“Who should I call about this, near me” is one of the oldest questions on the internet and one of the newest things assistants do. It is also the category where we are clearest about the limits of what we measure.
Who is asking
Local questions are short, urgent and specific. Someone needs a service now, in a place, at a price they can accept, and they want two or three names rather than a page of results.
The second half of a local question is almost always verification: opening hours, whether you cover their area, whether you can come out today. Those answers live in facts about your business, not in your brand story.
Questions buyers actually ask
Not keyword variants — whole questions, the way a person types them into an assistant. These are the shapes we build tracking around.
- emergency plumber open now near me
- family dentist in this part of town taking new patients
- who does same-day laptop repair around here
- is this place open on Sunday
- how much does a boiler service cost in this city
- do they cover my postcode
Which surfaces matter here
Local answers are strongest on the Google side, where an answer feature sits directly above the results a searcher was already reading. Chat surfaces answer local questions too, and are noticeably more cautious about them.
This is the one category where we say plainly what we do not cover: we track answer surfaces, not the map pack and not your business profile dashboard. Those are real and important, and they are somebody else's tool.
Reference pages for these surfaces
Where these answers come from
The pages an assistant leans on in this category are rarely all yours. Each block below is a source family worth checking before you write another article.
Business profiles and map data
The structured record of your name, address, hours and category. It is the most-used source for the verification half of a local question, and it is maintained outside your website.
Review platforms
The “best” half of a local question is answered largely from reviews you did not write, on platforms you do not own.
Local directories and trade bodies
Sector directories, chamber listings and accreditation registers. Thin pages, but consistent ones that name you precisely and are easy to keep correct.
Local press and community groups
Neighbourhood publications and community forums answer questions about specific places with a specificity nothing else has.
Your own location and service-area pages
The pages stating, in text, where you are, what you cover, what you charge and when you open. If any of that exists only inside an image or a booking widget, it cannot be used.
What the documentation says
Each line below is read from the linked document — a vendor's own guidance, a published standard, or a public register. Nothing in this section is our estimate.
Google documents local business structured data for describing a business's address, telephone number and opening hours in machine-readable form, so Search can present those details.
Source: Google — Local business structured data (opens the source document in a new tab)schema.org defines LocalBusiness together with a large set of more specific subtypes, with properties for address, geographic coordinates, opening hours and area served — the vocabulary Google's guidance builds on.
Source: schema.org — LocalBusiness (opens the source document in a new tab)Google states that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there is no special schema.org structured data for those features.
Source: Google — AI features and your website (opens the source document in a new tab)Google's review snippet guidance excludes self-serving reviews — a review about the business itself, placed on that business's own site, is not eligible for a review rich result.
Source: Google — Review snippet structured data (opens the source document in a new tab)
What is not documented
Open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering these with a precise number for your category is guessing.
- No assistant vendor documents how a local recommendation is chosen, and location handling differs by surface, by device and by how the question was phrased.
- We do not track the map pack, local pack rankings or your business profile. Those are different surfaces with their own tooling; we would rather name the gap than imply coverage we do not have.
- Consistent name, address and phone details across directories are standard practice and good hygiene. The effect on assistant answers specifically is not documented by anyone, and we will not pretend to have measured it.
- “Near me” is not a fixed query. Our tracking runs with fixed market settings so results stay comparable over time, which is deliberately not the same thing as what a person standing on your street sees.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your service and locality questions on a schedule with your market settings fixed, and record whether your business was named, which competitors appeared beside you, which sources were cited, and the tone of the mention.
Comparability is the point. Fixed settings mean a change in the number is a change in the answer, not a change in where the question was asked from.
The headline figure is the organic mention rate — questions that never name your business — kept apart from questions that already do.
Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only, with a one-time grant of answer credits and weekly automatic tracking. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are on Growth and Scale. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so every account currently runs on Launch — the pricing page lists what each plan includes.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this industry
No account, no card — results in the browser.
Related terms
Keep reading
The reference sets behind this page.