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Source-backed creator statements and evidence excerpts related to Review recency.
e your business is verified or where you're located is a huge factor. You'll always rank much better around your business. So what has changed? Well, reviews have always been very important, but this year everyone agreed that how recent those reviews are is more important than how many reviews you get. In other words, as I said before, it's more important...
OpenThe 2026 Local Search Ranking factors report has officially been published. This is the closest thing we get to a source of truth for the factors that Google uses to rank businesses and their search results. And while the report emphasises local businesses, I think it's valuable for any business to look at. This is a report that Darren Shaw from White Spa...
OpenThe 2026 Local Search Ranking factors report has officially been published. This is the closest thing we get to a source of truth for the factors that Google uses to rank businesses and their search results. And while the report emphasises local businesses, I think it's valuable for any business to look at. This is a report that Darren Shaw from White Spark puts out every couple of years. Because, of course, Google doesn't tell us what the ranking factors are. So Darren just gathers a bunch of the local SEO. Exp...
e your business is verified or where you're located is a huge factor. You'll always rank much better around your business. So what has changed? Well, reviews have always been very important, but this year everyone agreed that how recent those reviews are is more important than how many reviews you get. In other words, as I said before, it's more important how many reviews you got this month and how many reviews you have total. But again, the report doesn't just talk about local rankings. It also talks about orga...
ery cost effective. But if you look at how ChatGPT, Google's AI mode actually use directories, they have like one to three that they care about per industry, similar to how Google is. The experts also agree that it's suddenly very important to get on these top 10 lists. However, again, when you look at where ChatGPT is looking, most of the top 10 lists are produced by these same directories. In fact, that's why AI is looking at these directories in the first place. These are automatically generated lists. I have...