straight to Google Maps. Lighthouse SEO scores 92/100 and Lighthouse Accessibility 94/100. The two weak points are Lighthouse Best Practices at 54/100 and content depth: a 131-word homepage is thin for a site with this much authority pointing at it.
BIGGEST TECHNICAL GAP
Mobile load performance — Lighthouse Performance is 33/100 on mobile with a 22,976ms Largest Contentful Paint and a 0.27 Cumulative Layout Shift; the oversized hero media is the first place to look.
Medium + Full audits expand into Lighthouse + page-level on-page audit + content architecture + brand positioning.
Competitive Snapshot
| Business | Rating | Reviews | Pins in top 20 (of 95) | #1 pins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheers (you) — 84 Beacon St | 4.4 | 10,268 | 1 | 1 |
| Patrick’s — Malden | 4.5 | 165 | 22 | 0 |
| The Dooliner Irish Pub — Newton | 4.6 | 178 | 20 | 1 |
| Stewarts Pub — Everett | 4.7 | 170 | 19 | 1 |
Read that table twice. Patrick’s in Malden has 165 reviews and appears on 22 times as many grid points as you do. None of these businesses are beating you on reputation, product or authority — they are simply being surfaced by Google in places you are not. On the schema side, only one of the four competitors we could check (Woody’s Parkway Pub) carries richer structured data than you do; your site already publishes Organization and FoodEstablishment markup, which most of this field lacks.
Citation Breakdown
| Directories checked | 20 |
| Listings located | 8 |
| Name, address, phone and website all matching | 6 |
Your Google Business Profile name is clean — just “Cheers,” with no stuffed keywords or city suffix, which is exactly right and is what keeps a profile out of suspension risk. Where listings exist they are largely accurate: Yelp, Tupalo, Chamber of Commerce, Acompio, Find-Open and WhereTo all match your NAP on every field. Two flags worth acting on: Hotfrog carries the right address and phone but a mismatched business name, and ShowMeLocal is missing your website link. The bigger issue is absence — the scan couldn’t locate matching listings on Bing Places, Foursquare, TomTom, Yellow Pages, Manta, Citysearch, eLocal or EZLocal. Bing Places in particular feeds business data into Bing, Microsoft Copilot and several AI assistants, so an unclaimed listing there is a direct hit to the AI Visibility problem above.
VERIFY WITH CLIENT
Facebook and Instagram came back as “not found” in the directory scan, but both profiles are linked directly from your own site footer (facebook.com/CheersBoston and instagram.com/cheersboston). Those two platforms block automated checks, so the scan result is unreliable rather than meaningful — please log in and confirm the name, address, phone and website on each match your Google profile exactly.
VERIFY WITH CLIENT
Is 84 Beacon St the only Cheers location you want this audit to cover, and is it the single Google Business Profile in play? If there are or have been other Cheers-branded locations with their own profiles, they may be splitting your map visibility — and that would change how we’d sequence the fixes below.
Accessibility & ADA Readiness
94/100 mobile · 94/100 desktop — your site already passes most automated accessibility checks, a strong foundation; the two flagged items are a missing image alt attribute and one element whose visible label doesn’t match its accessible name.
A Medium audit ($49) runs the full WCAG-aligned audit and names the top 3 specific fixes. ADA accessibility lawsuits against restaurants and bars are rising every year — this is one of the highest-leverage protections you can put in place.
3 Quick Wins — This Week
1. Fix the hero media that’s costing you 23 seconds on mobile
Lighthouse clocked Largest Contentful Paint at 22,976ms on mobile with a 0.27 layout shift — the autoplay hero video and the full-size PNG logo preload are the first suspects. Compressing and properly sizing that hero media is a single afternoon’s work for whoever manages your BentoBox site, and it’s the highest-impact technical change available to you. Desktop LCP is 4,433ms, so the problem is specifically how that media behaves on a phone — which is how most of your walk-in traffic arrives.
2. Write 300 words of real copy onto the homepage and a Boston FAQ page
Right now the homepage offers two taglines and three link blurbs. Add a genuine paragraph: where you are on Beacon Hill, the nearest T stops, what’s on the menu, what the Norm Burger is, what to expect walking in. Then build the /faq/ page your 17-page sitemap doesn’t have, answering the questions people are literally asking Google right now — “What is the best pub in Boston?” appears in Google’s own People Also Ask box for this search. Written as a question heading with a direct two-sentence answer underneath, that content is exactly what AI assistants lift and cite.
3. Clean up Hotfrog and claim Bing Places
Your Hotfrog listing (hotfrog.com/company/1577b324974ac752b05c960f54549d28) has the correct address and phone but the wrong business name — edit it to read exactly “Cheers” to match your Google profile. Then claim your Bing Places listing, which the scan couldn’t find: Bing data feeds Microsoft Copilot and several AI search tools, and given you scored zero mentions across five AI assistant queries, every structured source you add is a channel back in. Both are free and take under 30 minutes combined.
What a Full Audit Reveals
This report shows you the two worst AI Visibility gaps; a Medium audit opens up the complete 6-pillar AI Search Optimization scorecard with a strategic read on each pillar, and a Full audit benchmarks all six pillars against five named Boston competitors side by side — so you can see exactly why The Black Rose gets recommended and you don’t. Beyond that, the deeper tiers add a keyword gap analysis against the pubs actually winning “best pub in Boston” searches, a page-level on-page and technical SEO audit across all 17 of your URLs, a full schema markup audit with the specific types missing from your site, a WCAG-aligned accessibility audit with a prioritized fix list, a 90-day strategic roadmap sequenced by impact, and a content calendar mapped to what Boston visitors are actually searching for month by month.
Want to Turn These Gaps Into Growth?
This snapshot only scratches the surface. Book a free strategy call — in 15 minutes we’ll walk through your numbers together, answer your questions, and show you which gaps are worth closing first.
Analysis prepared using live Google Maps data, geographic ranking scans, citation directory checks, live search results, AI assistant probes, and competitive research. Generated September 2026.
Findability Experts
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