The Diagnostic

Business Signals

Teach the mechanism in a way SMBs and builders can both use.

The Known Business Check reads four signal classes on every business: Identity, Understanding, Proof, and Consistency. Its output is a readiness diagnostic — not a Trust Score, not a ranking, not a public score badge. Below the four classes, a Commerce Context overlay surfaces educational context for builders, payment rails, and AI agents.

Run the Known Business CheckVisit IdentityRecord

The four signal classes

Each class answers a different question a reader — human or machine — needs to ask before acting on a business.

Identity

Who the business is.

  • Legal name and operating name
  • Owner-attested jurisdictions and contact
  • Domain and brand attribution
  • Owned business record on IdentityRecord

Understanding

What the business does.

  • Categories and service lines
  • Structured offering descriptions
  • Audiences served
  • Service areas and locations

Proof

What supports the claims.

  • Credentials, licenses, and certifications
  • Verifications attached to the record
  • Third-party attestations
  • Reviewable evidence of operating history

Consistency

Whether facts match across sources.

  • Name, address, phone (NAP) alignment
  • Hours and service area parity across listings
  • Stable category usage
  • Concordance between site, profile, and record

Commerce Context overlay

Commerce Context is an educational overlay, not a replacement for Local Trust Signals. It gives builders, payment rails, and AI agents a vocabulary for the commerce-readable fields a Known Business can expose. The Known Business Check surfaces these as context, not as a verdict on the business.

Payment readiness

Whether the business is set up to accept the payments its customers expect, including modern rails where applicable.

Wallet / payment endpoint readiness

Whether the record exposes structured endpoints that a payment rail or agent can read to route a transaction.

Commerce actions

Which actions the business is prepared to fulfill — book, order, quote, schedule — in a form a reader can act on.

Availability and routing context

Operating hours, service windows, and routing rules that tell a system whether the business is open and which location to reach.

Merchant claim status

Whether the business has claimed its own record and is the entity accountable for keeping it current.

What the diagnostic does — and does not — produce

The Known Business Check produces a readiness diagnostic across the four signal classes, a list of specific fixes the business can make, and the option to publish an owned record. It does not produce a Trust Score, a public ranking, or a badge the business can display. The number a business sees is a private diagnostic for their own decisions.

Run the Known Business Check

See how your business reads across Identity, Understanding, Proof, and Consistency, with the Commerce Context overlay surfaced where it applies.

Run the Known Business Check