What Ask Maps says about your client
Google Maps now answers questions in prose and recommends a handful of businesses instead of showing a three-pack. That answer is built from the profile you manage. Here is how to audit what it says before your client asks.
For years, local search had one scoreboard: the three-pack. Three businesses, a map, and everyone else below the fold. Managing a profile meant managing for that box.
Google Maps now answers questions in prose. Ask it for a plumber who does water heaters on a Sunday and it writes a paragraph, names a few businesses, and explains why. The answer is built from profiles: categories, services, hours, photos, reviews, and the replies to them. Early reports put the number of businesses an answer surfaces at roughly a third of the old three-pack.
That means the profile you manage is no longer competing for a slot. It is being read, summarised, and either recommended or left out. If you have never asked Maps about your own client, someone else has.
The audit
This takes about fifteen minutes per client. Do it from a phone, signed out, from the client's service area if you can.
- Ask the questions a customer would ask. Not the keyword. The question. "Who can fix a slab leak in [city] this week?" "Is there an emergency dentist near [neighborhood] open Saturday?" Write down five for the client's top services.
- Record whether the client appears, and what Maps says about them. The sentence matters more than the position. If Maps says the business "appears to offer" a service, the profile is not stating it plainly.
- Check the facts it used. Hours, services, attributes, and the most recent reviews. Every claim in the answer traces back to a field. A wrong hour or a missing service is a wrong answer at scale.
- Read the reviews the way Maps does. It leans on recent reviews and on whether the business replied. A profile with fifty unanswered reviews reads as unattended.
- Compare against who did appear. Open their profiles. The differences are usually boring: a more specific primary category, a services list that is actually filled in, photos from this year.
What to fix first
In most audits the fixes are the same ones an honest profile checklist has always asked for, and that is the point. Ask Maps did not invent new signals. It made the old ones legible.
- Make the services list say what the business sells, in the words a customer uses.
- Set the primary category to the thing the client wants to be recommended for, not the broadest thing they do.
- Answer every review, and answer the recent ones first.
- Keep hours current, including holidays. An answer that sends someone to a closed door is the fastest way to lose the recommendation.
- Post something this month. Not for the post. For the signal that someone is home.
Do it before the client does
The easiest version of this conversation is the one you start. "Here is what Maps says about you today, here is what we changed, and here is what it says now." The hardest version is the one that starts with a screenshot from the client.
If you want us to run the audit, send us the business name. We will send back what we see.