Maps Visibility

Maps Visibility measures where a business ranks on the Google Maps canvas from many points around it — not one rank, but a map of ranks. Use it for local SEO reporting, service-area coverage, and spotting competitors who are paying for map placement.

Why a grid

A local business does not have “a” Maps ranking. It ranks 1st to someone standing outside its door and 14th to someone two streets away, in the same search, at the same moment. A single number hides that entirely.

A campaign searches from a grid of coordinates around your business and records the rank at each one, so you can see how far your visibility actually reaches.

Local Presence Score

Rank-weighted visibility across the grid, 0–100.

Coverage

Share of points where you appear at all (top 10).

Pack vs map

How your Maps rank compares to your one local-pack rank for the same keyword.

Sponsored density

How much of the local results are paid placements.

What a run costs

One token per provider call. For Maps that is:

grid points × keywords     (the Maps canvas — one search per point)
+ keywords                 (the local pack — one search, it has no coordinates)

A 5×5 grid on 2 keywords is 50 + 2 = 52 tokens. It is a sum, not a product — the local pack adds one call per keyword, not one per point, so tracking both surfaces costs 1–11% more than the canvas alone and unlocks the pack-vs-map comparison.

The campaign form shows the exact figure before you save.

Setting one up

1. Name the business exactly as Google Maps shows it, and add its Google place id when you can. Rankings are matched on the id — businesses get renamed, and matching on name would reset your history.

2. Drop the pin on the business, then pick an area size and detail level. More points means a finer picture and a higher cost per run.

3. Switch off points you don’t need — water, farmland, anywhere outside your service area. Each active point costs a token per keyword per run, so a trimmed grid is cheaper and more honest: switched-off points are excluded from your Local Presence Score rather than counted as misses.

4. Choose what to track. Both surfaces are on by default.

5. Set a schedule and, if you want them, alerts on entering or leaving the top 3.

The centre point is fixed

The centre cell sits on your business’s own address and cannot be switched off — every other reading is compared against it.

Reading the results

Each pin shows the rank at that coordinate, coloured from green (top 3) to red. A pin with a dot had paid results at that point. Click any pin to see the full result list for both surfaces side by side, with each business’s rank on the other surface next to it.

Maps is not the local pack

They are different products with different rankings. A business can lead the pack and still be invisible three streets away on the map. That gap is the point of tracking both.

Reliability

Each grid point is checked by one of two data providers. If one is blocked or returns nothing, the check is retried on the other, so a single provider having a bad day rarely costs you a point. The local pack is served by one provider only, and pack checks are routed to it automatically.

When a point still cannot be read after those retries, it is marked not checked rather than guessed at. It draws as a hollow pin on the grid, it is left out of the Local Presence Score, coverage and average rank, and the run reports how many points it lost. A run that read nothing at all has no score and is skipped by the trend line entirely.

Not checked is not the same as not found

A grey pin means the business genuinely was not in the results at that coordinate, which is a finding. A hollow pin means we could not get an answer there, which is not. Scoring the second as the first would turn a provider outage into a visibility drop you never had.

Tokens are refunded for checks that fail, so an incomplete run is not billed as a complete one.

Schedules & alertsRun campaigns automatically and get told when rankings move.