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 3-mile radius reaches every searcher in a 28-square-mile area. A business with a position 1 ranking and a 0.25-mile radius reaches searchers in less than 0.2 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 MapPack around real-device measurement across a grid of coordinates. We do not report one position. We report your position at 20+ coordinate points, 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 MapPack measures your radius

The MapPack audit runs real queries from real consumer devices positioned at a grid of coordinates around your business location. We use actual phones on actual carrier networks — not API proxies, browser extensions, or datacenter IP addresses that Google can detect and adjust for.

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 a minimum of 20 coordinate points 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 requires building engagement signal density at target distances. Our device farm — 10,000+ real consumer phones distributed across US cities — generates proximity and engagement signals from the exact coordinates where your radius needs to extend.

The process works in phases:

1. Baseline measurement — We map your current radius in detail before any work begins.
2. Signal targeting — We identify the coordinate bands where your coverage gaps are and target those with concentrated signal generation.
3. Signal execution — Our devices at target coordinates search your keywords and engage with your listing: profile views, direction requests, call clicks. Every interaction is a real consumer device action.
4. Continuous measurement — We re-measure your radius throughout the campaign. When position 1-3 coverage extends to a new coordinate, we can see it and move signal generation to the next zone.

The free-until-you-rank guarantee applies to this entire process. We only charge once your listing appears in the Map Pack — not just at your address, but at the coordinate targets we defined at the start of the campaign.

What a typical radius expansion looks like

A plumbing business in Denver came to us with a 0.4-mile effective radius. They appeared position 2 at their address but were invisible to potential customers in the surrounding neighborhoods. Sixty days after signal generation began:

A 5x increase in radius means roughly 25x increase in coverage area. In a city like Denver, that is the difference between ~2,500 potential customers in range and ~60,000.