Do the national brands own Google Maps for movers? 359 moving companies in 22 cities, measured

Ask an independent mover why they are not in the map pack and the answer is usually the same: the national brands own it. The franchise across town has a corporate marketing team and thousands of reviews, and a local company with a few hundred cannot break into the top three. The only lever left, the belief goes, is a perfect rating.

We tested both halves. Late on the morning of Sunday, October 11, 2026, Central time, we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “moving company” in 11 large metros and 11 small cities, the same 22 cities our roofing, house cleaning, garage door, locksmith and dental studies used. Google returned 427 listings. We read every one and removed 68 that are not moving companies: 15 trucking and freight carriers, 20 self-storage facilities, 13 portable storage container services, 7 truck rental counters, 4 listings from one lead-generation network, 3 junk haulers, and 6 others. That left 359 movers: 81 brand locations and 278 independents. A brand is a national van line agent, a named franchise, or a company whose website appears in two or more of our 22 cities.

The belief about brands is half true, and only in large metros. The belief about ratings is not true anywhere we looked.

The benchmark: the top 20 in your market size

Measure	Large metros	Small cities
Movers in the top 20	219	140
Median reviews, all	500	47
Median reviews, positions 1 to 3	1,395	132
Median reviews, positions 13 to 20	274	21
Median rating	4.8	4.8
Brand share of listings	29 percent	13 percent
Brand share of top-three slots	45 percent	13 percent

In a large metro the middle listing in your pack has 500 reviews and the middle top-three listing has 1,395. In a small city the same two numbers are 47 and 132. The pooled median of 242 describes neither market, which is why the table is split.

Who holds the top three

Across all 22 cities, brand locations are 23 percent of listings and hold 29 percent of top-three slots, so they do better than their numbers. Pull the market sizes apart and the picture changes.

In the 11 large metros, brands are 29 percent of listings, hold 45 percent of top-three slots, 15 of 33, and sit at position 1 in 6 of the 11 cities. The median brand location sits at position 6; the median independent at 12. In the 11 small cities, brands are 13 percent of listings and hold 13 percent of top-three slots, 4 of 32, exactly their share. A brand sits at position 1 in 2 of 11 small cities, and three small cities had no brand in the top 20 at all.

Six brands account for 61 of the 81 locations.

Brand	Locations	Cities	In top three	At position 1	Median reviews	Median rating
Two Men and a Truck	21	16	7	5	701	4.6
All My Sons	13	10	3	1	2,702	4.5
College Hunks	10	9	1	0	1,616	4.9
Bellhop	8	8	1	0	500	4.5
Allied Van Lines agents	5	5	1	0	28	4.5
Coleman	4	3	1	0	251	4.8

Brands win on reviews, and partly on something else

The median brand location has 816 reviews; the median independent has 167. In large metros the gap is 1,206 against 321. So is “brand” doing anything beyond “has more reviews”?

We split the sample into thirds by review count and compared brand and independent positions inside each third. In the bottom third they sit at the same position, medians of 9 and 10, correlation -0.012. In the middle third the brand median is 8 against 11, not significant at this size. In the top third, brands sit at a median position of 5 against 9 for independents with the same review volume, and the difference is significant: -0.232 on 116 listings.

Inside the metros alone, the advantage lives in the middle: among listings with 259 to 842 reviews, brands sit at a median position of 7 and independents at 12, correlation -0.359 and significant. In the top third of metro listings, 843 reviews and up, the gap narrows to 5 against 7 and does not clear the bar. Most of the brand advantage is review volume. A residual part is not, and this study does not separate it.

Rating does not order the list, even here

Moving is a trade where ratings genuinely vary. The 348 rated listings run from 1.0 to 5.0, 20 percent carry a flat 5.0 and 18 percent sit below 4.5. If rating decided position anywhere, it should decide it here.

It does not. The correlation between rating and position is -0.009 across all 348, -0.009 in metros, -0.053 in small cities, and -0.029 on independents alone.

Rating tier	Listings	Median position	Share in top three	Median reviews
5.0	68	9	15 percent	123
4.8 to 4.9	126	9	26 percent	456
4.5 to 4.7	91	10	15 percent	364
Below 4.5	63	9	13 percent	46

A perfect 5.0 sits at the same median position as a rating below 4.5. The top-three band holds 10 perfect ratings and 8 ratings below 4.5 out of 65 slots. The listing at position 1 carries a 4.3 or 4.4 in three of the 22 cities. Brand locations carry a lower median rating than independents, 4.7 against 4.8, and sit higher.

The tier that does best, 4.8 to 4.9, is the tier with the most reviews. The perfect and the poor tiers are both small-sample tiers: 37 percent of 5.0 listings and 52 percent of sub-4.5 listings have fewer than 50 reviews. Both mostly describe a business few people have reviewed yet.

Review volume is the ladder, with a very different floor

Position tracks review count in both market sizes: -0.488 in metros and -0.379 in small cities, both significant. Among independents only, the metro bands run 1,036 reviews at positions 1 to 3, 549 at 4 to 7, 321 at 8 to 12 and 246 at 13 to 20. In small cities the same bands are 125, 46, 9 and 17.

The portable rule from our electrician and roofing studies holds again: the top three carry about three times their own market’s median listing, 3.31 times in metros and 3.14 in small cities. Read the twenty review counts in your pack, take the middle one, multiply by three.

The floor is where the markets separate. The least reviewed top-three mover in a metro has a median of 807 reviews, and only 1 of 11 metros has a top-three listing under 100. In small cities the median floor is 48: 6 of 11 small cities have a top-three listing with fewer than 50 reviews and 10 of 11 have one under 100. Only 12 percent of metro top-three listings have fewer than 500 reviews; 91 percent of small-city top-three listings do.

In a small city, the list is a third not movers

The 11 small cities had 207 slots and 140 were moving companies, 68 percent; the median small city had 12 movers in its top 20. In Florence, Sioux City and Wausau, half or more of the list was freight carriers, storage units, truck rental counters and container services. In the metros, 219 of 220 slots were movers. Forty-eight listings, 13 percent, have no website link and carry a median of 10 reviews; 86 percent of movers link to a site of their own, and 92 percent of top-three listings do.

What verification changed

The first pass kept 375 movers. Reading every kept row outside the Mover category and opening sites by hand found 16 that were not: six storage facilities rescued by a secondary “moving and storage” category, a multi-state storage chain with “Moving” in its name, three locations of a portable container franchise, two mobile home transporters, and four listings named “[City] Mover’s” in four small cities, filed as logistics services, whose websites share one page template. It also found one false brand match and four multi-city companies the brand list had missed. The corrected run moved brand share from 21 to 23 percent of listings, from 26 to 29 percent of top-three slots, and the metro top-three share from 39 to 45 percent. No conclusion changed; every number above is from the corrected run.

Limits: what this cannot tell you

Every listing here already ranks in the top 20. The study describes how the members of that list differ from each other, not what separates them from the movers who do not appear.

“Brand” is our definition: van line agents, named franchises, and websites appearing in two or more of our 22 cities. Regional companies with several locations in a single one of our cities count as independents, so the brand share is a floor.

Results were captured once, on a Sunday morning, with one query per city and Google’s default location for that city. Maps results vary by the searcher’s exact position, time and device. Ratings and review counts are as Google displayed them; 11 listings had no rating and are excluded from rating and review figures. We did not measure photos, review recency, response rates, service areas or category depth, and any of those could carry part of the residual brand effect. Correlation here describes what co-occurs among movers that already rank; it does not establish cause.

The number to write down

If you run an independent moving company in a large metro, the brand across town is not beating you on its rating, which is probably lower than yours. It is beating you on volume: 1,206 reviews against your field’s 321. Match the volume and the data says you have mostly matched the position. If you run one in a small city, the brands hold 13 percent of the top three, the median top-three listing has 132 reviews, and your real competition for the pack is 11 other movers and a row of storage units.

The full dataset, every listing kept and every listing removed with its reason, is below.