How Google decides which local business to recommend,
and the fifteen-minute Friday check

What Google says decides local results

Google publishes how its local results work. Three things, in its own words.

• Relevance: "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for." Google says complete business information helps it match you to the right searches.
• Distance: "how far each business is from the customer who's searching." You cannot change where you are, and nobody can change it for you.
• Prominence: "how well-known a business is," which Google says includes links to your website, the number of reviews and the ratings, and your standing in the ordinary web results.

Google adds four practical points on the same page: verified businesses are more likely to show up; businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up; photos and videos help show customers what you offer; and responding to reviews shows that you value customers' feedback. And it says this, which is worth reading twice when the phone rings: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

That is the whole list. Nothing on it costs money. All of it costs attention.

What Google says about the AI results

Google's own guide for site owners about its generative AI features, last updated on 2026-07-10, says that optimizing for those features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." It says plainly that you do not need machine-readable AI files, you do not need to break your content into pieces, you do not need to write in a special way for AI, and there is no special markup to add. What it asks for is the same as before: content that is unique and useful rather than the same thing every competitor says, good images and video, a page that works well on a phone, and a site that is indexed normally. It also notes a control in Search Console that decides whether your site can appear in and help ground those AI features; check that yours is on.

So when someone offers to sell you "AI optimization files" or "special AI schema", Google's guide is the reason to say no. The same guide is also the reason to say yes to the boring work: a page that actually answers what your customers ask, with your real photos, that loads fast on a phone.

What matters, in the order it matters

For a local business, the work that decides whether Google recommends you is short, and most of it is administrative.

1. A verified profile with everything filled in. Your exact category, your full address, your hours including holidays, your phone number, your service area, and the attributes customers ask about: parking, wheelchair access, appointments, payment types. When the hours are wrong on Google, the customer who arrives at a locked door leaves the review that costs you the next ten customers.
2. Real photographs, updated. Your storefront, your team at work, your finished jobs, your menu or your treatment rooms, taken on a phone in daylight. Not stock, not renders. Add a few every month.
3. Reviews, asked for and answered. Ask every customer, using the link or QR code Google gives you, never with a reward and never only the happy ones (both break Google's rules). Answer every review, good and bad, within a day; most businesses do not (a study of 229,882 Google reviews on small businesses in August 2026 found 9.8% of one-star reviews got a reply), so answering puts you ahead of nearly everyone. Our guide on answering a bad review has the exact words.
4. A website that answers the questions you get asked on the phone. Prices or how pricing works, the areas you serve, how to book, parking, insurance you accept, how long things take, what to bring. One plain page per question, with your real photos. This is the "relevance" Google means, and it is also what an assistant like Gemini or ChatGPT quotes when someone asks it about businesses like yours.
5. Being mentioned elsewhere. Your chamber of commerce, your suppliers' "where to buy" pages, the local paper, the trade association, the sponsorship page of the youth team. Each is a link and a mention that Google counts as prominence, and each is one email from you.

What to decline, and why

The phone calls sell five things. Here is what to say to each, with Google's own guidance as the reason.

What is worth paying for, if you would rather not do it yourself: someone to take the photographs, someone to keep the profile and the website current every week, someone to answer the reviews and the messages within the hour, and someone to write the pages that answer your customers' questions in your voice. That is a job, with a name, and it is the one to hire.

The fifteen-minute Friday check

Two reports, both free, both already yours. Do this every Friday with a coffee, and write four numbers on a card.

In your Business Profile (the Performance tab; five minutes). Google counts, for the period you choose, the calls made from your listing, the messages, the bookings, the direction requests and the clicks to your website, and it shows the search terms people used to find you (those update monthly). Write down the calls, the directions and the website clicks for the last seven days, next to last week's. If a number fell by a lot, check three things first: your hours, your phone number, and whether a photo or a post was removed.

In Search Console (the Performance report; five minutes). For your website, Google shows the clicks, the impressions, the click-through rate and the average position, by the query people typed and by the page they landed on. Sort by impressions. The queries near the top that you have no page for are next month's page. Write down the total clicks for the week.

Then five minutes of doing. Answer any review that arrived. Post one real photo from the week. Fix anything the two reports made you notice: a wrong hour, a page that gets impressions and no clicks (its title is the problem), a question people are typing that your site does not answer yet.

Four numbers on a card, every Friday: calls, directions, website clicks, search clicks. In three months you will know more about how customers find you than any agency will tell you on a call, and you will have paid nothing for it.

How Allying does this

When a business posts the job that carries this work, most often an SEO specialist, a marketing manager or a website designer, Allying does that job as the employee described in the posting: the profile kept complete and current, the pages that answer the questions the phone gets asked, written in the business's voice with its real photos, the reviews and messages answered within the hour under the rules the owner set, and the Friday numbers read and reported, with a note that says what changed and what to do about it. Nothing is bought, nothing is faked, and no page is made for its own sake; the guide above is the standard the work is held to.

The first week of the job is done before any conversation, so an owner sees the audit of their own listing and site, and the first pages drafted, before deciding anything. The price is 30% of the posted salary, billed monthly, with each job's minimum on the pricing page. If you go ahead after the first week, a free week starts with a short call, and the first charge comes on day 8.

The work is done with AI and overseen by a named specialist who answers for it.

Mae Santos, Allying's co-founder, is the person you talk to; write to hello@allying.com and she answers. The work is reviewed before it reaches you.

Questions owners ask

Related pages

• How to hire an SEO specialist
• How to hire a website designer
• Allying vs a marketing agency
• How to answer a bad review
• How to hire, job by job
• How Allying compares
• Every guide