What Actually Counts as a Citation?
The system rewards agreement, not volume, which is why a hundred untidy entries lose to twenty clean ones, once the obvious errors are gone. Where competitors are untidy, verified data is sufficient to take stronger trust signals.
How Commonly Should the Data Be Checked?
Even therefore, work from the aggregators outward, since fixing a source fixes everything downstream. Beyond that left alone, a misplaced service area spreads to sources the business never submitted to.
Which Sources Are Worth the Time?
The gain is seldom dramatic on any single day; it surfaces as faster indexing over a quarter, which is worth planning around. The cost of contradictory data across sources isn't a penalty; it's being quietly ranked below someone tidier.
Is Volume Ever Worth Chasing?
Confirm by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory. The payoff surfaces as improved local relevance, and it compounds over a single quarter.
On the other hand, if a listing can't be claimed, document it and move on rather than duplicating it.
Civic·Ledger
Beyond that each matching source adds a little confidence; each contradiction subtracts more than it adds.
Marrow Almanac Co