Citations go stale, and nobody notices for years
Citation building is sold as a project. Forty submissions, a spreadsheet, an invoice, done.
Then nobody looks at it again, and two years later a third of it is wrong.
Nothing failed. Listings decay on their own, and the decay is invisible because a stale listing looks exactly like a current one.
What actually goes wrong
The business changes something. New phone number, new hours, a suite number added, a rebrand. The website and Google get updated. The other thirty-eight listings don't. This is the biggest source by a distance, and a move is the worst version of it.
A directory rewrites your data. Many directories buy data from aggregators and periodically refresh from them. A listing you corrected by hand can silently revert to whatever the aggregator holds, which may be years old.
The directory itself changes. Sites get sold, merge, redesign their URL structure, or shut down. A citation URL that worked in 2024 may now 404, redirect to a homepage, or point at a completely different business.
A duplicate appears. Aggregator seeding, a well-meaning employee, or an update that created rather than edited. Duplicates start silently and neither listing announces the other.
Ownership lapses. A verification expires, a claimed listing reverts to unclaimed, and it becomes editable by the public — including competitors. Getting it back is the same job as inheriting a client's listings, and just as slow.
How often to check
For a normal local business with no changes: twice a year is enough to catch decay before it matters.
Immediately, regardless of schedule, after:
- Any change to name, address, phone or hours
- A rebrand
- Taking over the account from another agency
- A noticeable drop in map pack visibility
That last one is worth taking seriously. When rankings fall, people look at content and links. A duplicate listing or a phone number that disagrees across a dozen directories is cheaper to check and more often the answer.
What to check, in priority order
Don't audit forty listings equally. Weight it:
- The core ten. Google, Bing, Apple, Facebook, Yelp, BBB, Nextdoor, LinkedIn, Yellow Pages, Foursquare. Check every field, not just the phone.
- Anything the business pays for. Chamber memberships, trade associations, paid directory placements. Paying for a listing with the wrong phone number is worse than not having it.
- The trade-specific ones. Supplier locators and association directories, which are the highest-value links most local businesses have.
- Everything else, quickly. You're looking for gone-or-wrong, not perfection.
Check the right things
Not every difference is a problem, and auditing as though it is turns a two-hour job into a two-day one. "Street" versus "St" is noise. Two different phone numbers is not — the distinction is worth being clear about before you start.
So for each listing:
- Does it still exist? A 404 or a redirect to a homepage means the citation is gone.
- Is the phone right? The single field most likely to be wrong and most costly when it is.
- Is the address right, including suite number and any recent change?
- Is there a second listing for the same business on the same directory?
Some of it can't be checked automatically
Worth knowing before you build a process around a tool.
Yelp, Facebook, BBB and Angi all block automated requests from data centres. Any tool telling you a Yelp listing is confirmed live either has a partnership or is guessing.
A well-behaved tool tells you it couldn't check rather than pretending. "Couldn't check" and "gone" are different answers, and conflating them sends you chasing listings that are perfectly fine.
So expect a handful that need a browser and thirty seconds of your own attention. That's a limitation of the web, not a fault in the process.
Make it a calendar entry
The reason citation decay goes unnoticed for years is that nothing prompts anyone to look.
Put it in the calendar twice a year per client, keep a list of every listing with its URL, and the check becomes an hour rather than a rediscovery project. The list is the part that matters — without it, every audit starts by working out what exists, which is most of the work.
Placemark keeps that list and fetches each URL to report what's live, what's gone, and what it couldn't reach. Free for one business.