How to check your Google Maps ranking across your service area

To check your Google Maps ranking, run the same search from several points across your service area with your account and your history taken out of it and the browser’s location set to each point, and write down the position at each point. One search from your own desk is one data point about one person. The useful version takes about an hour the first time, costs nothing, and gives you a map instead of a number.

Why one search isn’t a check

Google’s local ranking page names three factors, and one of them is distance, which it defines as “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”. The same page says that “if a customer doesn’t share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location”. So every search has a location in it, and the location is the searcher’s, not yours.

Google’s search help lists where that location comes from: the device itself, a home or work address you have set, “areas that you have searched for in the past”, and the IP address, which is “roughly based on geography”. A search from your shop, signed in, on the phone you use to look up your own business every week, has all four pulling the result toward you.

The reasons behind this, and what the shapes on a finished grid mean, are in why you rank first at your shop and twelfth across town. This post is the procedure.

Step one: switch off everything that is you

Three switches, and what each one actually does, according to Google’s own pages.

All three together give you a clean searcher standing exactly where you are standing. That is still the one place where nobody is closer than you. Step two moves the searcher.

Step two: put the searcher somewhere else

Two ways, one documented and one not.

Chrome DevTools, documented. Open the Command Menu (Command+Shift+P on a Mac, Control+Shift+P on Windows), type “sensors” and choose “Show Sensors”. In the Geolocation dropdown pick “Custom location” and enter a latitude and longitude. Chrome’s page describes this as a way to test sites that use the visitor’s location. Then open Google Maps in that tab, allow it to use your location when asked, and search your keyword. The honest caveat: this overrides what the browser reports, not your IP address, and Google does not promise to prefer one over the other. When the map centers on the coordinates you typed, the override took.

Editing the Maps URL, undocumented. After a search, the address bar shows something like /maps/search/plumber/@33.4484,-112.0740,13z. Changing the numbers after the @ and reloading recenters the map and reruns the search there. Google’s Maps URL documentation describes only the ?api=1&query= form and says that “if no location is specified, Google Maps attempts to find listings nearby your current location”. The @ form is what the app happens to produce today. It works, it is not promised, and it can stop.

Coordinates for a point: right-click any spot on Google Maps and the first line of the menu is its latitude and longitude. Copy it.

Step three: nine points, one spreadsheet

A grid tool does this with 25 or 81 points. You can do the version that answers most questions with nine.

1. Put your address in the middle.
2. Pick a spacing: about half a mile in a dense city, one to two miles where the houses spread out.
3. Add the eight points around it, one in each direction, at that spacing. Get each one’s coordinates from the right-click menu.
4. For each point, set the location, search the keyword, and write down your position in the map results, or “not in top 20” if you scroll to the end without seeing yourself.
5. Write down who holds positions one to three at that point. The names repeat, and the ones that repeat are the competitors you are measuring against.

The spreadsheet has six columns: date, keyword, point, your position, the top three, notes. Nine points and three keywords is 27 searches, which is the hour.

What a grid tool adds

The nine-point method has a limit: it is slow to repeat, and nine points cannot show where the edge of your reach really is. Grid tools run the same search from every point of a 5×5, 7×7 or 9×9 grid at once and color the map.

Local Falcon, read on its pricing page on October 3, 2026, defines a credit as “one data point, often referred to as a ‘map pin’”, so a 5×5 scan is 25 credits and a 9×9 is 81. New accounts get 100 free credits. The Starter plan is $24.99 a month for 7,500 credits, and the company says “the average user typically starts scanning about 10 keywords”. Whitespark and BrightLocal sell the same instrument; their pages could not be opened for this post, so no feature or price is quoted for either.

The arithmetic for one business: three keywords on a 9×9 grid is 243 credits a month, well inside the cheapest plan, and the free credits cover one full scan before you pay. The thing to resist is scanning twenty keywords because the credits are there. The three that bring calls are the three to track.

Reading the log month over month

A single check tells you where you are. The second one, from the same points with the same keywords, tells you whether anything moved, and that is the only question worth paying for.

• Your own address, low position. Not a distance problem. Check the primary category and verification before anything else; if you are absent everywhere, start with the checks for a business that isn’t showing up.
• Center strong, one direction weak. Look at the top three at those points. A competitor’s address usually sits there.
• Outer ring empty. That is where your reach ends. Decide whether the towns beyond it deserve a page of their own, and measure again six weeks after you publish one.
• The same names in the top three everywhere. Those are the businesses whose reviews and links you are competing with, and the ones whose profiles are worth reading closely.

Keep the log simple enough that you will still fill it in next March. Date, keyword, point, position, top three, notes. The notes column is where you record what you changed and when, so that the next month’s row has something to be compared against. The broader timeline, including when profile edits and new pages tend to show, is in how long local SEO takes.

The five ways a check goes wrong

1. Checking from the shop, signed in. You are at the one point where you are closest to the searcher, with your own history helping. The result is real and useless.
2. Checking one keyword. The service you think of first is not always the one customers type. Use the performance report’s search terms.
3. Checking daily. Results vary by device, history and moment. A position that moves from four to six and back is noise. Monthly, same points, same words.
4. Changing the grid. Moving the points or the spacing between runs makes the comparison meaningless. Fix them in the spreadsheet and never edit the old rows.
5. Trusting the URL trick forever. The @ coordinates are undocumented. When a run looks wrong, confirm the map actually recentered before you write anything down.

The first check takes an hour and the second takes less. After that, the log is the one place where you can see whether the month’s work did anything, from the places your customers actually search.