What Is a Geo-Grid Rank Scan (Share of Local Voice)?

What is a geo-grid rank scan?

A geo-grid rank scan measures where your business actually ranks on Google Maps across a grid of points laid over your catchment, usually 25 points in a 5 by 5 pattern. It checks the rank at each point, then rolls the results into two numbers: Share of Local Voice and your average map rank.

Think of a paper map of your suburb with a tidy grid drawn over it. At every intersection, the scan asks Google the same question a customer would ask ("nail salon near me", "osteopath in Ubud") and records exactly where your business lands in the results at that spot. Twenty-five checks, twenty-five ranks, one honest picture of your whole trading area instead of one flattering guess.

Each point gets a colour. Green means you show in the top three (the pins customers actually tap). Yellow means you are close but buried. Red means you are invisible there. Line them all up and you get a heat map of exactly where you win and where you disappear.

What do Share of Local Voice and average map rank actually mean?

These are the two headline numbers a scan produces, and they answer two different questions.

Share of Local Voice (SoLV)

Share of Local Voice is the percentage of the map you own for a given search. A score of 100% means you sit at the top rank at every single point in the grid. A score of 40% means large parts of your catchment never see you first. It is the single cleanest "here is the gap" figure, because it turns 25 scattered ranks into one number a business owner can read in a second.

Average map rank

Average map rank is simpler: add up your position at all 25 points and take the average. A business that sits first or second across nearly its whole catchment, like Asia's Lashes in General Trias at 95.8% Share of Local Voice for "eyelash extensions", carries a very low average rank. A low average rank plus a high SoLV is the winning combination.

• SoLV near 100%: you own the map, competitors are an afterthought.
• SoLV 60% to 80%: strong core, soft edges worth fixing.
• SoLV under 40%: most of your area never finds you first.
• Average rank under 2: you are consistently in the tap zone.
• Average rank above 5: you are on page two where clicks vanish.

Why does a single rank check lie?

Most owners check their ranking by searching from the shop counter, right next to their own pin. That one check almost always reads number one. It is also close to useless, because Google shows different results depending on where the searcher is standing. Proximity is one of the strongest factors in the local Map Pack ranking signals, so the same business can rank first at its front door and nowhere three suburbs away.

A geo-grid scan exists precisely to expose that bias. Here is the difference laid out.

The Map Pack (the three pins under the map) takes roughly 40% to 50% of local-search clicks, so knowing your real coverage across the whole area, not just at your own address, is the difference between a guess and a plan.

How is a geo-grid scan measured on live Google data?

We run scans with Local Falcon, which queries live Google results from each grid coordinate rather than estimating. A few settings decide whether the picture is honest:

1. Grid size and spacing: a 5 by 5 (25 points) suits most suburbs, a 7 by 7 (49 points) for wide service areas.
2. Real keywords: the exact phrases customers type, not internal jargon.
3. Mobile results: most local searches happen on a phone, so we scan mobile.
4. Open hours: rankings shift when you are closed, so scans run while you trade.
5. The same grid every month: so the before and after are a fair comparison.

The output is a dated heat map plus the SoLV and average-rank numbers, captured at onboarding as your baseline. Every later scan is measured against that first picture, which is how the work becomes provable instead of a promise.

What does a strong scan look like?

Here are three real client scans from our own Local Falcon runs. The numbers are the client's, measured on live Google data.

A near-solid green grid like Osteo Ubud's means the business is the default answer everywhere a local might be standing. That is the goal, and the scan is how you prove you reached it.

Does the map still matter now that Google's AI answers the question?

It matters, but it is no longer the whole game. Around 45% of consumers now use AI to find local businesses, up from 6% a year earlier (BrightLocal 2026). AI Overviews already sit on a large share of local searches, somewhere between roughly 40% (Local Falcon) and about 68% (Whitespark) depending on the query type. And when an AI answer is on the page, users click a normal result only about 8% of the time versus 15% without it, and only around 1% click the source the AI actually cited (Pew, via Search Engine Land).

Here is the twist that changes everything for a local business. In AI answers, being physically close barely helps. The distance-to-citation correlation is about 0.001. In the Map Pack, proximity is king. In an AI answer, content quality and a clear, consistent business identity beat physical distance, which means a well-run business can get named across a whole city, not just its immediate street.

That is why the page you are reading is built the way it is. The only peer-reviewed study on getting named by AI, the Princeton GEO study (Aggarwal et al., 10,000 queries), found that adding statistics lifted AI visibility by up to 41%, and citing real sources lifted it by nearly 28%. So a geo-grid scan gives you two things at once: the map proof that wins the classic search, and the structured, evidence-backed answer that gets you recommended by Google's AI. AI traffic is still only about 1% to 2% of the web today, but it converts several times better because the AI already did the comparison shopping. You want to own both surfaces before your competitors claim them.