Insights
Writing on measurement, evidence
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Original research on what actually ranks, converts and gets cited, measured across real samples with the data attached. Search by topic or business type, or request a study of your own.
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How many Google reviews do you need for the map pack? Eight trades, the same 22 cities
Eight trades, the same 22 US cities, 3,031 Google Maps listings. The median listing runs from 13 reviews to 621 by trade and market size. There is no single number, but one rule holds in all eight.
ReadCan an independent physical therapy clinic reach the Google Maps top three? 384 listings in 22 cities
The Google Maps top 20 for physical therapy in 22 US cities. Chains, health systems and physician groups hold 46 percent of listings and 42 percent of top-three slots. The median listing has 75 reviews.
ReadDo Monday-closed salons get their Google Maps spot back? 349 salons, Monday against Wednesday
The same 22 cities searched on Monday and again on Wednesday, 349 salons matched. Salons closed all Monday rose a median of 2 places, 3 in large metros, and the Monday-open salons gave them back.
ReadDoes closing on Monday cost a hair salon its Google Maps spot? 424 listings in 22 cities
We read the hours on 424 hair salon listings in the Google Maps top 20 on a Monday morning in 22 cities. 35 percent close Monday. In metros they sit three places lower; in small cities the list barely notices.
ReadDo the national brands own Google Maps for movers? 359 moving companies in 22 cities, measured
We sorted 359 moving companies in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 US cities into brands and independents. In large metros brands hold 45 percent of top-three slots, on review volume, not rating. Small cities differ.
ReadDoes closing on Saturday cost a dentist their Google Maps spot? 347 practices, Thursday against Saturday
The same 22 cities, searched Thursday and Saturday. In large metros, dentists closed Saturday fell a median of 3 places and open ones rose 4. In small cities the list barely moved.
ReadDoes closing on Friday cost a dentist their Google Maps spot? 366 practices, Thursday against Friday
We searched the same 22 cities for a dentist on a Thursday and again on Friday at the same hour. Practices closed all of Friday fell a median of 2 places, 7 in large metros, while practices that were open moved up.
ReadDoes a dentist need Saturday hours to rank in Google Maps? 430 listings in 22 cities
We read the hours on 430 dental practice listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. 12 percent list Saturday hours, the top three look the same as the rest of the list, and 43 percent keep a four-day week.
ReadDoes a locksmith need a street address to make the map pack top three?
We read 282 locksmith listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. In the top three, 94 percent show a street address in the searched city, and in small cities nearly half the results were key-copying kiosks.
ReadDoes a carpet cleaner need a big website to reach the map pack top three?
We measured the websites behind 359 carpet cleaning listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. The median independent site has 25 pages, and the top three are only a little larger.
ReadHow many Google reviews does a roofer need to reach the map pack top three?
We read 422 roofing contractor listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. In metros the top three hold 1.5 times the market median; in small cities, 4.1 times.
ReadHow big is a page-one fence company website? A median of 88 pages in metros and 20 in small cities
We measured every fence company site on Google page one in 19 US cities. Size did not sort the list, and company profiles on Yelp, MapQuest and Facebook held twice as many slots as company websites.
ReadShould a house cleaning company link its Google listing to a city page?
We followed the website link on 395 house cleaning listings in 22 cities. Three in four go to the homepage. City-page links are mostly franchises, and among independents they sat no higher.
ReadDoes a garage door company need to list 24-hour hours to rank on Google Maps?
We read the hours on 335 garage door listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. 41 percent say Open 24 hours. Among independent companies, those listings sat no higher than companies keeping ordinary hours.
ReadWhat should a kitchen remodeler's homepage say? We read the ones on Google's page one
We read the homepages of 59 kitchen remodelers on Google's page one in 21 cities. The median used one praise word and one checkable number, and only 2 named a warranty term.
ReadDoes your Google Maps category decide your rank? We read the categories on 432 AC repair listings
We read every category on 432 AC repair listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. The category shown first was rewritten to match the search in most cities, and category count tracked reviews, not position.
ReadCan a painter outside the city limits rank in Google Maps for that city? We checked 404 listings
We read the address on 404 house painter listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. A suburban address does not keep a painter off the list, but it changes what the painter needs to climb it.
ReadWho holds page one for tree removal? One tree company per city, and none in most small cities
We read Google page one for "tree removal" in 20 US cities. Tree companies held 20 percent of the slots. In 6 of 11 small cities, not one organic result was a company that does the work.
ReadHow many Google reviews does it take to reach the map pack top three? We measured 434 electricians
We read 434 electrical contractor listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. Half of those markets have a top three business with fewer than 50 reviews.
ReadDo you need a page for the city you want to rank in? We measured 97 pest control companies
We read the sitemaps of 97 pest control companies ranking on Google page one across 22 cities. Sixty-two percent keep a landing page for the city they rank in, and the median site keeps one, not one per suburb.
ReadDoes the city in your Google listing name move you up the map pack? We measured 428 plumbers
We read 428 plumbing listings in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 cities. Ninety-four percent already carry the service word in the name, and the city in the name stops mattering once franchises come out.
ReadDo you have to blog to rank? 140 chiropractic websites on page one, measured
We measured every chiropractic practice website on Google page one in 22 cities. The median site has one blog URL, and 96 of 120 carry at least one article page that also exists on another practice site.
ReadDo the national daycare brands own Google Maps? 433 daycares, measured
We sorted 433 daycares in the Google Maps top 20 into national brands and independents. Independents held position 1 in 17 of 22 cities, and brands win mostly on review volume.
ReadDo martial arts schools on page one offer a free class? 59 homepages, measured
We read the homepage of every martial arts school on Google page one in 10 US cities. Only 40 percent offer a free class, 31 percent make no new-student offer at all, and the typical school shows 3 of 6 basics.
ReadDoes a perfect 5.0 help an auto repair shop rank? 440 shops in Google Maps, measured
We measured every auto repair shop in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 US cities. Only 10 of 440 had a 5.0. The typical shop sits at 4.7, and review volume, not rating, tracks position.
ReadDoes a lawn care company need a website to rank in Google Maps? 414 businesses, measured
We checked every lawn care listing in the Google Maps top 20 in 11 large metros and 11 small cities. In the metros, 25 of 26 top-three businesses had their own site. In small cities, the answer depends on reviews.
ReadPage one or page two? 122 roofing company websites, measured side by side
We measured every roofer on the first two pages of Google in 11 metros. Page-one and page-two websites look nearly identical. The pages do not: non-roofers hold 45 percent of page one.
ReadWhat a med spa website in the Maps top 20 actually has on it, measured across 22 cities
We measured 409 med spas in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 US metros. The median site carries 3 of 8 conversion and trust features, and not one site carries all 8.
ReadIs the bar lower in a small city? 394 veterinary practices in the Google Maps top 20, measured
We measured veterinary practices ranking in Google Maps across 11 large metros and 11 small cities. The median review count in a small city is 141 against 542 in a metro, but the top three slots cost almost the same.
ReadHow many page-one slots a personal injury firm can actually win, measured across 20 cities
Google page one for "personal injury lawyer" across 20 US metros: directories hold 22 percent of organic slots, firms hold a median of 7 per city, and in two cities firms hold fewer than half.
ReadHow many Google reviews a dental practice needs to show up in Maps, measured across 22 cities
We measured 437 dental practices in the Google Maps top 20 across 22 US metros. The median has 545 reviews and a 4.9 rating. Rating does not separate top from bottom. Review volume does.
ReadWhat a top ten HVAC website actually looks like, measured across twelve markets
We measured 67 HVAC company websites ranking in Google top ten results across twelve US metros. The median carries 378 pages, a quarter publish almost nothing, and site size does not separate the winners from each other.
ReadPodcast intelligence: strategy stated in a competitor's own words
Executive interviews are the least guarded thing a competitor produces. They are also transcribed, dated and public. Where a category has podcasts, this is the highest-signal lane available.
ReadEvery company in the market scored at par on conversion
Not one competitor offered a buyer any way to get a specific answer without waiting on a human. A ranked leaderboard would have declared a winner in that column and hidden the largest opportunity on the board.
ReadOur client was winning every category. That was a bug.
The first live competitive audit had our client leading every lens. It looked like a great result. It was uneven research, and the fix dropped them to second. We shipped the honest number and built a gate so it cannot happen again.
ReadTurning the quarterly review into a strategy meeting
A QBR spent defending spend is a QBR your client experiences as a cost. The same hour spent on what the market did and what to do about it is the meeting that renews the retainer.
ReadWhat to ask your agency for, in one page
Nine questions that will tell you more about the quality of your marketing reporting than any dashboard review. None of them are adversarial and a good agency will welcome all nine.
Read95% of your market is not buying today. Measure accordingly
If most of your market is out of market at any moment, then a measurement system that only counts people raising their hand is describing a small and unrepresentative slice of the thing you care about.
ReadThe llms.txt question, answered with the evidence
We publish an llms.txt file and we will tell you plainly that the evidence says it does almost nothing today. Here is the data, and here is why we ship it anyway.
ReadAre you cited in AI answers? How to check, honestly
AI answers are non-deterministic, which makes "we do not appear in ChatGPT" a much weaker claim than it looks. A testing protocol that produces a defensible finding rather than an anecdote.
ReadWhy we let a human overrule the adversarial checker
We measured what would happen if our skeptical second pass ran automatically. It would have demoted the strongest competitor most and handed our client back first place. A checker tuned to argue, applied mechanically, recreates the bias it was built to remove.
ReadWe audited our own gate and it caught 2 of 7 fabrication classes
Quote verification is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Here are the five fabrication classes it cannot see, why every one of them passes a byte-for-byte check, and what we built as a result.
ReadNegative controls for AI research
A verification step nobody tests is a verification step you are trusting on faith. Plant a deliberately false claim on every run, and fail loudly if it ever gets accepted.
ReadAn AI analyst that cannot contradict the dashboard
Give a language model its own database access and it will eventually quote a number that disagrees with the chart above it. The fix is architectural: make it read through the same code that renders the tile.
ReadThe grounding gate: how to stop an AI research pipeline inventing quotes
The dangerous failure is not invention from nothing. It is a quote that is ninety percent right and ten percent improved. Byte-for-byte verification against a cached source, with rejection rather than flagging.
ReadThe sales solicitation problem, and why the excluded count belongs on the page
Every business with a public phone number receives vendor pitches through the same channels as real inquiries. Excluding them is obvious. Showing how many you excluded is the part almost nobody does.
ReadBlended ad spend hides the exact thing you are comparing
A monthly average spread evenly across days is fine until you compare two date ranges, which is the only reason anybody looks at spend. Range-aware spend costs more to compute and is the only version that survives a question.
ReadReading a competitor's ad library without fooling yourself
Ad transparency records are the best free competitive intelligence available and the easiest to over-read. What they actually prove, what they cannot show, and the findings worth extracting.
ReadDoes not rank is not the same finding as does not exist
Ranking data can tell you a competitor is invisible for a term. Only a direct sweep of their own site can tell you they do not offer the service. Confusing the two sends you after entirely the wrong opportunity.
ReadCapacity or expansion: two hiring signals you must never merge
Ten field technicians and three senior leadership roles are completely different pieces of news. Averaging them into an open-role count destroys the only finding worth having.
ReadWhat a competitor's job postings tell you months before their advertising does
Headcount is the earliest reliable signal of intent. A company hiring for a capability is committing budget to it long before the campaign that announces it, and job boards are public.
ReadHow to build a competitor set you will actually learn from
Most competitive analysis fails at the roster. If you audit the companies you admire rather than the ones you lose to, every finding afterwards is about the wrong market.
ReadWhy there is no pricing page
Every engagement is quoted after a conversation, and there are no prices anywhere inside the product either. That is a deliberate constraint with a reason, not a sales tactic to make you call.
ReadAbsolute scoring beats a ranked leaderboard
A ranking always produces a winner, because sorting always terminates. An absolute standard is willing to report that nobody in a market is doing well, which is exactly when the opportunity is largest.
ReadWhy we publish the scoring rubric where competitors can read it
A standard that only works while it is secret was never a standard. Publishing the rubric costs us a defensible-sounding moat and buys something considerably more useful: the ability for a client to hold us to it.
ReadFirst touch or last touch: which channel actually brought them in
Last-touch attribution is the default nearly everywhere, and it systematically rewards the channel that was already going to close while starving the one that created the demand. Here is how that plays out over a budget cycle.
ReadA lead is a person, not a touch
Deduplication removes roughly 30% of raw contacts in live marketing data. Here is exactly where that third comes from, why it is not a tracking bug, and what a defensible lead definition looks like.
ReadThe three numbers in your marketing report that are usually wrong
Lead count, cost per lead and channel credit go wrong in almost every marketing report, without anybody lying. All three fail the same way, and all three fail in the direction that flatters whoever produced the report.
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