Google’s Business Profile guidance says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance measures how well a business matches the query. Distance considers the searcher’s location or the location implied by the query. Prominence reflects how well known the business is, including signals such as links, reviews, and ratings.

This is why no responsible Local SEO strategy can promise a universal #1 position. Distance varies by searcher, query interpretation changes, and prominence is multi-source. The controllable work is to improve entity accuracy, service relevance, review quality, local content, and the website’s overall search visibility.

Google says Business Profile information is compiled from multiple sources: information supplied by the business, publicly available web content such as the official website, licensed third-party data, and user contributions such as reviews and photos. The practical implication is that a local entity is not defined by one profile field alone.

SEOs often use the phrase “review velocity.” Google’s public documentation does not identify review velocity as a standalone local ranking factor. What Google does say is that review count and positive ratings can support local prominence. A steady stream of legitimate reviews is still useful operationally because it reflects current customer activity and continually supplies fresh language about products, staff, service quality, and location-specific experiences.

Google’s LocalBusiness documentation supports structured properties such as address, phone, opening hours, departments, and other location attributes. The markup is useful when it matches the visible page and the real business profile. It should reinforce the local entity, not invent facts that users cannot verify.

A strong local entity therefore repeats the same core facts consistently across its location page, Google Business Profile, LocalBusiness JSON-LD, and credible external references.

Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in its core Search systems, and its newer generative AI optimization guidance describes retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out across related searches. There are still no special technical requirements or special schema types for appearing in these experiences.

For local brands, this increases the value of comprehensive location pages. A strong location page should answer the follow-up questions a generative system may need to resolve: what the business does, where it operates, when it is open, which services are offered, what differentiates the location, and how customers can visit or contact it.