Local Dominator

Mobile and desktop rank the local pack almost identically.

We tested it across 40 keywords, 25 US metros and 703 measured locations, because the advice to track mobile separately gets repeated constantly and rarely gets checked.

The result: 99.85% concordance. The two device types returned the same businesses in the same order, not merely similar in aggregate.

Why it is worth knowing:

Device is not where your ranking differences come from. If mobile and desktop look different in your tool, check location settings and personalisation before blaming the device.

It simplifies reporting. One less dimension to split, one less thing to explain in a meeting.

It frees attention for the variables that genuinely move results, starting with proximity.

A service area business with no storefront should not be showing an address, and the radius matters less than most people think.

Two mistakes we see over and over:

Leaving the address visible when there is no public location. If customers cannot come to you, hiding the address is not optional, and getting this wrong risks suspension rather than a gentle correction.

Setting the service area to the largest radius available. A service area does not create ranking eligibility across that whole region. Proximity to the searcher still governs the map pack, so an enormous radius mostly signals a lack of focus.

What works better is listing the specific towns, suburbs or postcodes you genuinely serve, then supporting the important ones with real content on the site.

A test worth applying to every entry: if someone in that area called right now, would you take the job today? If not, it does not belong in the service area.

Google has extended the aggregator and supplier units in Search to handle local business queries.

Noted on 18 September. Those units previously surfaced product and supplier listings; they can now answer questions about local businesses directly on the results page.

What this means for local businesses and agencies:

The number of surfaces a customer can land on keeps growing, and most of them are fed by the same profile data. Categories, services and attributes are doing work in places you are not looking at.

Rank tracking that only watches the map pack is measuring a shrinking share of the page. A business can hold position three and still lose the click to a unit sitting above it.

None of this needs a new tactic. It raises the cost of a thin profile, because thin data cannot populate a surface you did not know existed.

If you report on visibility, add a line about which surfaces you actually measure, so nobody mistakes a map pack position for the whole picture.

The average local business is invisible to 92% of the AI search engines we checked.

That comes from our own study of 12,535 real businesses across the major AI assistants. It is not a ranking measure. It is whether the business was named at all when someone asked for a recommendation in its category and city.

Three things stood out:

Visibility in one assistant predicted very little about the others. Businesses named readily by one were absent from another entirely.

Traditional local rankings did not carry over. Plenty of profiles sitting comfortably in the map pack went unmentioned.

The businesses that did appear consistently had specific, detailed profiles and a steady flow of recent reviews.

The uncomfortable part is that none of this surfaces in a normal report. A profile can hold its map pack position while quietly going unnamed in the channel where a growing share of the questions are being asked.

Moving a business to a new address is one of the few profile edits that can cost you rankings outright.

A profile carries history tied to its location. Change the address carelessly and you can reset relevance in the new area while losing the standing you had in the old one.

A safer sequence:

Update the website first. New address on the contact page, the footer and the schema, then give it a few days to be crawled.

Change the profile address next, and nothing else. No category edits, no name changes, no new photos the same day. One change at a time is far easier to diagnose if something moves.

Then work the citations, largest aggregators first. Conflicting old addresses scattered across the web are what stretch a move out for months.

Run a grid scan before you touch anything, and another two weeks after. Without the before, you are guessing about the after.

Expect a dip. Three to four weeks to settle is normal, and pulling levers inside that window usually makes it take longer.

The option to mark a Business Profile permanently closed appears to have been removed.

Spotted in the week of 22 September. The setting that let an owner flag a location as permanently closed is no longer where it was, and Google has not announced a replacement path.

What this means for local businesses and agencies:

Closures still need recording, and right now the route is unclear. If you manage a portfolio where locations open and close, a process you rely on has quietly broken.

A profile left open after a business closes is worse than no profile. It keeps collecting calls, direction requests, and eventually one-star reviews from people who drove to a locked door.

Until the supported path is confirmed, mark the location closed everywhere you do still control, starting with the website and the major aggregators, so the public signals agree even while the profile lags behind.

If you find the current route, document it for your team. This is the kind of change that gets discovered at the worst possible moment.

A grid scan shows you where you are invisible. It does not tell you what to do on Monday.

That gap is where most reporting stops. The heat map gets pasted into a deck, the client sees red, and nobody turns the pattern into an action list.

This walkthrough works backwards from a finished grid: reading the shape of the red, separating a category problem from a proximity problem, deciding which locations are worth fighting for, and what to change first.

Worth a watch if you send grid screenshots to clients and get asked "so what now" more often than you would like.

https://youtu.be/ukw7O1nxfFg

Every click from your Business Profile lands in analytics as organic or direct unless you tag it.

That matters at renewal. Calls and direction requests are visible inside the profile, but website visits get absorbed into the same bucket as everything else, and the profile ends up looking like it did nothing.

Add UTM parameters to the website link on the profile. Something like utm_source=google, utm_medium=organic, utm_campaign=gbp.

Use the same three values across every profile you manage so the numbers stay comparable. Running multiple locations? Put the location in the campaign value rather than inventing a new source.

Two cautions. Tag the main website link and the booking link only, not menu or order links, since those often pass through third parties that strip parameters. And set it once, then leave it alone.

Next month that traffic shows up on its own line, and the conversation about value gets easier.

Scammers have been uploading AI-generated photos to Google Maps through the contributor program, with a fraudulent phone number baked into the image itself.

The mechanism is simple. The photo passes as a normal user contribution. Someone looking for a number reads it off the picture instead of the profile, calls the scammer, and the business never learns the call happened.

What this means for local businesses and agencies:

Photo moderation is now part of profile hygiene, not a nice-to-have. User-contributed images need reviewing on the same cadence as reviews.

The damage is invisible in your reporting. Calls that never reach you do not show up as a drop in anything you measure, so the profile looks healthy while the leads go elsewhere.

Service-area businesses and trades are the obvious targets, because callers expect to dial rather than click through to a site.

Worth doing this week: open the Photos tab on every profile you manage, filter to user-contributed images, and look for any photo with a phone number visible in it. Report those directly to Google.