Do more Google Business Profile categories help you rank? 4,627 listings in twelve trades

One of the most repeated pieces of Google Business Profile advice is to fill every category slot Google gives you. A profile takes one primary category and up to nine more, and the advice says each one is a relevance signal: list heating contractor, furnace repair and air duct cleaning beside HVAC contractor and you show up for more searches and rank higher for the main one. Owners who list only their main category tend to believe they are leaving position on the table.

We tested that on every listing the series has captured on one list of 22 US cities. Twelve trades and professions, the same 11 large metros and 11 small cities, captured on twelve days between September 29 and October 25, 2026: roofing, house cleaning, garage door repair, locksmiths, dentists, moving, hair salons, physical therapy, HVAC, pest control, accountants and insurance agencies. That is 5,111 results and 4,627 businesses after each study’s own exclusions, in 264 trade-by-city lists. No new searches were spent. Every category list comes from a dataset already published, and every listing was counted by one rule: how many categories Google returned with it.

The short answer: listings with more categories do sit slightly higher, and the reason is that they carry more reviews. Hold review count roughly constant and the edge disappears. Across all 4,627 listings, a listing with one category and a listing with four or more sat at the same median position in the least reviewed third (12 against 12), the middle third (9 against 10) and the most reviewed third (8 against 8).

Your benchmark

Open your profile and count your categories, primary plus additional. The median listing in these top 20 lists carries 2, and the median top-three listing carries 3. In large metros the median listing carries 3; in small cities, 2.

More useful is how many winners carry just one. 37 percent of all listings (1,701 of 4,627) list a single category, 33 percent in metros and 41 percent in small cities. Those single-category listings held 243 of the 773 top-three slots, 31 percent, and position 1 in 71 of the 264 lists. Only 92 listings, 2 percent, used all ten slots. If you carry one or two categories, you are in the majority of the businesses you compete with, including many that outrank you.

Find your trade

The trade decides the norm more than anything else. HVAC contractors carry a median of 5, pest control companies 1.

Trade	Median categories, all listings	Median, top three	Carry only one	Top-three slots held by one-category listings	Rank correlation with category count
HVAC	5	6	12%	2 of 66	-0.156
Insurance agencies	5	5	30%	6 of 57	-0.13
Dentists	3	5	29%	11 of 66	-0.115
Accountants	3	4	41%	18 of 66	-0.153
Moving	3	3	28%	16 of 65	-0.096
Hair salons	2	4	39%	13 of 66	-0.196
Roofing	2	2	44%	28 of 66	-0.002
Garage door repair	2	2	44%	24 of 66	-0.14
Physical therapy	2	2	35%	23 of 65	0.022
Locksmiths	2	2	35%	23 of 62	0.027
House cleaning	2	2	33%	26 of 63	0.037
Pest control	1	1	71%	53 of 65	0.137

A negative correlation means listings with more categories sit higher. Taken on its own, the table seems to support the advice: the correlation was significant in 7 of the 12 trades, and in 6 of those it favored more categories. Every one of those correlations is small, and the next section shows where they come from.

What the categories are really measuring

Owners who fill out every part of a profile are also the ones who collect reviews. Category count rose with review count in 10 of the 12 trades, up to a rank correlation of 0.46 in HVAC. Sort all 4,627 listings into four groups by category count and the median position barely moves while the median reviews climb:

• 1 category (1,701 listings): median position 10, median 73 reviews.
• 2 or 3 categories (1,280 listings): position 10, 119 reviews.
• 4 to 6 categories (1,163 listings): position 10, 172 reviews.
• 7 or more (483 listings): position 9, 295 reviews.

So we compared listings with similar review counts. All 4,627 were split into thirds by reviews: 1 to 54, 55 to 258, and 258 to 36,773. Inside each third, the rank correlation between position and category count was -0.028, 0.018 and -0.02, none of them significant. On the 3,916 independents alone, with chains and franchise locations removed, it was -0.023, 0 and -0.045, again none significant.

Trade by trade, 3 of the 36 trade-by-third tests were significant, and only 1 of those favored more categories, which is about what chance produces. With roughly 1,500 listings per third, this sample could detect a very small effect. It found none. Not significant does not prove categories never matter, but it does mean the edge in the table above comes from review volume.

The one exception, and the trade that went the other way

Metro accounting firms are the one group where more categories still went with a higher position once reviews were held constant. Firms with four or more categories sat at a median position of 9 against 13 for one-category firms in the middle review third (20 to 60 reviews), and 8 against 12 in the most reviewed third (62 to 1,016 reviews), both significant. A likely reason, which this data cannot confirm, is that the search was for accountant, and many firms list certified public accountant as their main category with accountant only among the extras. If that is the mechanism, the lesson is to carry the category that matches the words people search, not to carry more of them.

Pest control went the other way. 71 percent of pest control listings carry a single category, and in small cities single-category listings held 29 of the 33 top-three slots. The listings with more categories there were mostly businesses whose main work is something else: lawn care companies, wildlife and bat removal services, tree services with pest control added. Listings with two or three categories sat at a median position of 13 against 9, and the gap held in the middle and most reviewed thirds (rank correlations 0.281 and 0.31). A category describes what a business is, and a lawn company that adds pest control is still a lawn company to the person searching.

How we know the count is real

A pile of listings on one value can mean the instrument is capped rather than the world being uniform, so we checked. The chains are the test, because one brand runs dozens of profiles. Orkin’s 20 pest control locations each carried exactly 1 category. All My Sons’ 13 moving locations each carried 6, and Select Physical Therapy’s 11 clinics each carried 6. A brand’s count repeats city after city, which means the field records what the business set, not something the search service trimmed. Some franchise brands vary by location, which is what you would expect when local owners edit their own profiles. Every one of the 4,627 listings came back with a category list. One house cleaning listing carried 11, one more than Google’s stated limit, and it is counted as it was returned.

What this means on Monday

Check that your primary category is the one that names what you do, in the words customers type. Add the secondary categories that describe real services you offer, because they may help you appear for those other searches, which this study did not measure. Do not expect extra categories to move you up for your main search. In twelve trades and 264 lists they did not, once review count was taken into account. The variable that ordered every one of these trades was review volume, and that is still where the effort pays.

Limits

• Twelve snapshots taken on twelve different days between September 29 and October 25, 2026, on different weekdays and at different hours. The lists are not a single moment.
• Only businesses already in the top 20 were measured, so nothing here says whether categories help a business get onto the list, only how listed businesses are arranged.
• The categories are the ones Google returned with each listing on the capture day. Google reorders the list toward the search, so we used only the count and could not tell the primary category apart from the others.
• Each trade was searched with its main phrase only. A secondary category may matter for a different search, such as furnace repair for an HVAC company, and that was not measured.
• Review thirds hold volume roughly constant, not exactly. Profile age, photos, posts and other parts of the profile were not measured and could be related to both categories and position.
• The chain or organization tag is each source study’s own definition and is not uniform across trades.