How the Google map pack decides who shows up

The three things Google says it weighs

When someone searches “furnace repair” in Chilliwack, Google shows a map with three businesses under it. That block is the map pack, and for a lot of service businesses it is where the phone calls start. Google is unusually open about how it fills it. Its own help page names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. [1]

The same page says something most marketing pitches leave out: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. [1] Ads can sit above the map, but a position inside it is not for sale. Anyone who promises you one is guessing.

Relevance: does your profile match the search?

Google calls relevance how well a profile matches what someone is searching for. For a contractor, three things carry most of it:

• Your primary category. In the largest expert survey of local ranking factors it came first of every factor, ahead of distance. [2] A roofer filed under “Contractor” is competing with a hand tied behind its back. How to choose it.
• Your services list. Every job you want calls for should be on the profile in plain words: “Heat pump installation”, not a keyword list.
• The page your profile links to. A profile pointing at a home page that never mentions drain cleaning is weaker for “drain cleaning” than one pointing at a page about exactly that.

Distance: the factor you cannot move

Distance is how far the business is from the person searching, or from the town they typed. It is the reason your position is not one number. A plumber in Abbotsford can be first for a customer on the next street and not appear at all for a customer in Mission, on the same afternoon, for the same search.

You cannot move your shop, and you should not invent an address to get closer: a mailbox, or a shared-office desk with no signage, no staff and no customers, is not allowed on a profile. [5] What you can do is make the other two factors strong enough that you keep showing further from home. How far that reach goes is exactly what a geo-grid measures, and why it varies so much is its own guide.

Prominence: how well known you are

Prominence is Google's word for reputation, online and off. Reviews are the biggest part of it that a service business controls: the rating, the number, and above all a steady flow. In a 2025 study of 8,186 home-service businesses, monthly review volume mattered more than the total, and rankings started to fall after about 18 days with no new review. [3]

The rest of prominence is the wider web: links from real local sites, consistent listings across directories, mentions in the local paper or a supplier's “find an installer” page.

The quiet one: open when they search

One factor climbed sharply in the latest expert survey: whether the business is open at the time of the search. It entered the top five. [2] For an emergency trade that is a strong reason to keep hours and holiday hours exact, and a strong reason not to claim 24/7 unless somebody really answers the phone at 2 a.m.

What you control, and what you do not

Three shortcuts that backfire

The map now shares the screen with ads

One more thing has changed. A practitioner study published in June 2026 tracked ads inside the local pack rising from 1% of searches to 22%, and Local Services Ads above it from 11% to 31%. [4] The free spots are still there, but for urgent searches in trades like restoration or plumbing they now sit a little lower on the screen. That makes the three free spots more contested, not less.

Why one search from your office tells you nothing

Because distance changes the result at every address, searching your own trade from your office only tells you what the map looks like at your office. Your customers are everywhere else. The only honest picture is a measurement at many points across your service area, repeated on the same points over time, which is what the free scan starts and what weekly tracking keeps up.

How much it varies is measurable. When we searched Google Maps at 1,620 points across 10 Canadian cities, no HVAC company was in the top 3 across even a fifth of its city: the full study.