What the meter actually measures
It measures whether the sections of your profile contain something: business description, hours, services, photos, attributes, a website link. Fill them and it goes green. Google's own framing is about completeness, because complete profiles genuinely do get more views and more actions — that part is true and worth acting on.
What it does not assess is whether what you filled in is any good. You can reach green with the wrong primary category, three stock photos, a description written for nobody, and every service listed as one lump of text — all of which limit your ranking while the meter says you are finished.
Why green does not mean ranking
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. Completeness feeds relevance a little, but the heavy lifting is done by the primary category matching the search, by review count and recency, by whether your name, address and phone details agree across the web, and by your website.
None of those are on the meter. That is why the meter turning green is a starting line rather than a finish: it means nothing is obviously missing, not that anything is competitive.
What to check once you are green
- Is the primary category exactly what customers search for, rather than something adjacent? This single field moves more ranking than everything the meter measures.
- Is each service listed individually, rather than described in one paragraph?
- When did your most recent review arrive? Recency counts, and a profile whose last review was over a year ago looks dormant.
- Are your name, address and phone details identical everywhere else online?
- Are the photos real photographs of your work, premises and team, updated occasionally?
- Does the website link go to a relevant page that matches the profile, rather than a homepage that mentions nothing local?
The scores other tools give you
Various tools offer a “profile score” out of 100. They are not Google's, they use their own criteria, and two tools will happily give the same profile very different numbers. They are useful as a checklist and worthless as a benchmark.
The only score that matters is whether you appear when a customer searches — which is measurable, unlike a composite number, and is what an audit should report.