How Google Decides Which Local Business to Recommend
Google Is Choosing Businesses, Not Ranking Them
Most business owners think about Google like a league table. They assume there’s a definitive first place, second place, and third place, and that their job is to climb higher than their competitors. Local search doesn’t work this way. When someone searches for a plumber, a cafe, or a physiotherapist near them, Google isn’t consulting a fixed leaderboard. It’s making a recommendation based on who is searching, where they are standing, and what Google believes they actually need.
This distinction matters because it changes what you should focus on. If Google were simply ranking businesses, you’d want to accumulate as many ranking signals as possible and outmuscle the competition. But if Google is selecting which business to recommend for each individual query, the goal becomes different entirely. You need to become the obvious, reliable choice for the people you want to reach.
Why the Same Search Produces Different Results
Two people searching for “Italian restaurant” from opposite ends of the same town will see different businesses appear. Someone searching at noon on a Tuesday might see different options than someone searching at eight o’clock on a Saturday evening. A person who regularly searches for vegan options might see restaurants with strong vegan reviews surfaced more prominently, even if they didn’t mention vegan food in this particular search.
Google combines three things when deciding which businesses to show: what the searcher appears to want, how close relevant businesses are to their current location, and how confident Google is that each business will satisfy the searcher. These factors blend together in ways that make traditional ranking positions almost meaningless. Your business might appear in the top three results for someone standing fifty metres away and not appear at all for someone a mile down the road. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s how local recommendations work by design.
What Google Is Really Optimising For
Google’s objective in local search is to reduce the risk that a searcher has a bad experience. If someone follows a Google recommendation and ends up at a business that’s closed, rude, or incompetent, that reflects poorly on Google. The searcher loses trust in the platform, and Google loses a small amount of credibility every time this happens at scale.
This means Google is fundamentally conservative in its recommendations. When choosing between several businesses that could satisfy a search, Google tends to favour the option with the clearest, most consistent signals of reliability. A business with moderate visibility but rock-solid information and positive, detailed reviews often gets recommended over a business with higher raw metrics but inconsistent details or shallow feedback. Google isn’t rewarding effort. It’s avoiding risk.
The Three Decision Pillars Behind Local Recommendations
Google has explained publicly that three core factors influence which local businesses get shown: relevance, distance, and prominence. Understanding how these work together is essential, because most business owners over-invest in prominence while neglecting the basics of relevance and distance, or they optimise for metrics that Google treats as secondary.
Relevance and Distance Are Filters, Not Rankings
Relevance determines whether your business enters the consideration set at all. If your Google Business Profile says you’re a hairdresser but someone is searching for a barber, you won’t appear regardless of how prominent you are. The categories you select, the services you list, and the way your business is described all contribute to relevance. Getting these wrong means you’re invisible for searches you should appear in, or visible for searches where you’ll never convert.
Distance works similarly as a filter. Google uses the searcher’s location to narrow down which businesses are reasonable options. For some searches, particularly those with strong local intent, proximity weighs heavily. For others, especially searches for specialists or specific services, Google will expand the geographic range. The key point is that distance and relevance act as gatekeepers. They determine which businesses Google even considers before prominence comes into play.
Prominence Is Where Selection Happens
Once Google has filtered the options to businesses that are relevant and reasonably close, prominence determines who gets recommended. Prominence is Google’s measure of how well-known, trusted, and established a business appears to be. This signal draws from multiple sources: the quantity and quality of reviews, mentions of your business across the web, consistency of your business information across directories and listings, and even offline reputation factors like press coverage or industry recognition.
What makes prominence tricky is that it’s synthetic. Google is trying to infer trustworthiness from signals that can be gamed, manipulated, or simply inconsistent. A business with two hundred reviews averaging four stars might seem prominent, but if most reviews are generic one-liners from three years ago, Google has less confidence than it would in a business with sixty reviews that contain specific details about recent experiences. Prominence isn’t a score you can see. It’s a confidence level Google assigns internally, and it changes based on what Google learns over time.
How Google Evaluates Reviews (And Why Many Never Surface)
Reviews are the most visible prominence signal and the one business owners spend the most energy trying to influence. But there’s a significant gap between how business owners think about reviews and how Google processes them. Understanding this gap can save you from wasting effort on review strategies that don’t move the needle.
Reviews as Training Data, Not Social Proof
When you look at your reviews, you see social proof. Potential customers might see the same thing. But Google sees training data. Each review provides information that helps Google understand what your business does, how customers experience it, and whether those experiences are consistent over time. The star rating is only part of the input. The text content, the timing, the reviewer’s history, and the patterns across all your reviews contribute to how much weight each review carries.
Generic reviews like “Great service, would recommend” provide almost no useful information to Google. They confirm a positive experience but don’t help Google understand what makes your business relevant for specific searches. A review that says “They fitted a new boiler in our Victorian terrace and explained the options for our low water pressure” tells Google something meaningful. It connects your business to specific services, property types, and customer concerns. Reviews with this kind of detail help Google match your business to relevant searches with higher confidence.
Recency matters too. A business with a strong review profile from 2021 but sparse recent feedback looks different to Google than one with steady, ongoing reviews. Google wants to recommend businesses that are reliably good now, not businesses that were good three years ago. Fresh reviews signal that your business is active, engaged, and still delivering the experiences that earned your historical reputation.
The AI Layer Most Businesses Miss
Local search is increasingly influenced by AI systems that summarise, interpret, and recommend businesses in ways that extend beyond traditional search results. Google’s AI features, including Search Generative Experience and AI Overviews, pull from the same underlying information but process it differently. These systems look for businesses they can confidently describe and recommend, which creates new requirements for how your business information is structured and presented.
Why AI Looks for Certainty, Not Optimisation
AI systems generating recommendations have a strong preference for certainty. When an AI needs to recommend a business, it’s looking for clear, consistent, unambiguous information. If your business name appears slightly differently across various directories, if your services are described inconsistently, or if there’s conflicting information about your location or opening hours, the AI faces a choice: either present uncertain information and risk being wrong, or select a different business where the information is cleaner.
This is why entity consistency matters more than ever. Your business needs to appear as a coherent, well-defined entity across every platform where it’s mentioned. This includes your website, your Google Business Profile, industry directories, social media profiles, and anywhere else your business name appears. Discrepancies that seem minor to you, such as using “Street” in one place and “St” in another, or listing slightly different services across platforms, create noise that reduces AI confidence in recommending you.
Traditional link-building, the practice of acquiring links from other websites to boost search rankings, matters less in this context than having clean, consistent, well-structured information. An AI recommending local businesses doesn’t care how many websites link to yours. It cares whether it can confidently state what your business does, where it’s located, and what customers can expect.
What to Focus On Instead of Chasing Rankings
The businesses that perform well in local search over the long term share common characteristics. They have clear, accurate information everywhere they appear online. They generate steady, detailed reviews from real customers. They don’t chase vanity metrics or obsess over position tracking tools that show misleading data. They focus on being recommendable rather than being optimised.
Common failures in local visibility typically stem from strategic gaps rather than execution problems. A business might invest heavily in advertising while their Google Business Profile contains outdated information. They might request reviews aggressively but not create conditions where customers naturally want to share detailed experiences. They might track their “ranking” in a postcode where they already perform well while remaining invisible in areas with better customer potential.
A Simple Framework for Local Visibility
The principle that produces the best results is straightforward: build confidence before building volume. Before you seek more reviews, ensure your existing information is accurate and consistent. Before you expand to new directories, verify that your current listings match exactly. Before you create more content, confirm that your core business details are clear to both humans and AI systems.
A useful starting point is an audit of your current local presence. Check whether your business name, address, phone number, and categories are identical across Google, major directories, and your website. Read your reviews from Google’s perspective and ask whether they contain enough detail to help match you to relevant searches. Look at your Google Business Profile as a potential customer would and notice whether everything they need is present, accurate, and current.
Local visibility isn’t about outranking competitors. It’s about becoming the business Google can recommend with confidence when the right customer is looking for what you offer. That requires clarity, consistency, and a focus on trust signals that actually matter to the systems making recommendations on your behalf.
