Local search results are determined by three main factors: RELEVANCE: How well your business matches what someone is searching for.
This comes from your categories, services, and content.
DISTANCE: How far your business is from the searcher or the location in the query.
PROMINENCE: How well-known and trusted your business is—based on reviews, citations, links, and overall online presence.
AI systems use similar signals.
When someone asks an AI assistant about local businesses, it evaluates these same factors to decide which businesses to mention.
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number.
This is foundational.
Your NAP must be EXACTLY the same everywhere online.
Even small differences can confuse AI systems.
COMMON PROBLEMS: • 'Joe's Pizza' vs 'Joes Pizza' vs 'Joe's Pizza Inc.' • '123 Main St' vs '123 Main Street' • Phone with or without area code formatting ACTION STEP: Choose ONE official format for your NAP and use it everywhere—your website, Google Business Profile, directories, social media.
Why this matters for AI: When AI systems see identical NAP across multiple sources, they have high confidence they've correctly identified your business.
Inconsistencies create doubt.
Citations are mentions of your business NAP on other websites—directories, data aggregators, industry sites.
PRIORITY ORDER: 1.
Data aggregators: Factual, Neustar, Foursquare—these feed many directories 2.
Major directories: Yelp, Yellow Pages, BBB 3.
Local sources: Chamber of Commerce, local business associations 4.
Social profiles: Facebook, LinkedIn Quality over quantity.
Focus on accurate listings on authoritative sites rather than creating many low-quality citations.
You now understand the foundations of local search.
In the next module, we'll focus on the most important listing you have: your Google Business Profile.