Does the city in your Google listing name move you up the map pack? We measured 428 plumbers

Every plumbing contractor who has ever taken a call from a local marketing company has heard the same advice about the map pack: the business name is a ranking factor, so put the service in it and put the city in it. Rename the Google listing from your surname to something with the word plumbing and the name of the town, and you move up. Owners act on this, some of them renaming a listing that has carried the family name for thirty years.

We wanted to know whether the businesses actually sitting at the top of the map pack look like that. On September 21, 2026 we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “plumber” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities, and read every listing: 440 results, 428 plumbing businesses after screening, 22 searches.

The advice turns out to describe what almost everybody already does, which means it cannot be what separates them.

Almost everyone has already done it

Of the 428 businesses in the map pack, 401 carry a service word in the listing name: plumbing, plumber, rooter, drain, sewer, septic, pipe, water heater. That is 94 percent of the field.

A benchmark that 94 percent of a field already meets is not a lever. It is table stakes, and the numbers behave exactly that way. The median position of a listing with the service word in its name is 10. The median position of a listing without it is 11. Among the 66 businesses holding positions 1 through 3, 92 percent carry the service word, which is slightly lower than the 93 percent in positions 13 through 20. The rank correlation between having the word and position is 0.010 across 428 businesses, which is no relationship at all.

The 27 businesses ranking without a service word in the name are worth a look, because they are not small outliers hiding at the bottom. They are mostly multi-trade home service companies with a surname or an invented word on the sign, and several hold positions 1, 3 and 5 in their markets with review counts in the thousands.

Geography is rarer. Forty-four listings, 10 percent, carry the name of the city they are in. Fourteen carry the state. Fifty-five carry either one. Nobody in the sample used geography without also using the service word.

The city in the name, before and after verification

This is where the study changed, and the change is the most useful thing in it.

Pooled across all 22 cities, the city in the name looks harmless: median position 8 with it against 10 without, a rank correlation of -0.078, not significant. Split by market size, something appeared. In the 11 small cities, 19 listings carried the city name, their median position was 5 against 10 for everyone else, 32 percent of them sat in the top three against 14 percent of the rest, and the correlation was significant. It read like a real small-market effect.

Then we read the 19 listings by hand, which our own rules require before crediting any Maps measure. Five of them are locations of one national franchise, which names every location as the brand followed by the city. Those five sit at positions 1, 2, 2, 4 and 5, and they carry 232 to 1,361 reviews each in towns where the median business has 48.

Recomputed on independent businesses only, the effect does not survive. Fourteen independents in small cities carry the city name. Their median position is 7 against 11 for the 184 that do not, 21 percent are in the top three against 14 percent, and the correlation is -0.076, not significant. What looked like a naming effect was a franchise naming convention riding on franchise review volume.

In large metros there is nothing to explain in the first place: 11 percent carry the city, median position 10 with it and 11 without.

Fourteen listings is far too few to prove that the city name does nothing. It is enough to say that the significant version of the result was manufactured by five franchise listings, and that anyone quoting a small-city naming advantage owes you the same check.

Name length does not sort the list either

Listing name	Businesses	Median position	Share in top three
1 to 2 words	95	11	11 percent
3 words	98	10	13 percent
4 words	74	9	19 percent
5 or more words	161	10	18 percent

The median name in positions 1 to 3 is four words long. So is the median name in positions 13 to 20. The longer names do carry more reviews, a median of 275 against 158 for the shortest, which is the more likely reason they appear slightly higher.

What does sort the list

The same thing that sorted it in every Maps study we have run.

Maps position	Businesses	Median reviews
1 to 3	66	796
4 to 7	88	289
8 to 12	110	144
13 to 20	164	87

The median plumbing business in the map pack has 201 reviews and a 4.8 rating. The rank correlation between position and review count is -0.375 across 428 businesses, moderate and significant, and it holds at -0.353 on independents alone.

Rating is the floor again. The median rating is 4.8 in every single position band. Nineteen percent of the field holds a flat 5.0, and those businesses have a median of 40 reviews and a median position of 13, with 56 percent of them under 50 reviews. Only 5 percent of them reach the top three. The 4.8 to 4.9 group, with a median of 557 reviews, takes 21 percent of top three slots.

Market size moves the benchmark more than anything a business can write in its name. In large metros the median listing has 528 reviews and the top three run to a median of 1,282. In small cities the median is 48 and the top three run to 240. The rating is 4.8 in both.

One more number with the same shape: 84 percent of these listings link to a website of their own, and those that do sit at a median position of 9 against 14 for those that do not. Inside review count thirds, where volume is held roughly constant, that advantage is not significant in any third. Businesses without a website also have fewer reviews, a median of 19 against 275.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

Every business here already ranks in the top 20 for its city. The study can say what separates listings inside the map pack from each other. It cannot say what separates them from businesses that never appear, because those businesses are not in the data. If a name convention were a gate to appearing at all, this sample would show everyone already through it, which is roughly what 94 percent looks like.

We measured the listing name, the rating, the review count, the category, and whether the listing links to a website of its own. We did not measure profile completeness, categories beyond the primary one, photos, posts, service areas, review recency, responses to reviews, proximity to the searcher, or paid placement, and any of those could carry more of the explanation.

Results were captured once, on one day, with one query per city and Google’s default location for that city. Maps results move with the searcher’s exact position, device and time. Ratings and review counts are as Google displayed them at capture time.

Twelve of the 440 results were not plumbing businesses and were excluded with their reasons in the dataset: eight plumbing supply houses, one hardware store, one union local, and two heating and air contractors whose listings named no plumbing service. Our first run kept five of the supply houses, because the rule that rescues a wrongly categorized listing by its name matched the word plumbing inside “Plumbers Wholesale Supply”. Tightening it raised the median review count for the sample, because supply houses carry few reviews.

Correlation here describes what co-occurs among businesses that already rank. None of it establishes cause.

The number to write down

If you run a plumbing business and want to know where you stand: the median map pack competitor has 201 reviews and a 4.8 rating, 528 reviews if you are in a large metro and 48 if you are in a small city. The name on your listing is almost certainly already doing whatever a name can do, and the businesses above you are not there because of it.

The full dataset, including every listing, the words each name rule matched, and the 12 excluded results with their reasons, is below.