Your Map Pack Radius

The number most local businesses have never measured

If you ask most local business owners what their Google Map Pack position is, they can tell you. Position 1. Position 3. Position 7 (outside the pack).

If you ask them what their Map Pack radius is, almost no one knows. And yet the radius is the number that actually determines how many customers can find them.

Your Map Pack radius is the geographic coverage zone within which your listing reliably appears in Google’s Local 3-Pack. It is measured outward from your business location. Searchers inside your radius see your listing. Searchers outside your radius see your competitors instead.

A business with a position 3 ranking and a 12-mile radius reaches every searcher in a 452-square-mile area. A business with a position 1 ranking and a 5-mile radius reaches searchers in about 79 square miles. Position means nothing if the radius is too small.

Where the concept comes from

Google has never published the term “Map Pack radius” and does not define it explicitly. It emerged from SEO practitioners who noticed that the same business could appear at position 1 for a searcher at one address and not appear at all for a searcher six blocks away.

The underlying mechanism is Google’s proximity scoring. For every local search, Google calculates a proximity score for every nearby business — a measure of how close the business is to the searcher’s exact location. As searchers move further from a business, that business’s proximity score decreases relative to competitors closer to the searcher.

The radius is the practical result of this scoring: the distance at which your proximity + prominence score drops below what is needed to appear in the top three. Businesses with stronger prominence signals (accumulated engagement) can maintain their position at greater distances. Those with weaker signals drop out sooner.

Why standard rank tracking misses this entirely

Most rank tracking tools — BrightLocal, Semrush, Moz Local — report a single position for your keywords. They run the query from one location (usually your business city center or your business address) and report what they see.

This is an incomplete picture. It tells you your position at that specific location, not your coverage across the city. A business could be position 1 at their address and completely invisible to 90% of potential customers outside their 0.5-mile zone. The rank tracker would report “Position 1” and everyone would call it a success.

This is why we built Top3 around real-device measurement across a grid of coordinates. On an active campaign we do not report one position — we report your position across a coordinate grid, which gives you the actual radius picture. You can see exactly where your coverage starts, where it ends, and where the gaps are.

The three things that determine your radius

Not all of these are equally actionable. Understanding which ones to focus on is the key to efficient radius expansion.

How Top3 measures your radius

On an active campaign, we run real queries from real consumer devices positioned at a grid of coordinates around your business location. Actual phones on actual carrier networks — not API proxies, browser extensions, or datacenter IP addresses that return answers no real customer would see.

For each coordinate point, we record:

• Whether your listing appears in the Map Pack (positions 1-3)
• Your exact position (1, 2, or 3)
• Which competitors appear when you do not
• The distance and direction from your location

We plot this across the coordinate grid and return a radius estimate along with the full grid data. You see your actual coverage, not a single-point estimate.

How we expand your radius

Radius expansion is prominence work. We do the classic, white-hat deliverables that make your business read as established at greater distances — profile completeness, consistent local listings, real content, entity alignment — and our device farm measures the coverage result from real coordinates so you can watch it change.

The process works in phases:

1. Baseline measurement — We map your current radius in detail before any work begins.
2. The work — Profile, local listings, content, consistency: the prominence deliverables Google’s own guidelines describe, executed for you. No simulated demand, no injected engagement — that method class is what Google’s enforcement removes.
3. Continuous measurement — Devices at real coordinates search your keywords and record where you appear and where you drop out. Every reading is a real consumer device seeing what a real customer would see.
4. Re-measure and report — When position 1-3 coverage reaches a new coordinate, you see it in the data — screenshots included.

On the Growth plan, the free-until-you-rank guarantee applies to this entire process. Starting tracking requires a card, but we don’t charge it until your listing appears in the Map Pack, confirmed by real-device measurement — however long that takes. If it never happens, you’re never charged. On the Starter plan, your card is charged immediately when you start tracking.