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Local Market Share: How to Estimate Your Slice of the City
"What's your market share?" is a question every business owner can be asked and almost none can actually answer. Not because it's unimportant — it's one of the most useful numbers a business can know — but because the textbook definition requires data a small business will never have access to: your competitors' real revenue, their real customer counts, the true total size of your local market. Here's what's actually measurable, and why a number you can calculate turns out to track one you can't. Why you can't measure market share directly Market share, properly defined, is your revenue (or customer count, or unit volume) divided by the total revenue of everyone competing for the same customers in your area. To calculate it precisely, you'd need to know not just your own numbers — which you do — but every competitor's numbers, which you almost never will. Private local businesses don't publish revenue. Even a rough competitor count requires guessing who's actually competing for the same customers, which is its own research problem (see how to find your real local competitors if you haven't done this yet). So the textbook number is, for almost every small business, permanently out of reach. That doesn't mean the underlying question — "am I winning or losing ground against the businesses actually competing with me" — is unanswerable. It means you need a proxy: something measurable that moves the same direction as market share, even if it isn't the same number. Share of search as a market-share proxy The most useful proxy available to a small business is share of search — the percentage of category-relevant Google searches that go to your brand name specifically, versus your named competitors, over a rolling period. This isn't a guess dressed up as a metric. Les Binet's research, presented at the IPA's EffWorks Global conference and extended in follow-up work by the IPA's James Hankins across 30 case studies spanning 12 categories and 7 countries, found that share of search is a leading indicator of market share — when a brand's share of search rises, its market share tends to follow, and the correlation held strongly enough across categories (automotive, energy, mobile phones, among others) that share of search is now used by marketers specifically because it's measurable in days, from free tools, while real market-share data often takes a fiscal quarter or more to surface, if it ever does. The honest caveat: that research was done primarily on larger, category-level brand competition — not single-location local businesses specifically. The mechanism it relies on — that when people are more inclined to choose a brand, they search for it by name more often — doesn't have an obvious reason to stop working at local scale, but it hasn't been validated the same way for a five-location service business competing in one city. Treat it as a strong, well-evidenced proxy, not a guaranteed one. A simple, honest way to estimate your slice You can't get precise market share. You can get a reasonable estimate, built from numbers you can actually access: Identify your real competitor set. Not every business in your category citywide — the ones actually competing for the same customers you are, by service area and price tier.Pull branded search volume for each one, including yours, using Google Keyword Planner (free with a Google Ads account, no spend required) or Google Trends for relative comparison. Use a rolling 12-month window to smooth out seasonality.Calculate your share: your branded search volume, divided by the total branded search volume across your full competitor set (yours plus theirs). That percentage is your share of search.Track it over time, not as a single snapshot. A single month's share of search tells you relative position today. The trend — rising, flat, or falling over a quarter or two — is what actually correlates with gaining or losing real market share, and it's the more useful number to watch. This gives you something genuinely actionable: not "15% market share" asserted with false precision, but "our share of category search in this city has gone from 18% to 23% over the last two quarters, ahead of our two closest competitors" — a number you can defend, that's trending the direction that matters, and that took an afternoon with a free tool instead of data you'll never get. Where this fits into the bigger picture Share of search is one input, and a strong one, but it's not the whole visibility picture — a competitor can be invisible in search while still winning customers through Google Maps rankings, independent mentions, or recommendations from AI assistants, and vice versa. Measuring search share alone tells you about discovery by name; it doesn't tell you whether you're winning the moments when a customer searches generically, asks an AI assistant, or stumbles on a competitor mentioned in a local forum thread instead. See your share of search next to your named local competitors, alongside where you rank in local Google results, how often you're mentioned independently, and what AI assistants recommend — the fuller picture that search share alone can only hint at. Free report, no credit card, results in about 30 seconds.
How to Increase Brand Visibility Locally: 12 Tactics Tied to a Metric
Most "how to improve brand visibility" lists are the same dozen vague suggestions rephrased — "be active on social media," "engage with your community," "optimize your online presence." None of that tells you what actually moved, or whether it moved anything at all. Brand visibility isn't one thing; it's at least four measurable things — Share of Search, local Google results, independent mentions, and AI answers — and a tactic that helps one can do nothing for the others. Here are 12 specific tactics, each tagged to the exact dimension it's built to move, so you know what to check afterward instead of just hoping. Share of Search: tactics that grow how often people search your name Share of Search — how often people search specifically for your brand versus searching the category generically or searching for competitors — is one of the stronger leading indicators of market share, because branded search volume reflects real intent to find you, not just a business like you. 1. Run a local awareness push that puts your actual name in front of people, not just your category. Sponsoring a local event, a youth sports team, or a community fundraiser under your business name — not a generic banner ad — gives people a reason to later search for you by name rather than "plumber near me." The search volume shift usually shows up weeks later, not the same day, so give it time before judging it. 2. Get your business name into directory autocomplete and "people also search for" results. Claim and fully complete your listings on the aggregators Google and other platforms pull from (data providers, industry-specific directories, Chamber of Commerce listings). A complete, consistent listing makes it more likely your brand name surfaces as a suggestion when someone's typing a related query, which nudges them toward searching you specifically instead of the generic term. 3. Build a referral habit that travels with your actual name. A customer who tells a friend "go to [your business name]" produces a branded search later; a customer who says "there's a decent place on Main Street" doesn't. Make your name easy to repeat — on receipts, follow-up texts, loyalty cards — so word-of-mouth converts into the kind of search you can actually track. Local Google organic: tactics that move your position in local search results This is the most familiar visibility lever, and still worth doing properly, because it's the baseline most of the other channels build on. 4. Get your Google Business Profile categories and attributes exactly right, not just approximately right. "Plumber" and "Emergency plumber" surface for different queries. Businesses routinely pick the closest category instead of the most precise one and leave relevant searches on the table as a result. Audit your primary and secondary categories against the actual services you want to rank for, not just what felt closest when you set up the profile years ago. 5. Build out real service-area pages that name the specific neighborhoods you serve. A single "Service Areas" paragraph listing six suburbs in passing does far less than individual pages (or clearly structured sections) that name each neighborhood explicitly, because that's the literal language a local search is matching against. Generic city-wide copy signals that you serve the metro; specific neighborhood copy signals that you serve that neighborhood, which is what a local ranking system is actually trying to determine. 6. Make your name, address, and phone number identical everywhere they appear. Inconsistent formatting — "St." versus "Street," a disconnected phone number on one directory, an old suite number on another — is one of the most common, most fixable local SEO problems, and it quietly undermines the trust signals that local ranking depends on. A single pass to align your NAP across your site, your Google Business Profile, and your top directory listings is unglamorous work that still moves the needle. Independent mentions: tactics that get other people talking about you Independent mentions — coverage and conversation that exists off platforms you control — carry weight precisely because you didn't write them yourself. 7. Show up genuinely in local subreddits, Facebook groups, and neighborhood forums. Answering a real question with real expertise, occasionally and honestly, earns organic mentions over time in a way that a single promotional post never will; communities notice and penalize the latter. This is slow, cumulative work, not a campaign you run once. 8. Pitch local "best of" roundups, newsletters, and neighborhood blogs directly. Most small local publications and newsletter writers are actively looking for content and are more receptive to a short, specific pitch than you'd expect — especially if you can offer something concrete (an expert quote, a local statistic, a seasonal angle) rather than a generic "please feature us." 9. Treat every review as a mention, and respond to it like one. A detailed, specific review — naming the service, the neighborhood, the actual experience — functions as an independent mention in its own right, and a thoughtful reply to it is publicly visible proof that you're engaged, not just collecting stars. Tailwind's review management tool pulls every review into one inbox and helps you reply with AI-drafted responses in your own voice, so none of them sit unanswered while they're still doing (or not doing) their job as a mention. AI answers: tactics built for how assistants actually read your business This is the newest dimension, and the one most businesses haven't touched at all yet — which also makes it the one with the most room to move. 10. Say exactly the same thing about your business everywhere. AI assistants build a picture of your business from whatever consistent signals they can find — your category, your services, the language used to describe you across your site, your Google Business Profile, and third-party mentions. If your website calls you a "family-owned Italian restaurant" and your Google profile just says "restaurant," you've handed the assistant a weaker, less specific signal to work with. Pick the precise language that actually describes you and use it everywhere, word for word. 11. Write content that answers the literal question a customer would ask an AI assistant. "Do you offer same-day emergency service," "do you work with insurance," "what's included in a standard inspection" — these are the exact phrasings people type into a chat box, and a page that answers them directly and specifically gives an assistant grounded in live web search something concrete to cite back. A vague "About Us" page gives it nothing to work with. 12. Build your footprint on the sources assistants actually pull from. Review platforms, local directories, and local press coverage show up disproportionately often in web-search-grounded AI answers, because they're structured, current, and easy for a model to cite with confidence. Prioritizing a strong, current, accurate presence on review sites and local publications does double duty here — it's also independent-mentions work, and the overlap is the point, not a coincidence. Track whether it actually worked Twelve tactics across four dimensions is a lot to run blind. The whole reason to tag each one to a specific dimension instead of a vague "brand awareness" goal is so you can check the right metric afterward — a Reddit mention campaign that doesn't move AI answers isn't a failure, it just worked on the dimension it was built for, and a GBP category fix that doesn't move Share of Search was never going to. Track whether each tactic moved your visibility against a real baseline, across all four dimensions at once, instead of guessing from vibes three months later whether any of this did anything.
Competitor Visibility Report: A Template for Owners and Agencies
A competitor analysis that lists five businesses' star ratings in a spreadsheet isn't a report — it's a fact you already half-knew, written down. A genuinely useful competitor visibility report answers a different question: out of everyone a customer could find instead of you, who's actually winning, where specifically, and what would it take to close the gap. Here's what that report needs to contain, whether you're building it for your own business once or producing it for clients every month. What belongs in the report An executive summary number. Whoever reads this — an owner with five minutes, a client skimming before a call — needs one figure up front that answers "how do I compare, overall." Not a replacement for the detail below it, but an entry point. If you can't summarize the comparison in one sentence and one number, the report is going to lose its reader before it gets to the useful part. A per-dimension breakdown. "Visibility" isn't one thing, and a report that treats it as one thing hides exactly the information an owner needs to act on. At minimum, separate out: how often your brand gets searched relative to competitors (share of search), where you rank in local Google results for the terms that matter, how often independent sources — review sites, forums, local press — mention you versus them, and what AI assistants say when a customer asks. A business can be strong in one of these and invisible in another, and the fix for each is completely different. A named competitor comparison table. Generic benchmarks against "the industry average" are close to useless for a local business — your actual competition is ten to twenty specific businesses in your city, not a national average. The report should name them, rank them alongside you on each dimension, and make clear which ones are actually ahead and by how much. If a competitor shows up strong in AI answers but weak in search volume, that's a specific, actionable gap — "generic visibility is low" is not. A short "what to do next" section. This is the part most competitor reports skip entirely, and it's the part that actually justifies the time spent producing the report. Three to five concrete next actions, each tied to a specific gap the data surfaced — not a generic checklist that would apply to any business in any city. "Your AI answer share is zero while two competitors appear consistently — here's what their review and content profile looks like that yours doesn't" is a next step. "Improve your online presence" is not. Building this yourself, as an owner If you're doing this once, for your own business, the honest version is a few hours of manual work: list your real competitors (not the ones you assume, the ones that actually show up — see our guide on finding your real local competitors), check your search volume against theirs in Google Keyword Planner, check your ranking position for your core local search terms, scan review sites and local forums for mentions of each business, and ask a few AI assistants your category's most common "best [business type] in [city]" question. It's doable. It's also easy to do inconsistently — once, with enthusiasm, and then never again, which means you never find out whether anything changed. Building this for clients, as an agency The math changes once you're producing this report for more than one business. The manual version above takes real time per client — competitor identification, four separate measurement processes, synthesis into a readable report — and that time cost doesn't shrink as your client count grows. Ten clients means ten times the manual work, done on roughly the same cadence, with roughly the same risk of slipping when things get busy. This is where an automated, white-label version of the report earns its keep: the competitor identification, the four-dimension measurement, and the comparison table get generated consistently for every client on the same schedule, under your agency's own branding, without the hours-per-client cost scaling linearly with your client list. The report an owner would spend an afternoon assembling once becomes something you can hand every client monthly without it becoming a line item that eats your margin. Tailwind's Brand Visibility report generates exactly this comparison — named competitors, four dimensions, one summary number — and for agencies managing multiple clients, it's built to run repeatably without the manual assembly work scaling with your client count. The version that's actually worth reading Whether you're building this once or monthly, the test is the same: could someone who's never seen your business read this report and know, specifically, what to do by Friday? If the answer is yes, you've built a report. If it's a list of metrics with no comparison and no next step, you've built a dashboard — useful for watching, not for deciding. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see what a comparison against your real local competitors actually looks like — no spreadsheet required.
Online Visibility Scores: How They're Calculated (and Why Most Mislead)
Type "online visibility score" into any SEO tool's dashboard and you'll get a number — usually somewhere between 0 and 100, usually accompanied by a gauge or a traffic-light color, usually presented with the confidence of a credit score. What you almost never get is an explanation of how that number was built. That's not an oversight. For most tools, showing the math would reveal how little the number actually means. What goes into a typical visibility score Under the hood, most online visibility scores are a weighted blend of inputs that have nothing structurally in common with each other: organic keyword rankings, backlink counts, domain authority (itself a modeled estimate, not a Google metric), review volume and rating, citation consistency, sometimes social follower counts, occasionally — more recently — a rough stab at AI mention frequency. Each input is normalized to its own 0–100 scale, multiplied by a weight the vendor chose, and summed. The problem isn't that these inputs are irrelevant. It's that the weighting is almost always arbitrary, and almost never disclosed. Does backlink count matter twice as much as review rating for a local service business? Three times as much? The vendor picked a number, and you have no way to check whether it reflects anything real about how customers actually find businesses like yours, or whether it was chosen because it made the formula produce scores that looked reasonable across their customer base. This matters more than it sounds like it should, because a hidden weighting scheme means two businesses with identical actual visibility — same rankings, same reviews, same mentions — can get different scores from different tools, and neither business can tell you why. The score becomes a black box you're asked to trust rather than a measurement you can verify. The second problem: missing data treated as zero The weighting issue is bad enough on its own. The more damaging one is quieter: what happens when a tool simply doesn't have data for one of its inputs? If a scoring formula can't measure your AI mention frequency — because it doesn't actually check AI assistants, or because the check failed, or because there's genuinely no data yet — the honest move is to say so and either exclude that input from your score or flag it clearly as unmeasured. Many tools don't do this. They quietly treat "no data" as "zero," which drags the overall score down for a dimension that was never actually assessed. A business with excellent AI visibility that the tool simply failed to check can end up penalized for it, indistinguishable in the final number from a business that's genuinely invisible to AI assistants. This is the single most common way visibility scores mislead: not through outright fabrication, but through silently converting "we don't know" into "this is bad." What a trustworthy visibility score actually requires Two things, and neither is optional: The weighting has to be disclosed. If a tool won't show you how much each input contributes to the final number, treat the number as marketing, not measurement. A score you can't audit isn't a score — it's an opinion dressed up as data. The score shouldn't exist until the inputs it depends on have actually been measured. Not defaulted. Not estimated from a partial sample. Measured. If four dimensions feed into an index and only two have been reliably checked, the honest output is "two of four measured, index not ready" — not a number computed from two real inputs and two silent zeros. This is the standard worth holding any visibility tool to, including ours. Tailwind's own experimental index — a single number meant to summarize a visibility index that shows its sources across Share of Search, local Google results, independent mentions, and AI answers — is deliberately switched off until all four of those dimensions are reliably measured for a given business. We'd rather show four partial numbers honestly than one combined number that's quietly guessing at the parts it hasn't checked yet. It's worth comparing this to how we handle a different kind of single-number score. Tailwind Score compresses review data — ratings across every platform you're on — into one trackable number, but the inputs are all the same type of data (star ratings and review volume) and the calculation is simple enough to show: it's a weighted average across platforms, not a black box blending incomparable signals. That's the "show your work" bar a combined visibility index has to clear before it's trustworthy, and it's a meaningfully higher bar when the inputs are as different as search volume, organic rankings, forum mentions, and AI answers. How to evaluate a visibility score you're being shown right now If you're looking at a visibility score from any tool today, ask three questions before you act on it: Can I see the weighting, or at least a plain-language explanation of it? If the answer is no, the score is a presentation choice, not a measurement.What happens when an input is missing? Ask directly, or test it — find a dimension you know wasn't checked and see if the score dropped anyway.Does the score change in ways that match reality? If your reviews improved and your rankings held steady, did the score move the amount you'd expect? A score that moves unpredictably relative to real changes is tracking something other than what it claims to. A low score from a tool that passes all three isn't fun to see, but it's useful — you know what to fix. A score from a tool that fails any of them isn't actually information. It's a number that happens to be on your dashboard. See the four dimensions separately, not blended into a guess Until a combined index can be built honestly — fully measured, openly weighted — the more useful thing is seeing the dimensions themselves: how you show up in search volume against named local competitors, where you rank in Google's local results, how often independent sources mention you, and what AI assistants say when asked. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see all four, measured and labeled, with nothing silently filled in.
Why Competitors Get Mentioned on Reddit and You Don't
Somewhere in your city's subreddit right now, someone is asking "anyone know a good [your category]?" and getting three recommendations in the replies — none of them you. It's not because you're worse than the businesses that got named. It's because nobody who's actually used you has a reason to think of you when that thread comes up, and that's a fixable problem, not a character flaw. Why a Reddit mention is worth more than it looks A Google review is visibility you asked for. A Reddit mention is visibility nobody asked for — a real person recommending you, unprompted, to a stranger, with nothing to gain. That's exactly why it carries more trust than almost anything a business can generate on its own: readers can tell the difference between a solicited five-star review and someone genuinely vouching for you in a thread with zero incentive to lie. It's also, increasingly, visibility that gets reused somewhere you don't control. AI assistants that ground their answers in live web content treat forum threads — Reddit especially — as a meaningfully different signal than a business's own website or its Google listing, because the recommendation came from a person with nothing to sell. Count independent mentions like this against your competitors and you'll usually find the gap is bigger than it looks from the inside: most businesses have no idea how often they're (not) coming up. Why it's not happening for you yet There are really only three reasons a local business never gets organically mentioned on Reddit, and none of them are "the product isn't good enough": Nobody who'd recommend you is in the room. Someone has to be reading the local subreddit, see the question, and think of you at that exact moment. If your actual customers aren't the kind of people who hang out in r/[yourcity], you're relying on word-of-mouth that happens to cross into a space you don't participate in. There's nothing specific to say. "They were fine" doesn't make a good Reddit recommendation. "They fixed our water heater same-day and didn't try to upsell us on a whole new unit" does. If nothing about the experience with your business is memorable or specific, there's nothing for a satisfied customer to actually type when the moment comes. You've never shown up as a real person in that space. This is the one entirely within your control, and it's the one most businesses skip. The actual way in: participate like a person, not a business The businesses that do get organically mentioned almost always got there the same way: an owner or team member spent time in the relevant local subreddits being genuinely useful, long before they needed anything from it. What that looks like in practice: Answer questions in your actual area of expertise, even when it has nothing to do with booking a job. If you're a contractor, answer the "is this a DIY fix or do I need to call someone" post honestly — sometimes the honest answer is "DIY, don't pay anyone for this." That's the comment people remember and eventually cite back.Show up as yourself, not as a brand account. A personal account with real post history reads as a neighbor. A fresh account that only ever posts links to one business reads as spam, and most subreddit moderators (and other users) will treat it that way immediately.Don't post your own recommendation thread. This is the instinct to resist. The useful version of Reddit visibility is other people recommending you unprompted, not you showing up in your own thread saying "I run a great [category] business, DM me." The latter gets removed in most active local subreddits and does nothing for trust even when it survives.Respect that self-promotion norms vary wildly by subreddit, and lean conservative. You'll see marketers cite a "9:1 rule" — roughly one promotional post or comment for every nine genuine ones — as if it's an official Reddit policy. It isn't; Reddit stopped enforcing anything like it years ago, and each subreddit sets its own rule, from fully open to zero tolerance. The practical version: assume the stricter end, participate for the sake of participating, and let any mention of your business happen because someone else brought it up, not because you engineered an opening to bring it up yourself. What happens after you start getting mentioned Once the organic mentions start — and they usually start slowly, a thread here, a comment there — the job shifts from earning them to not wasting them. A mention that gets a helpful, timely reply from the business (when appropriate — read the room; sometimes the right move is no reply at all) compounds. A mention that sits there with no response, or gets caught days later after the thread's gone cold, is visibility you earned and then let evaporate. That's a monitoring problem, not an earning problem, and it needs different tooling — Tailwind's social listening is built specifically to catch mentions like this across Reddit and other platforms as they happen, so a thread recommending you doesn't just sit there unanswered for a week. The honest timeline This isn't a tactic that produces a mention next week. Businesses that get organically cited on Reddit built that reputation over months of genuine participation, usually without tracking it as a marketing activity at all — it reads more like "the owner happens to be active in the neighborhood subreddit" than a campaign. That's also exactly why it's so hard for a competitor to copy quickly, and why it's worth as much as it is when it works: it can't be bought, rushed, or faked convincingly. See where you actually stand Most businesses have never checked whether they're being mentioned on Reddit at all, let alone how that compares to the two or three competitors their customers are actually choosing between. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see independent mentions — Reddit included — measured next to Google results, AI answers, and share of search, instead of guessing from the inside. Sources: Reddit self-promotion norms and the "9:1 rule" context (various 2026 Reddit marketing etiquette guides; Reddit itself does not publish or enforce a sitewide ratio — individual subreddit rules govern).
Organic, Map Pack, Ads or AI Overviews: Where Local Clicks Go in 2026
Type "plumber near me" into Google right now and you'll see, in order: a block of paid ads, an AI Overview summarizing the answer, a map with three business listings underneath it, and then — scroll a little further — the traditional blue-link organic results. Four different zones, four different ways to win, and four different audiences actually looking at each one. Most "where do I rank" reports still treat this as a single number. It isn't. Why this isn't one result page anymore A decade ago, ranking well meant one thing: getting a blue link onto page one. That's no longer the whole game. A modern local search results page is really four separate competitions stacked on top of each other, and a business can be winning one while being completely invisible in another. That matters because each zone pulls from a different set of signals, reaches a different kind of searcher, and gets measured differently. See where you appear across every result type instead of just the one you happen to be checking — a business that only tracks its organic ranking is, by definition, blind to the other three. Zone 1: Paid ads The top of the page, for commercial-intent queries, is still ads — "plumber near me," "emergency locksmith," "same day dentist" all trigger paid placements before anything else loads. This is the one zone that's genuinely pay-to-play: show up here because you're bidding on the keyword, not because of any organic signal. It's also the most expensive and the most literal — you're competing on bid price and ad relevance, full stop, and the moment you stop paying, you stop appearing. Ads matter for visibility measurement for one specific reason: if a competitor is consistently buying ad placement on your branded terms or your core category terms, that's a real, quantifiable pressure on your visibility that a plain SEO audit won't catch, because it has nothing to do with rankings. Zone 2: The Map Pack (Local Pack) This is the block of three business listings with a map, sitting above the organic results on local-intent searches — what most people mean when they say "ranking locally." Unlike ads, the Map Pack is earned, not bought: Google blends relevance, distance from the searcher, and prominence (reviews, citations, overall authority) to decide who gets one of the three slots. There's no way to pay for a spot here. It's also the zone that converts hardest. Map Pack clicks skew heavily toward immediate action — calling the business, getting directions, visiting the website to book — because by the time someone's looking at a map of nearby options, they've usually already decided to buy something, they're just picking who from. Industry tracking puts Map Pack clicks at roughly 44% of all clicks on a local search results page, which is a disproportionate share for just three listings. The catch: there are only three spots. If your category has twenty real local competitors and you're not in the top three for a given search, you're not "ranking lower" in any meaningful sense to the searcher — you're invisible on that query, exactly as invisible as competitor #15. Zone 3: Traditional organic results The blue links below the Map Pack are what most SEO tools were originally built to track, and they still matter — service pages, blog content, and your website's own authority all live here. But for local, bottom-of-funnel searches specifically, organic is increasingly the zone people scroll past rather than the zone that gets the click. It still earns its keep for research-stage queries ("how much does a water heater replacement cost," "signs you need a new roof") where someone's reading before they're ready to call anyone. The honest read: organic ranking is necessary but no longer sufficient. A business that ranks #1 organically but isn't in the Map Pack and doesn't show up in AI Overviews is winning a shrinking share of the actual page. Zone 4: AI Overviews This is the newest zone and the one moving fastest. AI Overviews — the generated summary block that now appears above or interleaved with traditional results — showed up for roughly 8% of local searches at the start of 2025 and now appears on an estimated 68% of local queries, according to tracking from Whitespark. The rate isn't even across query types: informational local questions ("how long does a brake job take," "what's included in a standard cleaning") trigger an AI Overview around 92% of the time, and mixed questions like "average cost of a root canal in [city]" hit closer to 97%. Straightforward transactional searches ("pizza near me") still lean more on the Map Pack than a generated summary. Getting cited inside an AI Overview works nothing like ranking organically or winning the Map Pack — it depends on whether the underlying model considers your site (or your reviews, or a third-party mention of you) a trustworthy source to pull from and cite, which is a different, newer, and much less understood set of signals. It's also why tracking your share of search — how often people search for you by name in the first place — matters more than ever: branded search volume is one of the few inputs into "does this business get treated as a known, citable entity" that a business can actually move. Why this breaks the idea of a single "ranking" Put the four zones together and a few uncomfortable facts show up: A majority of local searches now end without a click to any website at all. Estimates for mobile local searches run as high as 72–78% zero-click, and when an AI Overview is present specifically, that climbs into the 80%+ range. A lot of what used to be "did I rank" is now "did I get mentioned in the thing nobody clicked through from."Winning one zone tells you nothing about the other three. A business can own the Map Pack and be completely absent from AI Overviews, or dominate organic for research queries while a competitor eats the ad spend on the exact same category terms.The zones are measured completely differently. Ad spend is visible in a dashboard. Map Pack position is checkable with a rank tracker. Organic has decades of tooling built around it. AI Overview citations have none of that — the only reliable way to check is to actually run the queries and read what comes back. What this means for measuring visibility If a tool reports "your ranking" as one number, ask what it's actually counting — because it's almost certainly only one of these four zones, usually organic or the Map Pack, and probably not the two that are growing fastest (ads pressure and AI citations). A business can look fine on a traditional rank tracker and still be losing the exact searches that end in zero clicks and a generated answer that never mentions them. That's the gap a real visibility report has to close: not "where do I rank," but where do you actually show up, across ads, the Map Pack, organic, and AI answers, next to the specific competitors your customers are actually choosing between. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see all four at once, instead of guessing from the one you happen to already track. Sources: Whitespark AI Overviews local search research (via Art of Strategy Consulting, 2026); local pack click-share and zero-click estimates aggregated from BrightLocal, SparkToro/Similarweb, and industry local SEO tracking reports, 2026.
How Visible Is Your Business Online? A 15-Minute Self-Audit
Most owners find out they have a visibility problem the hard way — a slow month, a new competitor who seems to be everywhere, a friend who says "oh, I couldn't find you online" after they'd already booked with someone else. You can catch this before it costs you a customer, and it takes about fifteen minutes. Here's exactly what to check, in order. "Online visibility" used to mean one thing: do you rank on Google. It's worth being precise about this now, because that's no longer the whole picture. A customer today might find you — or fail to — through a Google map pack, a review site, a Reddit thread, or an answer from ChatGPT, and each of those runs on a partly different set of signals. You can rank fine on Google and still be invisible to an AI assistant, or have a strong review profile that nobody outside your existing customers ever sees. This audit walks through all of them, not just the one most owners already check. 1. Google your own business name (2 minutes) Open an incognito window — this matters, because your regular browser remembers you're logged into your own Google Business Profile and skews what it shows you. Search your business name plus your city. Look at three things: Does your Google Business Profile show up with a knowledge panel (the box on the right with your hours, photos, and reviews)? If not, that's worth fixing before anything else on this list.Does a map pack appear — the three local listings with a mini-map above the organic results — and are you in it?What's on page one besides you? Directory listings, review sites, maybe a competitor. Note who else shows up; you'll want that list in a minute. 2. Check the map pack for your actual service (3 minutes) Searching your own name tells you if Google knows about you. Searching for what you do tells you if Google recommends you to someone who doesn't know you exist yet — which is the search that actually brings in new customers. Search "[your service] near me" or "[your service] in [your city]" the way an actual customer would type it. If you're not in the map pack for the searches that match what you sell, that's a bigger problem than not ranking for your own name — because a stranger has no other way to find you. 3. Ask an AI assistant about your business (3 minutes) This is the newest piece, and the one most owners haven't checked yet. Open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask the question a customer would actually ask: "best [your service] in [your city]" or "who should I use for [your service] near [your neighborhood]." Three outcomes are possible: You're mentioned, accurately. Good — note which assistant, and what it said about you.You're mentioned, but something's wrong. Old hours, a closed location, a service you don't offer anymore. AI assistants pull from whatever's indexed, and outdated listings get repeated as fact.You're not mentioned at all, while a competitor is. This is the result most owners are surprised by, because it doesn't show up anywhere in a normal Google search — Google ranking and AI recommendation are two different systems, running on overlapping but not identical signals. Run the question through more than one assistant if you can. They don't draw on identical sources or weight them the same way, so it's common to be mentioned clearly by one and missed entirely by another — which tells you something useful in itself about where your signal is strong versus thin. 4. Look at two review sites, not just one (3 minutes) Check Google reviews, obviously — but also check at least one other platform relevant to your industry (Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, or an industry-specific site). Two numbers matter here: your rating, and how recently you have a reply on a review. A profile with no owner responses in six months reads, to both customers and AI assistants summarizing it, as a business that's stopped paying attention. While you're there, skim the actual text of your three or four most recent reviews, not just the star count. Reviews that mention a specific service, a specific neighborhood, or a specific detail ("fixed our water heater same day, Mueller area") carry more weight — both with human readers deciding between you and a competitor, and with AI assistants pulling details to describe you — than a string of generic five-star ratings with no content behind them. 5. Search your business name on Reddit (2 minutes) Add `site:reddit.com "[your business name]"` to a Google search, or search directly on Reddit. Most owners have never done this and are surprised either way — by finding a thread they didn't know existed, or by finding nothing at all, which itself is useful information: it means independent, off-platform recommendations aren't happening for you yet, even if your competitors have a few. This matters more than it looks like it should, because this is exactly the kind of content AI assistants lean on when they ground an answer in live web results rather than older training data. A Reddit thread recommending a competitor by name is a signal an assistant can cite directly; your own website copy saying "the best in town" isn't, because nobody independent said it. 6. The mistake most owners make here It's tempting to treat this as a one-time fix: find the gap, patch it, move on. The problem is that every part of this list changes on its own schedule — a competitor picks up a cluster of new reviews, an AI assistant refreshes what it's pulling from the web, a Reddit thread gets a new top comment. A business that was solidly visible six months ago can quietly slip without anything on its own site changing at all, simply because the competitive landscape around it moved. Treat this as a recurring check, not a box you tick once. 7. Tally it up You should now have a rough picture across four areas: do you show up in Google's local results, what does AI say about you, what do your reviews say, and are people talking about you anywhere Google doesn't directly index. Write down one sentence per area — "weak," "okay," or "strong" — and you'll see immediately where the actual gap is, instead of guessing. If you want a deeper, technical read on the Google side specifically — schema markup, page speed, on-page basics — Tailwind's free Local SEO Audit checks that in about the same amount of time this self-audit took, no signup required. Or skip the manual work Running all five of these checks by hand, once, gives you a snapshot. Running them against 10–20 of your actual local competitors — so you know not just "am I visible" but "am I more or less visible than the business two blocks over" — is a different, much more useful question, and not one you can realistically do by hand in fifteen minutes. That's what Tailwind's Brand Visibility report does automatically: it checks Google's local results, asks the same AI assistants the same questions this audit just walked you through, counts independent mentions, and lines your business up next to the competitors you're actually losing customers to — not just the ones you already know about. Get the free Brand Visibility report and see, in about 30 seconds, where you stand next to them.
How to Benchmark Your Business Against Competitors in AI Answers
Ask ChatGPT "is Tailwind good for review management" and you'll get an answer about Tailwind. Ask it "what's the best review management software for a small business" and you'll get a ranked list — and that list is the one that actually decides whether a prospect ever hears your name. Benchmarking against competitors in AI answers means testing the second question, not the first, and most businesses that check their "AI visibility" are still only asking the first. Why a branded question tells you almost nothing When you ask an AI assistant directly about your own business, you're testing whether it has information about you — whether you're in its training data or whatever it pulled from the web for that query. That's a real thing to know, but it isn't visibility. Visibility is whether your business surfaces when a customer who doesn't know you yet asks a category question: "best plumber in Austin," "who should I use for pest control near me," "recommend a family dentist in this zip code." That's an unbranded query, and it's the one that matters, because it's the one a real prospect actually types. If you only ever test the branded version, you can walk away thinking your AI visibility is fine — the assistant clearly "knows" about you — while you're invisible in every answer that would have sent you a new customer. Run both versions side by side and the gap is usually obvious. Run the same question three times before you trust the answer AI assistants aren't deterministic the way a Google results page is. Ask the same unbranded question twice in two separate conversations and you can get two different rankings, two different sets of businesses mentioned, sometimes a business present in one answer and missing from the next. Some of that comes from how these models sample their responses; some comes from live web results shifting between calls for assistants that search in real time. A single run tells you what the assistant said once, not what it tends to say. See how your brand compares to competitors and you'll notice we run every question multiple times — three per assistant, minimum — and report the pattern rather than a single snapshot. If you're mentioned in three out of three runs, that's a different, more reliable signal than being mentioned once out of three. If a competitor shows up in all three and you show up in none, that's not noise — that's a real gap, and it's worth knowing before you build a strategy on a single lucky (or unlucky) answer. Test with web search on and off, separately Most of the major assistants now offer two distinct modes: answering from training data alone, or answering with live web search pulled in. These can produce meaningfully different competitor lists for the exact same question, because they're drawing on different source material — training data reflects whatever was popular and well-documented as of the model's cutoff, while a web-search-grounded answer reflects whatever's ranking, reviewed, and discussed right now. A business that was well-covered online a year or two ago might still show up strong in training-data-only answers while having fallen off entirely in web-search-grounded ones — or the reverse, where a newer business with a thin footprint historically but strong recent reviews and mentions only shows up once search is switched on. Testing just one mode gives you half the picture. If you run your own check, do it twice: once with web search explicitly enabled on each assistant that supports it, and once without, and compare the two competitor lists rather than assuming they'll match. What "benchmarking" actually means here Benchmarking isn't just "am I mentioned, yes or no." For it to be useful, you need four things recorded for every run, across every assistant you care about: Were you mentioned at all, and if so, where in the list — first, buried, or an afterthought at the end.Who else was mentioned, so you have an actual competitor set to compare against, not just your own result in isolation.What the assistant said about each business — the specific language it used, since that's effectively your AI-generated pitch whether you wrote it or not.Whether the result held across multiple runs and both search modes, so you know if what you're looking at is a stable pattern or a one-off. Do this by hand across five assistants, several phrasings, three repeats each, and two search modes, and you're running 30+ individual checks for one category in one city — before you've even looked at a second city or a second competitor set. It's not that it can't be done manually; it's that almost nobody actually keeps doing it consistently, which means almost nobody notices when their position slips. Tailwind's Brand Visibility report runs this exact process automatically — unbranded questions, repeated runs, web search tested separately — and puts your AI-answer results next to your Google local performance and independent mentions in one view, so you can see whether a gap is isolated to AI answers or part of a broader pattern. If you want to go deep specifically on AI visibility tracking over time — ongoing weekly checks across assistants, by city — see our dedicated AI Visibility tool, which is built for exactly that narrower, recurring use case. Reading the result honestly Two traps catch most businesses doing this for the first time. The first is over-reacting to a single missing mention — if you show up in two of three runs, that's not a crisis, that's a business near the edge of the assistant's shortlist, which is a very different problem (and a very different fix) than being absent entirely. The second is under-reacting to a consistent pattern — if a competitor appears in every run across every assistant and you appear in none, that's not something that will fix itself, and it's worth treating as seriously as a Google Maps ranking drop, because for a growing share of searches, it functionally is one. Start with a real comparison, not a guess Guessing at your AI visibility from a single branded prompt is close to useless. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see exactly how you stack up against the competitors who are actually showing up in the answers your next customer is reading — no credit card, results in about 30 seconds.
Brand Awareness vs Brand Visibility: What You Can Actually Measure
"Is this a brand awareness tool?" is a fair question to ask about anything that promises to measure how visible your business is — and the honest answer is no, not exactly. Brand visibility and brand awareness are related, but they're not the same thing, they're not measured the same way, and for a small business, only one of them is realistically something you can check this week instead of this quarter. Two different questions Brand awareness is a question about memory: if you asked a stranger in your target market to name businesses in your category, would they say yours? It's about recognition and recall — whether your brand has lodged itself in someone's head at all, independent of whether they're searching for you right now. Brand visibility is a question about exposure: how often, and how prominently, does your business actually show up in the places your customers look — search results, review sites, local directories, social mentions, and increasingly, the answers AI assistants give when someone asks for a recommendation. The relationship between them is directional, not interchangeable. Visibility is the input; awareness is the output. You generally can't build awareness without visibility — people can't remember a brand they've never been exposed to — but visibility doesn't automatically become awareness either. Someone can see your business in a Google local pack result, click past it, and forget it existed ten minutes later. Awareness requires enough repeated, consistent exposure that it sticks. Visibility is what you can control directly, this month, through what you fix on your profile, your reviews, and your content. Awareness is the slower, compounding result of doing that consistently over time. How awareness is actually measured The traditional way to measure brand awareness is a survey, and it's worth knowing roughly how that works, because it explains why it's impractical for most small businesses to run regularly. Market researchers typically ask two kinds of questions. Unaided recall: "Name a business that does [your category] in [your city]" — no prompting, no list. If people say your name without being shown it, that's strong, top-of-mind awareness. Aided recall (recognition): shown a list of business names, people say which ones they recognize. This is a lower bar — recognizing a name on a list is much easier than producing it from memory — but it's still a real signal. Running either version properly means defining your target market, recruiting a representative sample, fielding the survey, and analyzing the results — the kind of project market research firms typically quote in the low five figures and up, with turnaround running anywhere from a couple of weeks for a fast boutique agency to a couple of months for a full traditional study. That's a reasonable cost and timeline for a national brand deciding where to put its next ad budget. It's not something a single-location business is going to run before deciding whether to fix its Google Business Profile this week. How visibility is measured — and why it's the practical substitute Visibility doesn't require surveying strangers, because you're not trying to measure what's in someone's head — you're measuring what's actually in front of them, which you can check directly. You can see, right now, whether you appear in Google's local pack for the searches your customers run. You can see whether your reviews mention the specific services and neighborhoods that make you a credible match for a local query. You can see whether independent sources — local subreddits, forums, roundup articles — mention you at all. And you can see, by actually asking them, whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest recommend you when someone asks for your category in your city. None of that requires a sample size or a market research firm. It requires checking the channels directly, consistently, against the specific competitors you're actually losing business to — which is a fundamentally cheaper and faster thing to do than running a recall survey. Why visibility is the more actionable number for a small business This isn't an argument that visibility is a perfect stand-in for awareness — it isn't. A business can be highly visible in search results and still fail to build real brand recall if its presentation is generic and forgettable. Visibility is a proxy, a correlate, not a direct substitute. But it's the correlate you can act on immediately. If a brand-awareness survey tells you only 12% of people in your area can name your business unprompted, you learn something, but not what to do about it tomorrow morning. If a visibility check tells you that you're absent from AI assistant answers for your category in your own city, or that three competitors are out-mentioning you on a local subreddit, you have a specific, fixable gap — today, not after a six-week fieldwork period. For a small business, visibility and awareness aren't competing metrics. Visibility is the thing you check weekly and fix. Awareness is the slower result you're trying to build, and you build it by staying visible, consistently, across the channels that matter — not by commissioning a survey to confirm it's working. What this means in practice If your goal this month is "find out if people have heard of us," a survey measures that, imperfectly and slowly. If your goal is "find out exactly where we're losing to competitors and fix it," visibility is the number to track — because it's the one you can measure today, compare directly against named competitors, and act on this week. For the full breakdown of what brand visibility covers — search, mentions, and AI answers together — see our guide to what brand visibility actually is. And if you want to see where you stand without commissioning a survey, Tailwind's free report lets you measure digital visibility without a survey — compared directly against the competitors in your city, across every channel that actually matters.
How to Check Brand Search Volume (Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Search Console)
"How many people search for my business name?" sounds like a question with a simple answer. It isn't — not because the data doesn't exist, but because the three free tools that come closest to answering it each tell you something slightly different, and none of them hands you a clean, exact number unless you're already spending on ads. Here's what each tool actually shows, what it doesn't, and how to read the result without fooling yourself. Why this number matters Branded search volume — how often people search your business name directly, rather than a generic category term — is one of the clearest available signals of brand awareness. A category search ("plumber near me") tells you how visible you are in a moment of need. A branded search ("[Your Business] reviews," "[Your Business] hours") tells you someone already knows you exist and is specifically looking for you, or checking you out after hearing your name elsewhere. Comparing your branded volume to a competitor's is the closest free proxy most small businesses have for relative brand strength — which is exactly what share of search measures at scale, across a whole competitive set. Google Keyword Planner: the main tool, with a real limitation Keyword Planner is the most direct way to check this, and it's what most competitor comparisons — including Tailwind's own Brand Visibility methodology — are built on. Search your business name as a keyword and it'll show "Avg. monthly searches." The honest limitation: if you're not running an active Google Ads campaign with real spend behind it, Keyword Planner doesn't show you an exact number. It shows a bucketed range instead — 0, 1–100, 100–1K, 1K–10K, and so on. For a small, single-location business, your own name will often land in the lowest bucket, sometimes showing as "0" or no data at all. That's where it's easy to misread the tool. A "0" or missing result doesn't mean zero people search for your business. It usually means your volume falls below whatever floor Google reports for a non-advertiser account that month — a measurement gap, not a real-world zero. This is the same principle behind "missing is not zero" that shows up everywhere in visibility reporting: if a channel can't detect something, the honest conclusion is "we don't know," not "it isn't happening." Treat a Keyword Planner range as what it is — a rough band, not a precise count — and you'll avoid both overreacting to a scary "0" and over-trusting a specific-looking number from a single month. Google Trends: not volume, but a useful comparison Google Trends doesn't report actual search counts at all — it reports relative interest on a 0–100 scale, normalized against the highest point in whatever time range and region you select. That makes it the wrong tool for "how many people search my name," but the right tool for a different, genuinely useful question: "am I trending up, down, or flat compared to my named competitors?" Type your business name and two or three competitors' names into the same Trends comparison, set the region to your city or state, and look at the lines relative to each other over the past 12 months. A steady upward trend relative to competitors is a real signal even without an absolute number attached to it. A sudden spike usually lines up with something identifiable — a local news mention, a viral review, a seasonal pattern worth knowing about either way. Search Console: the one number that's actually yours If your website is already set up in Google Search Console, there's one metric here that isn't an estimate: the Performance report, filtered to queries containing your business name, shows the actual impressions and clicks your site received for people searching your own name. This is real data, not a bucketed estimate — but it only covers people who searched your name and saw your website in the results, which undercounts total branded search (some of those searches resolve entirely within the map pack or a Business Profile panel without a website click at all). Use it as a floor, not a ceiling: if Search Console shows 40 branded impressions a month, your actual branded search volume is "at least 40," not "exactly 40." Putting the three together No single one of these tools gives you a clean number, but used together they triangulate a reasonable picture: Keyword Planner for the rough volume band and for direct comparison against competitors, Trends for the trend line and relative standing, Search Console for a hard floor on your own site's share of it. That's genuinely more reliable than any single tool's output taken alone — and it's the same logic behind why Share of Search measured for you by Tailwind pulls from a full 12 months of Keyword Planner data rather than a single snapshot: one month's bucketed range can be noisy; a year's worth, compared consistently against named competitors, is not. Check your own number, then check it against competitors A branded search volume number means very little in isolation — "200 people a month search our name" is only useful once you know whether your closest competitor gets 80 or 800. That comparison is the actual point. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see your Share of Search measured against 10–20 real local competitors automatically, using the same Keyword Planner methodology described above — no manual lookups, no guessing at what a range means.
Share of Voice for Local Businesses: Google + Mentions + AI in One View
Ask a marketer what "share of voice" means and most will describe the advertising version: your ad spend divided by total category ad spend. Most local businesses don't buy enough media for that number to mean anything. But the underlying idea — how much of the conversation about your category you actually own, compared to the businesses you're competing with — still applies. It just has to be measured across the places that conversation is actually happening now: organic search, independent mentions, and AI answers. This is a guide to the combined version, not the AI-only version. If you specifically want to go deep on how AI assistants describe you versus competitors, Tailwind's AI Visibility tool tracks exactly that slice on its own. This article is about putting all three channels — search, mentions, AI — on one dashboard, because checking them one at a time is where most businesses get misled. The classic formula, and why it travels The standard share of voice formula is simple: Share of Voice = (Your Metric ÷ Total Market Metric) × 100 In advertising, "your metric" is ad spend and "total market metric" is total category spend. If you spend $10,000 a month on local ads and your five visible competitors collectively spend $40,000, your share of voice is 20%. The formula travels well to other metrics because it's really just a ratio: your piece of a measurable pie, divided by the whole pie. That's why it also works for search visibility (your keyword rankings vs. competitors' rankings, across the terms that matter), for mention volume (how often you're named across a set of sources vs. how often competitors are), and for AI-answer share (how often an AI assistant recommends you vs. how often it recommends each competitor, across a set of realistic questions). The math is the same ratio each time — what changes is what you're counting. Why one channel's number lies to you Here's the problem with stopping at one channel: each one measures a different kind of attention, and they don't move together. A business can rank well in Google's local pack — strong reviews, solid on-page SEO, consistent NAP data — and still be functionally invisible when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini "best [category] near [city]." AI assistants don't just re-rank Google's results; they synthesize an answer from a different mix of signals, weighted toward whichever reviews, descriptions, and third-party mentions happen to be well-structured and specific enough to quote. A business with five generic five-star reviews ("Great service!") can lose that comparison to a competitor with three detailed reviews mentioning exact services and neighborhoods, even if the five-star business outranks them on Google. The reverse happens too. A business can get genuinely strong independent attention — a popular Reddit thread, a mention on a local subreddit, a Hacker News discussion if the category fits — and have that attention contribute nothing to its Google ranking or its AI visibility, because nobody built the connection between "people are talking about us here" and "our website/profile reflects that." Independent mentions are a real signal of market presence, but only if something downstream (a review, a link, a citation) turns the mention into something Google or an AI assistant can actually find and weigh. Checking only one channel means you only see one slice of a three-part picture, and the slice you check is rarely the one that's actually weak. How to estimate your share, channel by channel You don't need enterprise tools to get a rough, directionally useful number for each channel. Here's the practical version of each calculation. Search visibility share Pick the 10–15 search terms a real customer would actually use — not just your business category alone, but the category plus your city or neighborhood, plus a handful of "near me" and comparison phrasings. For each term, record whether you appear in the local pack (and at what position) and whether you appear in organic results below it. Do the same for your 5–10 closest competitors. Your rough share of voice for search is: the number of top-3 local-pack appearances you have, divided by the total top-3 appearances across you and your tracked competitors combined, across all the terms you checked. It's not a perfectly scientific metric — Google's local pack shifts by query, by time of day, and by the searcher's exact location — but run consistently across the same term list every month, it tells you whether you're gaining or losing ground. Mention share Count how many times you and each tracked competitor are mentioned across the sources that matter for your category — local subreddits, niche forums, "best of" roundup posts, local news coverage, and (where relevant) sites like Hacker News for more tech-adjacent local businesses. A simple site-restricted search (`site:reddit.com "your business name"` and the same for competitors) over a fixed period, say the last 90 days, gives you a usable count. Your mention share is your count divided by the total mentions across everyone you're tracking. This number is noisier than search share — a single viral thread can swing it hard in either direction — so treat spikes as worth investigating, not as a new steady state. AI-answer share Ask each major assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity — the same handful of realistic, non-branded questions ("best [category] in [city]," "who should I use for [service] near [neighborhood]") multiple times each, since answers aren't always identical run to run. Record whether you're named, where, and whether competitors are named instead. Your AI-answer share is the fraction of those runs where you show up, relative to the total times anyone from your tracked set shows up. This is the channel most businesses have never checked even once, and it's also the one changing fastest — assistants update their blended web/training data regularly, so a number from six months ago tells you very little about today. Putting the three together Once you have a rough share for each channel, the useful exercise isn't averaging them into one score — it's looking at where they disagree. Strong on search, weak on AI answers, is a specific, fixable gap (usually: your content and reviews aren't specific enough for an AI assistant to quote confidently). Strong on mentions, weak everywhere else, means your independent attention isn't being converted into anything a search engine or assistant can act on. Weak across all three against one specific competitor is the clearest signal of all — it tells you exactly who to study. Tailwind's Brand Visibility report runs this comparison for you automatically — pulling search visibility, independent mentions, and AI-answer checks into one cross-channel share of voice report against the local competitors you actually compete with, instead of three separate numbers you have to reconcile by hand. Start with the gap, not the average The point of measuring share of voice across channels isn't to produce one tidy percentage. It's to find the specific channel where you're losing ground without knowing it — because that's the one costing you customers right now. Get your free Brand Visibility report and see where you actually stand against the competitors in your city, across search, mentions, and AI, in one view.
How to Find Your Real Local Competitors (Not Just the Ones You Know)
Ask most business owners who their competitors are, and you'll get two or three names — the ones they think about, the ones a customer mentioned once, the ones they used to work for. Ask the same question with real data behind it, and the list is usually three to five times longer. Not because the owner is wrong about the two or three they named. Because there are another ten or fifteen businesses actively winning the same searches, the same AI recommendations, and the same customers — and nobody's ever gone looking for them. That gap matters more than it sounds like it should. You can't lose market share to a competitor you don't know exists, and you can't win it back from one either. Before you can analyze competitors, benchmark against them, or figure out why a customer picked someone else, you need an accurate list. Here's how to actually build one. Why your mental list is already wrong A few reasons the obvious names aren't the whole picture: You know who's been around. The competitor who's been on the same street for fifteen years sticks in your head. The one who opened eight months ago and has been quietly climbing the map pack for "best [your category] near me" doesn't — until they're already taking your calls. You think in terms of direct competitors, not the businesses actually ranking for your terms. A specialty repair shop might only think of other specialty shops as competition. Meanwhile a general handyman service with a stronger Google Business Profile and twice the reviews is showing up above them for half their target searches, and taking the customers who didn't care about the specialization. AI assistants don't share your mental model. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini "who's the best [category] in [city]," the assistant pulls from review volume, review content, site content, and citations — not from who's been established the longest or who you personally think of as competition. The businesses it recommends are, by definition, your real competitive set for that query, whether or not you'd have named them. Four ways to actually find them 1. Search like a customer, not a business owner. Open an incognito window, search "[your category] [your city]" and "[your category] near me," and write down every business in the map pack and the first page of organic results — not just the first three. Do this for every variation a real customer would use: the formal name of your service, the casual name, the "near me" version, the "best" version. 2. Check "people also search for." Google's Business Profile listings and Maps results often surface a "people also search for" or "nearby" row of related businesses. These are frequently competitors Google's own algorithm has already identified as substitutable for yours — which is a stronger signal than your own guess, since it's based on actual user behavior. 3. Ask the AI assistants the question your customer would ask. Put the same "best [category] in [city]" question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. The businesses that come back — especially the ones that show up across more than one assistant — are competing for the exact same decision your customer is making, and some of them will be names you've genuinely never heard of. 4. Look at review platforms' "similar businesses" sections. Yelp, Google, and most vertical-specific review sites (OpenTable, Houzz, Avvo, depending on your industry) show a "similar businesses nearby" module on your own listing. That's a free, ready-made competitor list someone else already built for you. Run all four, and you'll typically end up with a working list of 10 to 20 businesses — a mix of the ones you expected and a longer tail you didn't. That's we suggest 10–20 competitors for you to review for exactly this reason: it's a wide enough set to catch the real competitive picture, without being so long it's unusable. What to do once you have the list A list of names isn't an analysis — it's a starting point. The real question is where each competitor actually beats you and where you beat them: search visibility, review volume and rating, AI recommendation rate, and independent mentions outside the review sites. Once you have your list, here's how to actually analyze it, step by step. The list is the hard part — don't skip it It's tempting to analyze the two or three competitors you already know well and call it done. But those are usually the competitors you're already aware of, already benchmarking against informally, and already losing or winning against in a way you roughly understand. The ones costing you customers without your noticing are the ones further down this list — the newer shop, the generalist pulling your specialty searches, the business the AI assistants keep recommending that you'd never thought to check. Get your free Brand Visibility report and skip the manual search-and-compile work — it surfaces your real local competitor set automatically, across search, AI answers, and mentions, so you're reviewing a complete list instead of guessing at one.
Local Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Template for Small Businesses
Most local competitor analysis dies in the same place: a half-finished spreadsheet with three competitors listed, one column filled in, and a note to "come back to this" that never happens. The problem usually isn't motivation — it's that nobody wrote down which columns actually matter before opening the spreadsheet. Here's a template you can build in fifteen minutes and actually keep updated, plus the method for filling it in. Why this is worth doing properly Most owners already have an informal sense of their competition — the two or three names that come to mind when someone asks "who else does what you do." The problem with relying on that mental list is twofold. First, it's usually incomplete: the business that's actually eating into your search traffic is often not the one you'd name off the top of your head, because visibility and reputation in your industry don't always match who's been around longest or who you personally think of as "the competition." Second, even for the competitors you do know about, an informal sense of how you compare isn't the same as a number you can track over time. A proper local competitor analysis fixes both problems: it gives you the right list of competitors, not just the familiar one, and it turns "I think we're doing fine" into something you can actually check again in three months and see whether it's still true. It's also worth being honest about what this isn't. This isn't a pricing comparison or a list of their marketing taglines — plenty of competitor-analysis advice stops there, and it's the least useful part. What actually predicts whether a customer picks them over you is visibility and trust signals: do they show up when someone searches, what do strangers say about them, does an AI assistant recommend them. That's what this template tracks. Step 1: Build your competitor list first — don't skip this Before you open a spreadsheet, get the list of who to put in it. Finding your real local competitors is worth doing as its own step, because the obvious names — the other business you think about, the one with the big sign — are frequently not the ones actually ranking next to you or getting mentioned instead of you. Search the terms a customer would use ("[your service] near me," "[your service] in [your city]") and write down every business that shows up in the map pack or the first page of organic results, not just the ones you already recognized. Aim for 10 to 15 names for a first pass. That's enough to see real patterns without the analysis becoming a part-time job. Step 2: Set up the table Here's the column structure. You can build this in a spreadsheet in a few minutes — the specific tool doesn't matter, the columns do: ColumnWhat to put in itCompetitor nameAs it appears on their Google Business ProfileGoogle rating & review counte.g. 4.6★ (212)Review response rateRough estimate: scan their last 10 reviews, count how many have an owner replyMap pack presenceYes/No, for your 2–3 most important search termsEstimated share of searchSee Step 4 — a rough percentage, not exactAI mentionsMentioned / Not mentioned, across the assistants you checkIndependent mentions foundReddit, local blogs, "best of" roundups — count or note examplesNotesAnything specific — a tagline they use, a service angle, a weak point Put your own business in the first row. Everything after that is comparison, not a report about your competitors in isolation. Step 3: Fill in the easy columns first Google rating, review count, and map pack presence take the least time and are worth doing for the full list before you move to anything else. For each competitor: Search their business name plus city, note the star rating and review count from their Google Business Profile.Open their 10 most recent reviews and count how many have a visible owner response. This is a rough proxy for how actively they manage their reputation — a business replying to most reviews within a few days is paying attention in a way that shows up in how they're perceived.Search your 2–3 core terms and note, for each competitor, whether they appear in the three-listing map pack. This alone usually surfaces the first real insight: the competitor you assumed was "the big one" sometimes has a weaker review profile than you do, while a business you'd never thought of as competition is quietly outranking everyone. Step 4: Estimate share of search Share of search — what fraction of the branded search volume for your category goes to your name specifically, versus each competitor's — is the harder column to fill in, because it requires search volume data most owners don't have ready access to. The practical shortcut: use Google Trends to compare your business name against two or three competitors at a time (Trends allows direct comparisons and shows relative interest over time, even without exact volume numbers). You won't get a precise percentage this way, but you will get a reliable relative picture — whether you're the most-searched name in your category locally, roughly tied, or clearly behind. For a rough number instead of a relative comparison, Google's Keyword Planner can estimate monthly search volume for your business name versus competitors' names directly, though its ranges are wide and it won't return data for very low-volume local names. Either method gets you close enough for this table's purpose, which is spotting direction and gaps — not academic precision. Step 5: Check what AI assistants say For your 2–3 core search terms, ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini the question a customer would ask ("best [service] in [city]") and note which competitors get mentioned, in what order, and whether you're among them. This is the column most competitor-analysis templates from a few years ago don't include at all, and it's increasingly the one that explains a gap the other columns can't: a competitor with a similar review profile and similar map pack presence to yours can still be the one AI assistants recommend, because the underlying signals — review content, structured business data, independent mentions — don't always track with Google ranking. Step 6: Look for independent mentions Search each competitor's name on Reddit, in local Facebook groups if you have access, and alongside terms like "best [category] [city]" to catch roundup posts or local blog mentions. This column is the slowest to fill in and the easiest to skip — which is exactly why it's often where the real differentiator shows up. A competitor with an unremarkable Google profile but three or four organic Reddit recommendations is winning a kind of trust signal that doesn't show up anywhere else on this table. Step 7: Read the table, not just the numbers Once it's filled in, look for the column where you're clearly behind — not the one where you're clearly ahead, which is tempting to focus on but doesn't tell you what to fix. A pattern worth watching for: being roughly tied on Google rating and map pack presence, but behind on AI mentions and independent mentions. That combination usually means your on-platform reputation is fine, but nothing independent is vouching for you off-platform — which is a different problem than a weak review profile, and needs a different fix (getting mentioned, not just getting rated). A worked example of what this looks like in practice: say your table shows you and your closest competitor both sitting around 4.5 stars with roughly 150 reviews each, both in the map pack for your top two search terms. On paper, a tie. But your AI mentions column shows them coming up first in three out of four assistant checks, and your independent mentions column has two Reddit threads recommending them by name against zero for you. The Google-facing numbers say you're even; the off-platform numbers say they're pulling ahead in exactly the channels that are hardest to fix quickly. That's the gap worth acting on first, and it's one a review-count comparison alone would never have surfaced. Keep it updated, not perfect The table doesn't need to be exhaustive to be useful, and it loses most of its value if you build it once and never look at it again. A quarterly refresh — same competitors, same columns, 20 minutes — is enough to catch a competitor pulling ahead before it shows up as a slow month you can't explain. Skip the manual version Everything in this template is something Tailwind's Brand Visibility report checks automatically — Google's local results, independent mentions, AI answers across assistants, and an experimental visibility index that combines them — lined up against the 10 to 20 competitors you're actually competing with, not just the ones you thought to list. Run a local competitor visibility report and get the filled-in version of this table in about 30 seconds, free, no signup required for the first look.
Share of Search: The Metric That Predicts Market Share
Most marketing metrics tell you what already happened. Share of search is one of the rare ones that tells you what's about to happen — and you can calculate it yourself, for free, in Google Keyword Planner, without a research budget. What share of search actually is Share of search is your brand's share of all the branded searches in your category. Take the total number of people searching for you and your named competitors by name over a period, and divide your number by the total. If you and three competitors get searched by name a combined 1,000 times a month, and 250 of those searches are for you, your share of search is 25%. That's it — no survey, no panel, no agency. It's built entirely from data Google already collects and already shows you for free through Keyword Planner. If you'd rather skip pulling the numbers yourself, you can see your share of search next to local competitors in a free automated report — but the manual version below is worth understanding even if you end up using the shortcut. Why this number predicts market share This isn't a metric someone invented because it sounded plausible. It comes from research by Les Binet, presented at the IPA's EffWorks Global conference in 2020. Binet tested share of search against actual market share across several categories — including automotive, energy, and mobile phones — and found a consistent pattern: when a brand's share of search rises, its share of market tends to follow, usually with a lag. For some categories, like cars, that lag ran close to a year — meaning share of search was showing a shift in market position before it showed up in sales figures. Binet's framing for the gap between the two is "Extra Share of Search" (ESOS) — when a brand's share of search runs ahead of its share of market, that gap tends to predict the market share is about to move up to close it, and vice versa. Follow-up research by James Hankins for the IPA, covering 30 case studies across 12 categories and seven countries, found share of search explained roughly 83% of the variation in a brand's market share — a strong enough relationship that share of search gets treated in marketing effectiveness circles as one of the few genuinely predictive, cheap-to-measure brand metrics available. Worth being precise about what this research actually covers: Binet's original work was done at the category level — national or regional brands in categories like cars and energy, not local businesses competing block by block. The same logic — more people searching for you by name relative to your competitors signals growing consideration, which tends to precede growing share — holds at the local level too, but it's a reasonable extension of the research, not a direct restatement of it. Treat it as a strong, well-grounded signal, not a guarantee specific to your category. A worked example Say you run a local moving company. You list four real competitors — the ones customers actually compare you against when they're getting quotes. Pulling 12 months of Keyword Planner data for all five business names gives you this: You: 320 searches/month averageCompetitor A: 590 searches/month averageCompetitor B: 210 searches/month averageCompetitor C: 140 searches/month averageCompetitor D: 90 searches/month average Total category search volume: 1,350. Your share of search: 320 ÷ 1,350 = 23.7%. Competitor A, by comparison, sits at 43.7% — nearly double yours, which tells you more about where you actually stand than "we're ranked #3 locally" does on its own, because it's measuring demand, not just where Google happens to place you today. Run the same calculation again next quarter. If your share climbs to 27% while Competitor A's slips to 40%, that's the "Extra Share of Search" dynamic from Binet's research in motion — your actual market position is likely starting to shift before it shows up anywhere else you'd normally look, like revenue or lead volume. Share of search vs. share of voice These two get used interchangeably and shouldn't be. Share of voice is about how much you're being talked about — ad spend, media mentions, social conversation. Share of search is about how much you're being searched for — which is closer to actual purchase intent, because someone typing your name into Google is already past "have I heard of this brand" and into "I'm thinking about this brand specifically." Share of voice can be bought with a bigger ad budget. Share of search is harder to fake — it reflects whether what you're already doing (reviews, word of mouth, local reputation, past advertising) is actually converting into people searching your name. If you want the fuller comparison across all the channels that feed into share of voice for a local business, see share of voice for local businesses. How to calculate your own share of search List your real competitors. Not every business in your category citywide — the specific 3 to 8 businesses a customer would actually be choosing between you and. If you're not sure who those are, start there first; a share-of-search number built on the wrong competitor set tells you nothing useful.Open Google Keyword Planner. You don't need to be running ads to access it — a free Google Ads account gets you in. Use the "Discover new keywords" tool and search each business name individually (yours and each competitor's).Pull 12 full months of data, not a snapshot. A single month will reflect whatever's seasonal in your category — more landscaping searches in spring, more HVAC searches in July and January. A full year averages that out and gives you a number you can actually compare year over year.Add up the monthly search volumes for your name and every competitor's name, then divide your number by the total. That's your share of search.Watch it over time, not just once. A single reading tells you where you stand today. Tracking it quarter over quarter tells you whether you're gaining or losing ground — which is the part that actually matters for decisions. If step 2 through 4 sounds like more manual pulling than you want to do by hand — especially across several competitors, repeated quarterly — our guide to checking brand search volume walks through the Keyword Planner mechanics in more detail, including the gotchas (Keyword Planner shows volume in ranges rather than exact numbers once you're outside an active ad account, and some low-volume local business names return no data at all rather than a true zero — which is a different thing and shouldn't be read as "nobody searches for us"). The limits of this metric Share of search isn't perfect, and it's worth knowing where it breaks down before you lean on it too hard. Businesses with generic names (a "City Dental" in a city with five other dental practices that could plausibly be called that) get noisy data, because Keyword Planner can't always tell which searches meant which business. New businesses with low search volume overall will see share-of-search numbers that swing wildly month to month off small sample sizes. And it only measures branded search — if your category has mostly unbranded search behavior ("dentist near me" rather than "[your business] dentist"), share of search will understate how much of the local market is actually in play, because a lot of that competition is happening in map-pack rankings and reviews rather than name recognition. That's exactly why it's one measurement among four, not the whole picture — see what brand visibility actually is for how it fits with local organic rankings, independent mentions, and AI answers. Checking it without the manual work You can run the calculation above yourself — it costs nothing but time, and the time is mostly in pulling 12 months of data for every competitor and repeating it on a schedule. Tailwind's free Brand Visibility report runs this calculation automatically, alongside the other three signals that make up the full picture — local Google rankings, independent mentions, and AI answers — against the specific competitors you choose.
What Is Brand Visibility? How to Measure It for a Local Business
Ask ten business owners what "brand visibility" means and you'll get ten different answers — most of them vague. Some mean "do people recognize our logo." Some mean "do we rank on Google." Some mean "are people talking about us." The honest answer is that brand visibility isn't one thing. It's four separate, measurable signals, and most businesses have only ever checked one of them. Brand visibility, defined Brand visibility is how often — and how prominently — your business shows up across the places a potential customer actually looks before they decide to call, book, or buy. Not "does my business exist on the internet." Whether, at the specific moments people are deciding between you and the business down the street, you're the one they actually see. You can measure your brand visibility against competitors directly, but it helps to first understand what's actually being measured. That definition matters because it's the one that's measurable. "Awareness" lives in people's heads and you can't check it without a survey. Visibility leaves a trail: search volume, rankings, mentions, and now, AI answers. You can go measure all four this week, for free, without hiring a research firm. The four measurements that make up visibility 1. Share of Search Share of search is your branded search volume divided by the total branded search volume across you and your named competitors, measured on Google Keyword Planner over a full 12 months (a full year smooths out seasonal spikes — a landscaping company's search volume in April tells you nothing reliable compared to October). If three competitors in your city get searched by name 400 times a month combined and you're 100 of those, your share of search is 25%. This metric matters more than it sounds like it should, because branded search volume is one of the few publicly checkable proxies for "how many people in my market already think of me first." We cover the mechanics in detail in our guide to checking brand search volume, and the research behind why this number is worth tracking at all in our piece on share of search as a predictive metric. 2. Local Google organic results This is the one most businesses already half-track: do you show up in the map pack and organic results for the searches your customers actually run — "plumber near me," "best coffee shop in [neighborhood]," "[your category] in [your city]." The gap is that most businesses check their own ranking and stop there. The more useful question is relative: where do you rank compared to the specific competitors your customers are choosing between, for the specific terms that drive calls and bookings, not just your brand name. 3. Independent mentions Reviews on Google and Yelp are visibility you control, at least partly — you can ask for them, respond to them, manage them. Independent mentions are the visibility you don't control: a Reddit thread where someone asks "anyone used [category] in [city]?", a Hacker News comment, a local Facebook group recommendation, a "best of" roundup on a blog you've never heard of. This is also the hardest signal to track manually, because it happens on platforms you don't have an account that monitors, in threads you're not tagged in. It's also often the most trusted signal, precisely because it's not sponsored or self-reported — see how competitors get mentioned on Reddit (and you don't) for more on why this channel in particular tends to go unmeasured. 4. AI answers When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot "who's the best [category] in [city]," does your business get named? This is the newest of the four signals and the one with the least established measurement practice — there's no "AI Analytics" dashboard the way there's Google Search Console. It's also the least stable: the same question asked twice in the same week can come back with a different answer, because these models don't all answer from the same underlying data, and some (Perplexity, and ChatGPT and Gemini when web search is on) pull live results while others lean more on what they were trained on. The honest way to check it is to actually run the queries yourself, across assistants, repeated a few times, and record what comes back — not just whether you're mentioned, but who's mentioned ahead of you and why. See how to benchmark your business against competitors in AI answers for the specific method, including how to phrase questions the way an actual customer would rather than the way a marketer would. A quick example Say you run a mid-size HVAC company. You check Google and you're ranking #2 in the map pack for "AC repair [city]" — looks solid. But run the other three measurements and the picture changes: your share of search is 18% against a competitor's 44% (they've been running radio ads for a decade and it shows in branded search volume, even though their website ranks below yours). On Reddit, a thread from eight months ago in your city's subreddit recommends two other companies by name and doesn't mention you. And when you ask ChatGPT and Perplexity "who's the best HVAC company in [city]," neither names you — both default to whichever companies have the most recent, most detailed Google reviews, which happens to be your two biggest competitors. Checked in isolation, each of those signals would have told a different story. #2 in the map pack says "we're doing fine." 18% share of search says "we have a real visibility gap." Zero AI mentions says "we're not even in the model's consideration set." None of the four is more "correct" than the others — they measure different things, and a business can be strong on one and nearly invisible on another. That's the whole reason to check all four side by side instead of picking whichever one already looks good. Brand visibility vs. brand awareness — not the same thing "Awareness" is whether people have heard of you at all, anywhere, in any context — it's a mental state, and the only honest way to measure it is a survey asking people to recall brands unprompted. Visibility is narrower and far more actionable: it's what people see at the actual moment they're choosing. A business can have low awareness in the broad sense (most of the city has never heard of them) and still have strong visibility at the moment of decision, if they dominate the search results and AI answers for the handful of queries that matter. For most local businesses, that's the metric worth optimizing — see brand awareness vs. brand visibility: what you can actually measure for the longer version of this distinction. It's also worth separating visibility from reputation. Reputation is about what people say when they talk about you — your star rating, the tone of your reviews, whether complaints get resolved. You can read more about managing that side of things with Tailwind's review management tools. Visibility is about whether you're in the conversation at all. A business can have an excellent reputation and still be nearly invisible if it never comes up when people are actually comparing options — and a business with a middling reputation but strong visibility will still get more first looks. Both matter; they're not substitutes for each other. Why "next to competitors" is the part everyone skips Almost every visibility check a business runs is about itself in isolation: "what's our Google ranking," "what's our star rating." The number that actually tells you something useful is relative — how you compare to the 10 to 20 businesses your customers are realistically choosing between. 25% share of search sounds fine until you learn one competitor has 50%. Showing up in AI answers sounds fine until you learn you're mentioned fourth, after three names a customer will probably call before they get to you. Finding the right set of competitors to measure yourself against is its own small skill — most businesses either pick too few (just the one obvious rival) or too many (every business with a similar name in the metro area). Once you have that list, a structured local competitor analysis across all four dimensions — not just one — is what turns "we think we're doing fine" into an actual, comparative answer. How to check your own brand visibility You can run a rough version of this yourself, free, in about 15 minutes: pull your branded search volume from Keyword Planner, check your map pack position for your top three local terms, search your business name on Reddit, and ask three AI assistants who they'd recommend in your category and city. Our 15-minute self-audit walks through exactly that process step by step. The faster path is Tailwind's free Brand Visibility report — it runs all four measurements for you, side by side against the specific competitors you're actually losing customers to, instead of checking each one separately and trying to piece together what it means. Go deeper This article is the entry point to a longer series on brand visibility. If you want to go deeper on a specific piece: Measuring search and market position - Share of Search: The Metric That Predicts Market Share - How to Check Brand Search Volume - Local Market Share: How to Estimate Your Slice of the City - "Organic, Map Pack, Ads or AI Overviews: Where Local Clicks Go in 2026" Competitors - Local Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Template - How to Find Your Real Local Competitors - Competitor Visibility Report: A Template for Owners and Agencies Mentions, voice, and AI - Share of Voice for Local Businesses - Why Competitors Get Mentioned on Reddit and You Don't - How to Benchmark Your Business Against Competitors in AI Answers Scoring and action - Online Visibility Scores: How They're Calculated (and Why Most Mislead) - Brand Awareness vs. Brand Visibility - How to Increase Brand Visibility Locally: 12 Tactics Tied to a Metric - A 15-Minute Self-Audit Or skip the manual version entirely: get your free Brand Visibility report and see all four measurements run automatically against the competitors you're actually up against.
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