Sauce · Measurement
What a geo-grid scan actually shows you about local rank
Quick answer
A geo-grid checks your rank for a search from many points spread across town, not from one spot, and draws the result as a coloured heat map. Green is a top-three position, orange is the edge of the pack, red is not ranking at all. It shows something a single reported position cannot: how far your visibility reaches before it drops off. For a business that drives to the customer, that spread is the whole picture.
Want to see your own map?The free check runs a geo-grid on your main search and shows you where you appear.
Run the free checkYour tool says you rank fourth. Fourth where? From your desk, or from the other side of your service area?
A single ranking number answers a question nobody asked. Local results change with the searcher’s location, so “position four” is an average of many different truths. A geo-grid unpacks the average.
How it works
The tool picks a search, say “emergency electrician”, and a grid of points across your service area, maybe seven by seven. It runs the search as if the user were standing at each point, records your position, and colours the point. Put together, the points make a heat map of your real coverage.
One check versus the grid
- One position, from one location, usually near your address.
- Looks stable month to month even when coverage is shrinking.
- Cannot tell you which suburbs you have lost.
- Easy to feel good about and act on the wrong thing.
- Dozens of positions, one per point, across the whole area.
- Shows the shape of your visibility and where the edge is.
- Names the exact parts of town where you drop out of the pack.
- Turns “we need better rankings” into “we need the north end”.
Reading the map
You rank in the top three for that search from that location. These are the areas actually sending you calls from the map.
Roughly positions four to ten. You are on the page but below the fold of the pack. Spillover only. These are the winnable edges.
Not in the local pack at all. If red points sit close to your address, that is a bigger problem than red points at the far edge of the area.
A healthy map is green in the middle and fades outward evenly. Holes near the centre, or a lopsided map, point to a specific issue: a category, a competitor cluster, or a proximity ceiling you cannot out-optimise.
Go deeper
Related reading
How to measure, why proximity caps you, and what the number leaves out.
Set up geo-grid tracking
What to track, how often, and how to compare month to month fairly.
I rank at my office, not across town
The proximity ceiling, why it exists, and what actually widens coverage.
Why a rankings report is a weak measure
What monthly reports leave out, and what to ask for instead.
See your coverage, not a number.The free check runs the grid and hands you the heat map.
Run the free checkHow to use it
- Run one before any work starts as a baseline you own.
- Run it monthly, on the same day, so the comparison is fair and free of daily noise.
- Track the count of green points, not one headline position. That number is your coverage.
- Aim work at the orange edge nearest your green core. That is where a small gain flips points to green.
What is a geo-grid scan?
It checks your ranking for a search from many points laid out in a grid across your service area, instead of once from a single location. Each point gets a position, and the results are drawn as a coloured heat map so you can see where you are strong and where you disappear.
What do the colours mean?
Green points are where you rank in the top three for that search. Yellow and orange are the edges, roughly positions four to ten. Red points are where you are not in the pack at all. A healthy map is green near your address and fades outward; a patchy one has red holes close in.
Why not just trust the position my tool reports?
Because one number is an average or a single check. It can read position 4 while you are first at your address and nowhere three kilometres away. The grid shows that spread. For a service business that drives to the customer, the spread is the whole story.
How often should I run one?
Monthly is enough for most businesses to see a trend without chasing daily noise. Run one before you start any local SEO work as a baseline, then on the same day each month so the comparison is fair.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help, Improve your local ranking on Google: local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence, so distance from the searcher changes the ranking a geo-grid measures. Read it
- Search Engine Land, Local SEO coverage (2026): grid-based rank tracking is the accepted way to measure local visibility because a single-location check misrepresents coverage. Read it
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors (2026 edition): proximity to the searcher is among the strongest Local Pack factors, which is why position varies point to point across an area.
- DataForSEO, SERP datasets (2026): local pack results returned for the same query differ by the coordinates attached to the request, confirming that one check cannot represent an area.
- Peer-reviewed: Tadelis, S. (2016). “Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets.” Annual Review of Economics 8, 321–340. A single aggregate metric hides the variation underneath it, which is the case for one reported ranking versus a full grid.
Figures are directional and drawn from the sources above.
Next step
Get the heat map, not the headline
The free check runs a geo-grid on your main search and hands you a map of where you appear, where you fade, and where the winnable edges are.