Am I in the local pack? Check in five minutes.
Most business owners search for themselves from their own desk, see their name, and assume customers see the same thing. They don't. This is how to see what your customers actually see — no tools, no login.
The five-minute check
Search from your phone, location on
Not signed into the business's Google account. Search your main service with no town name: "emergency plumber", "dentist", "italian restaurant". The map block with three businesses is the local pack.
Write down the three names
Are you one of them? Note your position. Note the star rating and review count of each.
Move two miles and search again
Physically, or open Google Maps, drag the map so a point two miles away is in the centre, and search there. This is what a customer on the other side of town sees. Most businesses fall out of the pack somewhere between one and three miles from their door.
Search with the town name, from a desktop
"emergency plumber croydon". Google now uses the centre of Croydon, not your location. A third set of results.
Look at the winners' categories
Tap each business in the pack. The grey text under the name is its primary category. If the three all say "Emergency plumber" and yours says "Plumber" or "Contractor", you have found your biggest problem already.
How to read your results
- In the pack at your door, out of it two miles away: normal, and fixable. Prominence — reviews, citations, links — is what extends your radius.
- In the pack for "near me" but not for "[service] [town]": your profile is fine; the website is weak for the town term, or you are far from the town centre.
- Not in the pack anywhere, even at your door: a category, eligibility or suspension problem. Check the profile is live and the primary category matches the winners.
- You appear, but with fewer reviews or a lower rating than the other two: you are in on proximity and will be pushed out when a competitor opens nearby. Start the review process now.
Want the full picture?
Five minutes gives you three data points. We check 49 points across your whole area for your top searches, pull the winners' profiles side by side, and send you the three biggest gaps — free, within one working day.
Why the answer changes with every step
Distance is a ranking factor
Google weighs how far each business is from the searcher. The pack is genuinely different from every street, which is why a single "we're number one" screenshot means very little.
"Near me" and "in Croydon" are different searches
One uses your phone's location; the other uses the town centre. Businesses on the edge of town often win the first and lose the second.
Personalisation
If you are signed in as the business, or you visit your own profile often, Google may show it to you more readily. Check logged out, in a private window, or on someone else's phone.
The full explanation of what decides these results is in the ranking factors chapter of our guide. What to do about it is in how to rank in the local pack.