Why your map pack rankings look different from every seat in the city

Ask a local business how they rank and you will usually get one number. Ask their customers and you will get a dozen different answers, because proximity is the strongest ranking factor in the map pack and it changes with every hundred metres.

A geo-grid replaces that single number with a matrix. You sample rankings from a grid of coordinates around the business — typically 7x7 or 9x9 across a radius that matches your real catchment — and you get a heat map of visibility.

The first time a client sees theirs, the reaction is nearly always the same: surprise at how quickly the green fades. A business ranking first at its own doorstep often falls out of the pack entirely two kilometres away, which is where most of the population lives.

What you do about it depends on the shape of the fade. A sharp, symmetric drop usually means the profile is fine and the problem is competitive density. An asymmetric fade points at a competitor with stronger signals on one side of town.

The levers are unglamorous: category precision, review velocity and recency, local content that genuinely serves the neighbourhood, and links from organisations in the area. The grid tells you where to point them.