How it works

How we build
a real listing.

Nothing here is written by hand and nothing is invented. Every record on Seek Optical follows the same four steps, whether it's shop one or shop 1,079.

  1. 01
    Sweep a town, street by street

    We search a town on Google Maps the same way a customer would — not one query for the whole country, but neighbourhood by neighbourhood, so nothing gets missed because it wasn't the top result.

  2. 02
    Keep only real optical shops

    Every result gets checked against the category Google itself assigns — optician, optometrist, contact lens supplier, glasses repair. Anything that isn't genuinely an optical business gets dropped before it ever reaches the site.

  3. 03
    Pull the real record

    Name, address, postcode, phone number, website, opening hours, star rating, review count, and real photos — all pulled straight from its Google Maps listing, never rewritten, never guessed.

  4. 04
    Publish once there's enough there

    A town only goes live once it has real shops inside it. No thin auto-generated pages sitting empty and waiting for traffic — that's the exact pattern we built this site to be better than.

How ranking works

Inside a town, shops are ordered by real Google review volume — nothing else. There's no sponsored slot, no pay-per-lead placement, no way to buy a higher spot. The shop with more real reviews behind it ranks first, the same way it would if you searched Google Maps yourself.

How corrections work

A sweep only catches what Google Maps already knows — if a shop has moved, closed, or never got picked up by the sweep at all, that's a gap in our data, not a judgment call. Shop owners can send in a correction or a missing listing any time through List with us, and we'll fix the record.

What we don't do

We don't write shop descriptions from scratch and pass them off as ours — every fact you see traces back to a real field from the actual listing. We don't accept payment to rank a shop higher. And we don't publish a town just to have a page for it; a town goes live only once there are real shops inside it, checked and ready.