The 2026 Local Search Ranking factors report has officially been published. This is the closest thing we get to a source of truth for the factors that Google uses to rank businesses and their search results. And while the report emphasises local businesses, I think it's valuable for any business to look at.
This is a report that Darren Shaw from White Spark puts out every couple of years. Because, of course, Google doesn't tell us what the ranking factors are. So Darren just gathers a bunch of the local SEO.
Experts and has them answer a grueling two hour long survey and then aggregates together the results. So what you get is the average opinion of a bunch of the top experts in local SEO. I get super excited whenever this report comes out.
It's like Christmas in the SEO community. This is the first year Darren asked me to participate as one of the experts. So thank you, Darren, for including me as one of the 47 local SEO experts.
I feel honored to be included among some of the people I've looked up to over the last 16 years. I just thought it'd be fun to go over some of the most interesting bits of the report. But you should definitely check out the whole thing.
It's just a treasure trove of good information, and Darren does a really good job of taking a ton of information and making it very digestible. So on the Local side if you're trying to rank in Google Maps, the main factors have pretty much remained consistent for several years now. You need to make sure you're in the right primary category.
If you can get a keyword into the name of your business, that'll help you rank for similar keywords. And then of course, where your business is verified or where you're located is a huge factor. You'll always rank much better around your business.
So what has changed? Well, reviews have always been very important, but this year everyone agreed that how recent those reviews are is more important than how many reviews you get. In other words, as I said before, it's more important how many reviews you got this month and how many reviews you have total.
But again, the report doesn't just talk about local rankings. It also talks about organic rankings and ranking in AI. This is the first year of the report talks about AI.
One thing that most of us seem to agree on is that links don't matter as much as they used to. They still do matter, specifically for organic ranking, but they matter less than they used to. And for ranking in AIs, they matter even less.
And I'm using the term ranking in AI. That's not quite accurate. You don't rank in AI, you get recommended by AI.
But everyone trying to get recommended by AI. Is an SEO. So we're using SEO language.
There are a few other things that have become more important largely due to AI. Citations, for example, have become less and less important every year for the last several years. This year they're making a comeback because citations are very important for A.
I. If you don't know, a citation is just a mention of your name, address, and phone number on a website. This is typically going to be on some kind of business directory.
That being said, I still don't think spamming your business across a bunch of directories is going to make a big difference. We typically still do this for our clients cause it's very cost effective. But if you look at how ChatGPT, Google's AI mode actually use directories, they have like one to three that they care about per industry, similar to how Google is.
The experts also agree that it's suddenly very important to get on these top 10 lists. However, again, when you look at where ChatGPT is looking, most of the top 10 lists are produced by these same directories. In fact, that's why AI is looking at these directories in the first place.
These are automatically generated lists. I have another video talking about how you should figure out which directories the AI. Looks at for your industry and then figure out how they rank businesses so that you can get to the top of these lists.
Typically it's just by getting more reviews So that's just a few highlights. Go check out the report for yourself.
