Why Google Maps shows only three businesses, and what decides which three
The map pack is the three names Google shows before anything else. Most customers never scroll past it. Here is how it is built, and why you can be first on one street and missing on the next.
Search “dentist near me” on your phone. Before any website, before any ad, there is a map with three names. That box is where local customers come from, and it only has three seats.
People call it the map pack, the local pack, the three-pack. Whatever the name, if you are not in it, you are on the page after the page that people read.
How Google fills the three seats
Three ingredients, and Google has said so publicly for years.
- Distance: how far your listing is from where the person is standing right now. Not from the city centre. From them.
- Relevance: how well your listing matches what they typed. Category first, then services, description, and the words in your reviews.
- Prominence: how much Google trusts you. Reviews, their pace and their replies, photos, how long the listing has existed, mentions of your business elsewhere.
Distance is why the pack changes from one corner to the next. Relevance and prominence are why, at the same corner, one business beats another.
Why checking from your own shop tells you nothing
Standing behind your counter, you are the closest business to yourself. Distance is maxed out. You will see yourself in the pack, and you will believe everything is fine. Your customer, four streets away, is closer to two competitors, and your relevance and prominence now have to make up the difference. That is the search that matters, and you have never run it.
Over 400 reviews, and invisible from most of its own neighbourhood. From inside the practice, everything looked fine.
A scan measures you from 9 points around your address, the way customers actually search, and shows where you are in the pack and where you are not. See what Watch would tell you about your listing, $29 a month.
What you can do about each ingredient
Distance: nothing, unless you open a second location. Relevance: fix the category, fill the services, get reviews that mention what you do and where. Prominence: reviews, replies, photos, every week, more than the three businesses ahead of you. That last sentence is the whole job, and the only question each week is which one is your biggest gap.
See at which of the 9 points around you Google shows you, and who it shows instead
Free, about a minute, no account. We never ask for access to your Google profile: everything is measured from what any customer can see.
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