Does a locksmith need a street address to make the map pack top three?

Locksmithing is the trade where everyone says the map pack is full of fake listings: call centers, keyword names and addresses that lead nowhere. The advice that follows is that a real local shop with a street address should sit ahead of them, and that an owner who works from a van and hides the address has little chance.

We tested that against the list itself. On October 7, 2026 we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “locksmith” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities. That was 344 results from 22 searches. After screening, 282 were locksmith businesses, and we read the address line, the review count and the map position of every one.

The short answer: the belief is mostly right about the top, and the top is small. 94 percent of the top-three listings show a street address in the city that was searched. But the bigger surprise was in the small cities, where almost half of everything Google returned was not a locksmith at all.

The number to write down first

Of the 282 locksmith listings, 86 percent show a street address and 14 percent show none. By where the address sits, 72 percent are in the searched city, 14 percent are in another town and 14 percent hide the address.

Now the top of the list. Of the 62 listings in positions 1 to 3, 58 sit in the searched city, 2 sit in another town and 2 hide their address. The median top-three listing is 2.6 miles from the city center, and 61 of the 62 are within 10 miles. The farthest is 11.3 miles. Rank 1 went to a business in the searched city in 21 of 22 markets.

To place yourself, read the address line on the twenty listings for “locksmith” in your own city. If you are in the city and show a street address, you look like 94 percent of the top three. If you are in the next town over, you look like the exception, and the list says the exception is rare.

Hiding the address costs more in a small city

Large metros and small cities behave differently, so here they are split.

	Large metros	Small cities
Locksmith listings	219	63
Hide the address	8 percent	33 percent
In the searched city	78 percent	52 percent
Top three in the searched city	97 percent	90 percent
Median miles from center, top three	3.5	1.5
Rank vs miles from center (rho)	0.194	0.676

In metros the distance effect is weak: rho 0.194 across 219 listings, so a listing farther out is only slightly lower. In small cities it is strong, rho 0.676 across 63 listings. Small-city locksmiths who sit in another town or hide the address are packed below the top three: 65 percent of positions 4 to 7 hide their address, against 2 of the 29 listings in the small-city top three.

Does hiding the address itself cost anything? Splitting the sample by review volume says it depends who you are. In the most reviewed third of listings (322 to 14,088 reviews), the 8 that hide their address sit at a median position of 18, against 5 for those with a street address in the city, and the correlation is 0.398. In the least reviewed third, hidden-address listings sit at a median position of 9 against 12, and the difference is not significant. A business with few reviews is not being held back by the missing address. A business with many reviews and no address is.

In small cities, half the list is not a locksmith

This is the finding we did not design the study to find. In the 11 small cities Google returned 124 results, and 58 of them, 47 percent, were automated key-copying kiosks. Several carry the word “locksmith” in the listing name. Of the 58, 43 sat in positions 1 to 10, and 4 were in the top three. There were none in the 11 large metros.

We excluded them, each with a reason in the dataset, because a kiosk is not the kind of business a locksmith is competing with for a lockout call, though it does compete for the key-copying search. That leaves a small city with a median of 5 locksmiths in its entire map list, and as few as 3 in Wausau and Dothan. The most is 10, in Johnson City.

That changes the arithmetic of “reaching the top three.” In a metro it means beating 17 other locksmiths. In a typical small city the whole list holds 5, so three of the five locksmiths get a top-three spot.

What the top three carry

Reviews sort this list far better than the address does. The median listing has 198 reviews and a 4.8 rating, and rating does not separate anything. The median top-three listing has 391 reviews.

	Large metros	Small cities
Median reviews, top three	841	205
Median of the least reviewed top-three listing, per city	370	97
Top three vs market median listing	3.04 times	1.13 times
Rank vs reviews (rho)	-0.449	-0.428

The reader’s test is the middle row. In a large metro the lowest-reviewed business in the top three had a median of 370 reviews, and in 8 of 11 metros it was under 500. In small cities it was 97, and in 6 of 11 cities it was under 100. Compare your own count against the row for a market your size, not the pooled 391.

The multiple tells the same story as in our roofing study: it does not travel between market sizes. The top three carry about 3 times the median listing in a metro and 1.13 times in a small city, so a “multiply by three” rule would send a small-city owner chasing a number nobody there needed.

Who sits at the very top

Nine of the 282 listings, 3 percent, are locations of a national or regional brand. They hold 8 of the 62 top-three slots, 13 percent, with a median of 1,239 reviews against 190 for independents. One national franchise has five locations, four of them in the top three, and ranks first in three markets. Inside the most reviewed third the chain effect on rank is significant (rho -0.262), and in the other two thirds it is not, so it largely tracks review volume.

Limits

• Range restriction. We measured only businesses that already appear in Google’s top 20. This describes who is on the list. It cannot say what separates them from locksmiths who are not.
• Address is what Google shows. We read the address line on the listing. We did not visit any location, so a street address that is a mailbox, a shared office or a suite number is counted as a street address. This study cannot call any listing fake.
• Small samples. Small cities contribute 63 locksmith listings and 29 in the top three. The hidden-address finding among the most reviewed rests on 8 listings. Treat these as leads, not settled results.
• Kiosks. Excluding them is a judgment. Someone searching for key copies would count them as competition, and the dataset keeps every excluded row so you can put them back.
• One day, one searcher position. Maps results move with the searcher’s location and the day. We searched once, from no specific neighborhood.
• Not measured. Whether any listing is verified, how the business profile is managed, response time, or which listings take the calls.

The dataset behind every figure here is linked below, one row per listing, with the reason attached to every exclusion.