Do the national daycare brands own Google Maps? 433 daycares, measured

Independent daycare owners tend to believe one thing about Google Maps: the national brands own it. KinderCare, Primrose and Goddard have corporate marketing behind every location, and a single center cannot compete with that.

We tested it. On September 19, 2026 we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “daycare” in 11 large metros and 11 small cities, recording every listing’s position, rating and review count, and sorted each one into a brand location or an independent center. Of 440 listings, 4 were pet boarding businesses, 2 were whole YMCA branches and 1 was a county social services office. That leaves 433 child care businesses.

The belief holds only in part. Brand locations are 16 percent of listings and hold 29 percent of top-three slots, so they do better than their numbers. But an independent center held position 1 in 17 of 22 cities, and when brand and independent centers carry similar review counts, we could not detect a brand advantage at all.

The benchmark: how many reviews a daycare in the top 20 has

Start with the number every owner can check. Across all 433, the median is 21, and 83 percent have fewer than 50.

Measure	Large metros	Small cities
Businesses in the top 20	220	213
Median reviews, all	33	12
Median reviews, top three	44	18
Median reviews, positions 13 to 20	24	6
Median rating	4.7	4.6
Brand locations	52 (24 percent)	18 (8 percent)

If your center has 40 reviews, you are above the median in a large metro, and in a small city at most one listing in ten has more. Review count tracks position in both groups: -0.297 in the metros and -0.331 in small cities. Rating does not: among 346 independent centers, rating against position is -0.003.

Who holds the top three

We counted a listing as a brand location when its website appeared in three or more of our 22 cities, or belonged to a named national brand. That caught 70 locations across 14 brands, including a smaller group with 4 of its 6 locations in Bowling Green.

Maps position	Large metros, share brand	Small cities, share brand
1 to 3	39 percent	18 percent
4 to 7	16 percent	12 percent
8 to 12	25 percent	6 percent
13 to 20	20 percent	5 percent

In the large metros, brands hold 13 of 33 top-three slots, well above their 24 percent share of listings. But the advantage does not run down the list. Across all 20 positions the rank test between brand and position in the metros is -0.093, not significant. Brand locations cluster in the top three and then spread evenly.

Position 1 is a different story. Across 22 cities, a brand location held it in 5. Independents held it in the other 17, including 9 of 11 large metros. Atlanta and Phoenix were the two metros where a brand took position 1, and they had the most brand locations of any city, 10 and 9 of 20.

In small cities brands are rarer: 18 of 213 listings, and none at all in the top 20 of Sioux City, Cheyenne, Lawton, Wausau or Bismarck. Where they appear, they place well, with a median position of 5 against 11 for independents, a significant rank correlation of -0.167. They held position 1 in Bowling Green, Johnson City and Jonesboro.

Brands win on reviews, not on the brand

Brand locations carry more reviews. The median brand location has 44 against 17 for an independent center, and the gap holds in both groups: 50 against 29 in the metros, 29 against 11 in small cities.

A pooled comparison credits the brand with what volume did, so we split the sample into thirds by review count and compared positions inside each third, where brand and independent centers have similar review counts.

Review count	Businesses	Brand locations	Median position, brand	Median position, independent
1 to 13	139	1	19	13
13 to 33	139	23	9	9
34 or more	138	46	9	8

Inside each third, brand and independent medians sit at nearly the same position. One of the three tests clears the significance bar (-0.172 in the middle third), and none of the three clears it within the large metros alone. With 1, 23 and 46 brand locations in the three thirds, the sample can rule out a large brand advantage, not a small one.

In the metro top three, the median brand location has 46 reviews. The median independent there has 44, with a 4.9 rating. Across the metros, brand locations rate slightly lower: 4.6 against 4.8.

The brands, one by one

Brand	Locations in our top 20s	Cities	In the top three	Median reviews
KinderCare	21	11	9	35
La Petite Academy	7	5	3	79
Bright Horizons	7	5	3	23
Goddard School	5	4	1	79
The Learning Experience	4	4	0	142
Primrose	3	3	0	50

KinderCare is the only brand present at scale, with a location in half of our cities and 9 top-three slots. The Learning Experience makes the point about volume from the other side: its 4 locations carry a median of 142 reviews, the most of any brand, and sit at a median position of 15. Reviews are not the whole story; distance and category, which we did not measure, may matter too.

The most-reviewed listing in the sample is not a brand at all. A Columbus operator with 5 listings in that city’s top 20 carries 497 reviews at position 3. Columbus had no brand location in its top 20.

What verification changed

We read every row flagged as a brand and every listing outside the “day care center” category. The first pass had two kinds of problem.

The brand name list matched Xplor inside two independent centers’ names, one of them at position 2 in Sioux City, and missed two brands whose websites appeared in only one or two of our cities. Fixing both moved the small-city brand share of the top three from 21 percent to 18 percent.

Three listings were not child care centers. A YMCA branch in Bismarck, filed as a child care agency, carried 262 reviews for the whole facility; another in Wausau carried 71; and a county social services office carried 154. Left in, the Bismarck branch and the social services office would have been the two most-reviewed “daycares” in the small cities, and the small-city maximum would have read 262 instead of 113. All three are excluded, with reasons, in the dataset. Head Start programs, faith-based centers, a hospital’s child care center and a university lab school stay in: they are child care businesses, whatever their owner.

Limits: what this cannot tell you

Every business here already appears in the top 20. The study compares brand and independent centers that rank; it cannot say how many of either never appear.

Results were captured once, for one query, from Google’s default location for each city. We did not measure distance, category, photos, review recency, capacity or age, any of which could explain position. Brand status is identified from the listing’s website and name; a franchise location using its own domain and name would be counted as independent, and a local operator with centers in three of our cities would be counted as a brand. Franchise locations are often independently owned, so “brand” here means the name on the door, not who owns it. Correlation describes what co-occurs among businesses that rank; it does not show that reviews or a brand cause a higher position.

The number to write down

In a large metro, the median daycare in the top three has 44 reviews, and a brand location there has about the same. In a small city, it has 18. Nothing here shows brands holding the top of the map on their name alone: where they win, they arrive with more reviews, and independents with the same volume sit beside them. Count your reviews against the band you want to reach, then ask every enrolled family.

The full dataset, with every listing, its brand status and how it was identified, and the excluded listings with reasons, is below.