Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 aggregated insights from leading industry experts curated by @whitespark is out! Here are a few key takeaways IMO. 👉 Consensus building is now mainstream - If you're not working on creating or getting mentioned in consensus content (best of lists, etc...) you are already behind. The panel rated this the #1 AI Search factor! 👉 I'm probably the only panel member that rated citations higher than where they are. I believe citations today have a lot of value for local but only certain ones. 👉 GBP Posts as a ranking factor was ranked lower than: Quantity of Clicks on WhatsApp / SMS, BBB Accredited, Social Profiles Are Linked to GBP, and Presence of Social Media Updates on GBP. That should tell you something - these do not matter for rankings (most likely). whitespark.ca/local-search-r…

Google adding to the enshittification of the web and profiting from it is truly something.

😂😂😂

As I dig in more to this spurious correlation, I am seeing this across accounts I have GSC access to. @ahrefs "organic pages" figure is wildly inaccurate now whereas prior to mid-September it was at least close. They probably need to deprecate this or augment it with a "Page 1 Organic Pages" figure cc @patrickstox

Answer = The '&num=100' deprecation is clearly part of the puzzle. According to Ahrefs rankings between p11 and p51+ are virtually nonexistent now and began sliding around the same time this was first reported (September 14th-16th) and in fact rankings on page 1 are starting to climb. The other parts of the puzzle are that this client accidentally deleted their GBP which had nearly a decade of history just prior to these losses (September 5th). And the August Spam Update stopped rolling out just prior to the declines as well (September 21st). We've seen a lot of shuffling after spam updates, even for clients who have no spam and no links from spammy websites. My guess is these broadly deindex quality content as well as spam content. Very real chance there were some downstream impacts being felt here. While the correlation between loss of indexed organic content and fresh new inbound ranking domains appears so starkly in this chart, it is most likely completely unrelated and in fact will be part of their success story as Google's algorithm begins to factor in these values, the new GBP gets more history and regains lost reviews, and as our team works on improving internal linking.

SEEKING: I am looking for a Faceless YouTube channel for an experiment. Preferably covering tech topics with at least a handful of subscribers. Anyone got something like that I can partner with for this experiment?

Well that's a terrifying correlation. Client got a HUGE link building win via the media, on topic, tons of relevant articles and documents linking to the client from top tier media sites with tons of editorial oversight. Instead of booming, their indexed page count (in Ahrefs) is tanking.

New Mediavine Journey dashboard finally shows revenue and RPM by traffic sources! This is definitely helpful.

And this is for "significant" issues, there are a lot of falsehoods that wouldn't qualify as this such as radically outdated data or marketing fluff instead of reality.

That is one heck of a price cut!

I created a Gmail account for a client's marketing department and only used it to signup for a Reddit account. It was suspended weeks later without ever being used for anything else. 1. Signed up for Gmail in September. 2. Joined reddit with the account that day just to secure the user handle for the client. 3. Stayed logged out until today. 4. Used Edge instead of Chrome to login. 5. Verified 2FA via text message. 6. Account suspended.

OH an AI conversation between 3 'normies' while voting on Tuesday: Person 1: "No I didn't use AI to make any of my voting decisions, all it does is Google things for you and tell you what you want to hear." Person 2: "I used to use AI more, but it got several things wrong for me at work and I was almost fired. Quit using it immediately, went back to Google only." Person 3: "Yeah, you can't trust it, I think it's alive and trying to ruin our lives. I think that's what they [tech companies I assume] want." Blue collar part of DFW, all appeared roughly late 30's males, they said where they work (keeping that redacted for privacy) but suffice it to say that none of them worked in tech or marketing.

Ah there it is. Also realized this impacts 100% of subdomains on this account. Yeesh.

Hey @Cloudflare respect your attempts here, but let's be honest your Robots.txt "content" signal isn't used by any LLMs and I just launched a site I want to shut down completely (disallow all) feels weird that you just automatically assume I want a site to be searchable these days. I can shut this all off right?

Local Service SMB Sees Big Wins, Then Plateaus After Firing SEO Agency: This local service business client in an extremely competitive niche (100s of local competitors) hired us last year. We spent the first 2 months researching, pulling base lines, and starting on citation and link building work. Then went full bore into content we determined they needed. The site had practically nothing when we took over. 👉 Full rebuild, moved from Weebly to WordPress, had to build more than Home and Contact page 👉 Zero links of any value (standard spam domains only), had to score quality links as quickly as we could 👉 Zero citations for NAP 👉 Had reviews but they were mostly "thanks" and "Great service", had to help client learn how to request reviews with prompting. 👉 Zero photos 👉 Unoptimized GBP Chart data below provided by @semrush and based on the GSC access I still have seems fairly accurate (we turned our rank tracker off months ago). As you can see it took 10-months for the content to go from existing to starting to dominate (gold sliver at the bottom). Just 2 months later after enjoying the success built 10-12 months prior things are starting to plateau and go away. The content we created at the time tested as the most semantically relevant in their space and location - that might have changed by now. Without someone watching over this and making adjustments, keeping up with the work that needs done, SEO can and does go away. It takes months to get amazing SEO results, don't let these charlatans on Twitter tell you otherwise with their fake screenshots and bold claims of instant SEO success. Why this client fired us: In our pre-sales calls we ask for at least 8 months to pass judgement, they waited 9 months as the wins were already apparent in our system for them but not high enough to justify their investment. ChatGPT told them to fire us and hire another agency that guarantees results, then recommended some - and so the client did. That other agency still doesn't have access to the website (client has refused our requests to offboard them and transfer everything to them or the new agency) nor has any SEO tool picked up new citations or links over this period of time. It is a mystery what they are doing, but I talked to the ex-client who said they claimed all of this was their work (lmao), I showed them the time stamped data from the WordPress admin but still they believe the guarantee agency. Why? It is really hard to believe that Google, a tech company worth hundreds of billions with some of the smartest humans on the planet employed there would spend nearly a year evaluating new pages before ranking them - but this happens more than the sudden extreme high rankings you hear about on SEO Twitter from people selling courses or pushing a podcast. Patience in many ways is the #1 ranking factor for long-term success.

cc @patrickstox

Correlation =/= Causation. Business owner claims keyword research from Ahrefs was to expensive and difficult for him to use, but uploading content to Perplexity and asking it to tell him the keywords and title tags worked better and saves him $100 / month. His assumption is that there are near instantaneous gains in clicks after implementing SEO work.

More proof SEO is Dead: The Global Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Market size was valued at around USD 81.46 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 171.77 billion by 2030. Along with this, the market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of around 13.24% during the forecast period, i.e., 2025-30.

Thanks to @DanielRussey for pointing this out, it appears "moving to NYC" is also spiking. Guess we'll see which side wins this battle over the coming days.