We are one of the agencies you would be choosing between, so the fair thing is to hand you somebody else's tests rather than our own. Google publishes a page on hiring an SEO. It is better than almost anything the industry has written on the subject, and it opens with a sentence most agency pages would rather you never read:
If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself. We recommend starting with the SEO starter guide, as it's a practical guide to improving your site's SEO and it describes much of what your SEO will do for you.
Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?, read September 8, 2026
Most dispensaries are small local businesses. So the first honest answer to how you should choose a cannabis SEO agency is that you may not need one, and the page below is written that way: Google's tests first, four cannabis-specific ones we would add, and then what we are and are not, so you can rule us out quickly if we are wrong for you.
When you should not hire anyone
Four situations, and the first is Google's rather than ours.
Your profile has never been finished. If your hours are wrong, your categories were picked in a hurry and nobody has asked a customer for a review in a year, an agency's first ninety days will be spent doing work you could do in a fortnight. Do the ten-point self-audit first. If it moves the needle, you have learned something cheaply. If it does not, you have a much better brief for whoever you hire.
You cannot say what a customer is worth. Any agency's reporting will eventually meet the question of whether the work paid for itself, and without an average order value and a repeat rate from your point of sale, that conversation has no arithmetic in it.
You are not eligible for a Business Profile. Google's eligibility guidelines name cannabis directly: businesses associated with products requiring a minimum customer age are not permitted as service-area businesses without a storefront. If you are delivery-only with no premises a customer can walk into, the map results are not available to you, and no agency changes that.
You need brand, packaging or a website rebuild more than rankings. That is a different purchase, and search specialists are the wrong people to sell it to you.
Seven questions, and the answers that should worry you
The first three are Google's, condensed from the ten questions it publishes. The last four are the ones that separate an agency that has worked in cannabis from one that has read about it.
1. Do you follow Google Search Essentials, and can you show me the documentation behind your recommendations?
Google asks buyers to check whether recommendations line up with official guidance, and to ask a specific question: "Do they cite official Google documentation as supporting evidence for their recommendations?" It goes further, and names the category directly. If an agency has advice on optimizing for AI experiences, which Google itself puts in quotation marks as "AEO" and "GEO" services, Google says to check whether that advice is aligned with its own guidance on generative AI features.
That is a test with a right answer, and a lot of AI-search pitches fail it. Google's generative AI guidance says structured data is not required for AI search, that there is no special markup to add, and that Google Search ignores llms.txt files. An agency selling you schema or an llms.txt as an AI visibility tactic is selling against Google's published position.
What should worry you: recommendations sourced to a blog post, a conference talk or "our experience", when a Google page exists that says otherwise.
2. What results do you expect, and in what timeframe?
Google's question, verbatim from its list. The useful part is comparing the answer against what Google says about timing: some changes take effect in a few hours, others take several months, you should generally wait a few weeks before assessing whether anything worked, and not all changes produce a noticeable impact at all.
What should worry you: a confident number of days attached to a ranking position. Any specific timeline, ours included, is an estimate drawn from experience rather than something Google publishes, and it should be presented that way.
3. What access do you need, and what will the audit actually produce?
Google is precise here in a way worth quoting when you negotiate: consider carefully what is involved and "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)". On the deliverable, it says an audit "should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved", and that if an agency guarantees first place, "find someone else".
What should worry you: a request for write access or profile ownership before any work has been agreed, and an audit that arrives as a list of scores without an estimate of the work behind them.
4. Is my business even eligible for a Business Profile?
The first cannabis question, and the fastest way to find out whether you are talking to a specialist. Google names cannabis explicitly in its Business Profile eligibility guidelines, alongside alcohol and weapons, as a category not permitted as a service-area business without a storefront. Eligibility also requires in-person contact with customers during your stated hours.
What a good answer sounds like: an immediate yes or no based on whether you have a storefront, and awareness that a store which also delivers is eligible on the strength of the store. What should worry you: an offer to rank a delivery-only operation in the map results.
5. What do you plan to do with my menu?
There are two documented traps here, and a competent answer names both. The Products section of your Business Profile is not open to you: profile products are governed by Shopping policy, and Shopping policy prohibits recreational drugs and psychoactive substances. Separately, the menu property in local structured data is scoped by Google to food establishments, so it is not the markup for a cannabis product list however naturally the word fits.
What should worry you: a plan to load your menu into your profile's Products section, or markup that uses the menu property on your product page. Both are outside Google's documented use, and one of them touches a policy whose enforcement mechanism is suspension.
6. How do you measure my position, and is that number yours or Google's?
Almost every cannabis agency, us included, sells some form of grid tracking, often expressed as a Share of Local Voice percentage. Here is the thing to know before you buy it: Google publishes neither. We searched Google's local ranking documentation and its Business Profile performance documentation on September 8, 2026 for "grid", "share of local voice" and "local voice", and got no hits on either page.
That does not make a grid useless. It samples a factor Google does document, since distance is measured from the person searching rather than from your store, and a single check at your own address answers a question no customer asks. It does mean the number is the agency's measurement rather than a Google metric, and Google's own warning applies: third-party tools have no access to its internal ranking data, and no tool is "approved by Google".
What should worry you: a score presented as though Google issued it, or a dashboard metric nobody will explain the derivation of.
7. What do I keep if I leave?
Google settles this one too, and most contracts are silent on it. Anyone managing a Business Profile they do not own is an "authorized representative", and Google requires them to never claim a profile without the owner's express consent, to work directly with the owner on verification, to keep the owner informed about actions they will take, and to "transfer Business Profile ownership to the business owner immediately upon request". Failing those can result in suspension of the profile and the Google Account.
Extend the same question to everything else. Who holds the domain, the site, the content, the review history and the analytics? Google adds one more line worth remembering: "You should never have to link to an SEO."
What should worry you: a profile claimed under the agency's account, content on a domain the agency controls, or a required link in your footer.
The warning signs Google itself publishes
These are not our red flags. They are Google's, and you can check every one against the page they come from.
- Guaranteed rankings, a claimed "special relationship" with Google, or a "priority submit" to Google.
- Secrecy about what will be done. Google's words: be careful if a company will not clearly explain its intentions, and ask for explanations if something is unclear.
- Unsolicited email offering to fix your search presence. Google says to treat it with the same skepticism as diet-pill spam, and notes it receives the same emails about google.com.
- Link popularity schemes or submitting your site to thousands of search engines, which Google calls typically useless exercises.
- Tools presented as "acceptable" or "approved" by Google Search. None are, and none see Google's ranking data.
One consequence makes all of this concrete. Google states that if an agency creates deceptive content on your behalf, your site could be removed entirely from its index, and that ultimately you are responsible for the actions of any company you hire. The penalty lands on the dispensary, not on the agency. If it goes wrong in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission takes complaints about deceptive business practices.
How to check an agency's claims, including ours
Three checks, in ascending order of usefulness.
Search for what they sell. An agency selling cannabis search visibility should be findable for the terms it sells. Not proof of client results, but a fair first filter.
Ask for Search Console, not a rank tracker. Screenshots of a third-party tool are a vendor measuring itself with its own instrument. Impressions, clicks and average position from Search Console, with the export date visible, are considerably harder to dress up.
Check references, as Google advises. Ask past clients whether the service was useful, whether the agency was easy to work with, and what actually changed.
Apply all three to us. Ask us for the Search Console export on the call and we will open it in front of you rather than send you a screenshot, which is the standard we are asking you to hold everyone else to. What you can check before that call without asking anyone: every figure on our market guides traces to a named state agency file with the date it was published and the date we read it, every claim on our comparisons carries the date we checked it and links the competitor's own material, and our reporting standard is written down before you are a client rather than after. Judge the method, then make us prove it.
How the named cannabis agencies compare
We publish four comparisons against the agencies we are most often weighed against, each written concede-first, each claim dated and each competitor's own material linked so you can check it. Corrections are invited and re-verified.
- Bud Authority runs the largest geographic footprint in cannabis search. The comparison is footprint against verifiability.
- Deeproots builds suburb-level pages around dispensary locations, an approach we also use, so the comparison is about execution rather than idea.
- Range Marketing productized answer-engine work in cannabis before almost anyone, which makes it the sharpest comparison on AI search.
- Cannabis Creative Group is a full-service brand and design agency, so the real question is which problem you are hiring for.
The comparisons hub holds all four and the method behind them.
What Nearfront is, and what it is not
What it is: one marketed service, local search visibility for licensed cannabis dispensaries with storefronts, run against the documentation quoted throughout this page and reported against customer actions rather than screenshots. Every market guide on this site is built from a state agency's own file with the dates attached, which is the same standard we apply to a client's market before touching anything.
What it is not: a brand or design agency, a link vendor, a marketplace-advertising buyer, or a company that will tell you a number one ranking is available. We do not sell packages of links, we do not publish a price list because engagements are scoped individually, and we have no results on this domain to point at yet beyond the log above.
The entry point is a free data audit, which by Google's own description of what an audit should be gives you realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved. We ask for read access to Search Console at that stage, because that is the access Google says to grant. You keep the findings either way.
Frequently asked questions
How do I choose a cannabis SEO agency?
Start by deciding whether you need one, because Google's own hiring guidance says a small local business can probably do much of the work itself. If you do want help, interview candidates against Google's published questions, add four cannabis-specific ones about Business Profile eligibility, your menu, how position is measured and what you keep if you leave, and check business references. Google also says to be wary of guaranteed rankings, claimed special relationships with Google, and secrecy about what will be done.
Do I need a cannabis SEO agency at all?
Often not, and Google says so plainly: if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself, starting with its own SEO starter guide. Profile completeness, accurate hours, a compliant review request process, consistent listings and clean markup are all owner-level work. The parts that are genuinely hard alone are measurement across a trade area, attribution from menu to search, and keeping it current while running a store.
What questions does Google say to ask an SEO?
Ten of them, published on its hiring page: can you show examples of previous work and success stories; do you follow the Google Search Essentials; what results do you expect and in what timeframe; how do you measure success; what is your experience in my industry; in my country or city; developing international sites; how long have you been in business; how can I expect to communicate with you; and will you share every change you make along with the reasoning. Google adds a soft test: see whether the agency is interested in your business at all, and if not, find someone who is.
Can any agency guarantee a dispensary a number one ranking?
No. Google states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and says to beware of anyone claiming guaranteed rankings, a special relationship with Google, or a priority submission. Its local ranking page says separately that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. For a dispensary the point cuts twice, since the ads around the map results are closed to cannabis anyway.
What access should a cannabis SEO agency get to my accounts?
At the audit stage, read access to Search Console and nothing more. Google's wording is explicit: consider carefully what is involved and only grant read access at this stage, not write access. It also says an audit should give you realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved, and that anyone guaranteeing you first place is someone to walk away from.
Who owns my Google Business Profile if I hire an agency?
You do, and Google sets the rule rather than leaving it to a contract. Anyone managing a profile they do not own is an authorized representative, and Google requires them never to claim a profile without the owner's express consent, to work directly with the owner on verification, to keep the owner informed about the actions they will take, and to transfer ownership back to the owner immediately upon request. Failing those can suspend the profile and the Google Account.
How can I check an agency's own search performance?
Search for the terms it sells against and see whether it ranks for them, then ask for its Search Console numbers rather than a screenshot of a rank tracker. Google notes that third-party tools have no access to its internal ranking data and that no tool is approved by Google, so a vendor dashboard is a vendor's measurement. Apply the same test to us: ask for the export on the call and read it yourself.
