Local SEO statistics measure how people look for a nearby business on Google, on maps and now in AI assistants, and what happens to the listings that show up in those results. Most of the ones in circulation come from US surveys, some are ten years old, and one of the most quoted has never had a public source.
Here every number comes with who measured it, when and in which market. No survey of local search existed for Italy, our home market, so we ran a small one ourselves: on 4 October 2026 we queried Google from six Italian cities on 24 searches. On 10 October 2026 we added a shorter check from four UK cities.
The result in one line: on the 12 strictly local searches the local pack was always there and the AI Overview never was. On the 6 informational searches it was the exact opposite. The UK check gave the same split.
The most quoted statistics, checked one by one
Before putting a number in a presentation, it's worth knowing where it comes from. We took the statistics that appear most often on the pages ranking on Google UK's first page for this search and traced them back to the original source.
| How it circulates | Where it really comes from | Year and market | Can you use it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 46% of Google searches have local intent | A slide Google showed at an event, reported by Search Engine Roundtable on the strength of a tweet. Google never published it | 2018, market not stated | No, except as an unofficial claim |
| 76% of people who search for something nearby on a smartphone visit a business within a day, 28% buy | Google/Purchased digital diary study of 1,000 smartphone users | May 2016, country not stated | Yes, with the year next to it |
| "Near me" searches are up 136% | Internal Google data, mobile searches | March 2016, United States | Only as a historical figure |
| 97% read reviews of local businesses | BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 | 2026, 1,002 US adults | Yes, stating the sample |
| Listings in the 3-pack get 126% more traffic | SOCi, about 300,000 listings of multi-location brands, compared with positions 4-10 | 2022, country not stated | With care: it applies to chains |
| 42% of searchers click in the map pack | Backlinko, 259 valid US users, a single query | 2020 | Only with the sample next to it |
| A complete profile is seen as 2.7 times more reputable | Google Business Profile support page | Year, sample and country not stated | As a claim by Google |
| 78% of mobile local searches lead to an offline purchase within 24 hours | On Page Optimizer Pro, on page one for this search, it appears with no source and no year. We couldn't trace an original study | Not stated | No |
The 46% is the most instructive case. Barry Schwartz, who reported it in October 2018, wrote that all he had was a tweet from Nick Wilsdon reporting a slide. Eight years on, that number still opens local SEO guides: on Google UK's first page for "local seo statistics" on 10 October 2026, four of the nine organic results show it right in the snippet. Only Shopify adds that it was first reported by an industry blog in 2018.
The second case is the 76%. The figure exists and it is Google's, but it dates from 2016: the web page that presented it now redirects to the Google Business home page, and only the PDF is still online. Since then maps have started showing reviews up front and AI assistants have arrived. Ten years is a long time.
What we measured on 24 searches in six Italian cities
The method: on 4 October 2026, between 19:15 and 19:18 UTC, we used DataForSEO to collect Google.it's first page on desktop, simulating a searcher in Milan, Rome, Naples, Turin, Bologna and Florence. The 24 queries fall into three groups: 12 strictly local ("dentista milano" (dentist Milan), "idraulico roma" (plumber Rome), "gommista bologna" (tyre shop Bologna)), 6 informational ("quanto dura un impianto dentale" (how long does a dental implant last)) and 6 hybrid, with a city plus a comparison or price intent ("costo impianto dentale milano" (dental implant cost Milan), "migliore pizzeria napoli" (best pizzeria Naples)).
| Group | Queries | With AI Overview | With local pack | Directories and portals among organic results |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local | 12 | 0 of 12 | 12 of 12 | 42 of 118 (35.6%) |
| Informational | 6 | 6 of 6 | 0 of 6 | 7 of 48 (14.6%) |
| Hybrid | 6 | 4 of 6 | 2 of 6 | 13 of 56 (23.2%) |
| Total | 24 | 10 of 24 (41.7%) | 14 of 24 (58.3%) | 62 of 222 (27.9%) |
The first thing that stands out: the AI Overview and the local pack never appeared on the same page. Not in any of the 24. On this sample Google decides whether a search calls for a map or an answer, and doesn't mix the two. We ran the same check on Google UK on 10 October 2026 from Manchester, London, Leeds and Birmingham: "dentist manchester", "plumber london", "best italian restaurant leeds" and "accountant birmingham" all had a local pack and no AI Overview, while "dental implant cost manchester" and "how long do dental implants last" had an AI Overview and no pack.
The second point concerns the hybrids. The two that showed the map were "migliore pizzeria napoli" (best pizzeria Naples) and "migliore palestra firenze" (best gym Florence). When "costo", "costi", "prezzo" or "prezzi" (cost, costs, price, prices) enter the query, the map disappears and in four cases out of four the AI summary takes its place. In Manchester the AI Overview for "dental implant cost manchester" went a step further and built its own list of six local clinics, with stars, review counts and starting prices taken from their websites. A business that publishes its prices for its own city is competing with the AI Overview, not with the pack, and the clinics that published prices are the ones the AI Overview quotes.
The third point concerns reviews. In the 14 Italian pages with a local pack we collected 57 listings, some appearing in two queries. Of the 55 that showed the figure, the median was 358 reviews, with a minimum of 3 (an accountancy firm in Turin) and a maximum in the tens of thousands for a historic pizzeria in Naples.
| Query | City | Listings in the pack | Reviews (min-max) | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| idraulico roma (plumber) | Rome | 3 | 5-61 | 22 |
| commercialista torino (accountant) | Turin | 3 | 3-60 | 30 |
| avvocato divorzista milano (divorce lawyer) | Milan | 3 | 28-855 | 48 |
| palestra firenze (gym) | Florence | 3 | 68-135 | 118 |
| ottico bologna (optician) | Bologna | 3 | 176-346 | 300 |
| gommista bologna (tyre shop) | Bologna | 3 | 192-1,500 | 358 |
| dentista milano (dentist) | Milan | 6 | 34-974 | 360.5 |
| parrucchiere roma (hairdresser) | Rome | 6 | 37-4,500 | 506.5 |
| veterinario torino (vet) | Turin | 3 | 170-2,200 | 1,500 |
Put simply: there's no review count that's right in absolute terms. There's one per sector and per city, and it's set by the three competitors in the pack today. A plumber in Rome with 60 reviews is already level with the firms ahead of him; a vet in Turin with 300 is five times behind. The UK check shows the same spread: the median in the pack was 222 for "plumber london", 301 for "dentist manchester", 331 for "accountant birmingham" and 883 for "best italian restaurant leeds", and Pimlico Plumbers sat in the London pack with 6,200 reviews next to a firm with 73. You can do the count in five minutes by opening the map.
The sample is small and captures a few minutes of one evening (and, for the UK, six searches on 10 October 2026): it's an indication, not a national statistic. But it's measured on Google itself, in the country it describes, which is more than can be said for almost every other number on this page.
How much people search online in the UK
The pool every local search starts from is measured with official data, and here the UK has its own numbers, mostly from Ofcom.
- In May 2025, 82% of UK online adults used Google Search and 77% of adult smartphone users opened Google Maps at least once in the month, making it the third most used smartphone app (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, published 10 December 2025, Ipsos iris data).
- 94% of UK adults have internet access at home, a share that has been flat for several years; among people aged 65 and over, 21% don't (Ofcom, Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2025, 2024 data).
- In September 2026 Google handled 91.39% of searches made in the UK, Bing 6.08% (StatCounter).
- In the same month 53.56% of page views in the UK came from smartphones, 41.78% from desktop and 4.66% from tablets (StatCounter).
The Google Maps figure is the one that matters most for a business with a physical location. Three smartphone users in four open the app every month, and the map is where the local pack takes people when they tap it. What the UK no longer has is the direct measure of how many people search online for goods and services: the ONS stopped its "Internet access" bulletin in 2023, and the last figure in that series is from 2020. Eurostat, which publishes the indicator for EU countries, no longer covers the UK.
The detail on search engines and devices is on the page with SEO statistics; what changes on a phone is in the guide to mobile SEO.
The local pack: what decides it and what it's worth
The local pack is the block with the map and the listings that Google shows when it works out that the searcher wants a physical place. In our Italian test it was there on all 12 local queries, and in 10 cases out of 12 it started from the first position on the page, before any organic link. In the four UK local searches it sat below a row of directories ("Find results on", with Checkatrade, Yell, Bark, TheFork, Tripadvisor and others), but still above every organic result.
What decides it is set out in Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors, an annual survey of specialists. The 2026 edition, published on 6 November 2025 with 47 experts and 187 factors, puts these five at the top.
| Factor | Whitespark 2026 score |
|---|---|
| Primary category of the Google listing | 227 |
| Proximity to the searcher | 225 |
| Keywords in the business name | 223 |
| Physical address in the city searched | 213 |
| Business open at the time of the search | 189 |
Two of the five, proximity and address, can't be changed without moving. Keywords in the name can only be added if they are part of the real trading name, otherwise it breaks Google's guidelines. That leaves category and opening hours, which take ten minutes on the profile.
What being in it is worth: SOCi compared about 300,000 chain listings and found that those in the top three get 126% more traffic and 93% more actions (calls, direction requests, website clicks) than those between fourth and tenth position. It's a 2022 figure and only covers brands with many locations.
Our own first-hand figure is already published in our local SEO guide and comes from an Italian client: for an outdoor shop in Rome, between June and August 2026, non-branded local queries at an average organic position of 1.7 had a CTR of 5.2%, against 37.6% for branded queries at position 1.1. A sevenfold difference at the same position. The explanation is the map sitting above the first blue link.
Reviews: plenty of US data, not much British
Reviews are the most quoted topic in local SEO and the one where the gap between US and UK data is widest. The US reference is BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, published on 11 February 2026 and based on 1,002 US adults:
- 97% read reviews of local businesses;
- 74% look for reviews written in the last three months;
- 31% only use businesses with at least 4.5 stars;
- 89% expect the owner to respond;
- Google is still the leading review platform, but its share fell from 83% in 2025 to 71%.
The UK has no equivalent survey on local businesses. The closest figures are the ones the Competition and Markets Authority quoted when it announced five investigations on 27 March 2026, and they cover products and services in general:
- 89% of UK adults use online reviews when researching products or services (Which?);
- 90% of consumers used reviews, and reviews played a part in £217 billion of online retail spending in 2023 (government research quoted by the CMA);
- after a sweep of more than 100 review publishers, the CMA sent advisory letters to 54 firms, and 90% of them made changes.
- 90% of consumers are concerned about fake content in reviews and 87% think they have read fake ones (PowerReviews, 2022, also quoted by the CMA; the release doesn't state the market).
The weight of reviews explains the two UK changes of the last two years. Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans commissioning or posting fake reviews, offering to do it, and publishing reviews without reasonable steps to check they're genuine; the CMA can fine up to 10% of global turnover without going to court. And on 24 January 2025 Google gave undertakings to the CMA: UK businesses found boosting their rating with fake reviews get a warning on their Google profile and lose the ability to receive new reviews, and repeat offenders can have all their reviews deleted for six months or more. In the March 2026 investigations the CMA is looking, among other things, at Pasta Evangelists over discounts offered to customers who left 5-star reviews.
For anyone running a listing, the practical point is this: bought reviews, or reviews obtained in exchange for discounts, were already against Google's rules; in the UK they are now also a legal risk, and Google can make the penalty visible on the profile. How to ask for reviews without risk is covered in the guide to Google reviews.
Local search and AI: how much space it really takes
On AI the numbers contradict each other, and the reason is nearly always the same: everyone defines "local query" in their own way.
| Study | Sample | AI Overview on local queries |
|---|---|---|
| Whitespark, May 2025 | 540 queries, three US cities, six sectors | 68% across all queries; 15% on strictly local ones |
| Ahrefs, September 2025 | 146 million desktop SERPs | 7.9% on queries classed as local, against 22.8% on non-local ones |
| Visilay, October 2026 | 24 queries in six Italian cities, plus 6 queries in four UK cities | Italy: 0 of 12 strictly local, 6 of 6 informational. UK: 0 of 4 local |
The 68% that circulates in US reports lumps together very different searches. Isolating the ones where someone is actually looking for a place, Whitespark drops to 15% and finds the local pack in 93% of cases. Our test points the same way, even more sharply, in both countries. For the UK as a whole, Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 puts AI Overviews on about 30% of keyword searches and reports a YouGov finding that 53% of UK people say they often see AI summaries. The AI Overview has taken the informational part of the funnel, as we explain on the page about AI Overviews.
Where AI is really growing is outside Google:
- 45% of US consumers use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools to get recommendations for local businesses, up from 6% a year earlier; 40% say they trust the recommendations, 32% don't (BrightLocal 2026);
- 47% of US adults used AI for a local search in the last month, but 62% go straight to Google to check after an AI recommendation (Yext, March 2026, 1,120 respondents);
- ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of the brand locations analysed, against an average 35.9% presence in Google's local pack (SOCi, Local Visibility Index 2026, more than 350,000 locations of 2,751 brands);
- 86% of citations in Gemini, OpenAI and Perplexity answers come from sources the brand manages or can influence: websites for 44%, listings and directories for 42% (Yext, 6.8 million citations, October 2025).
Read together, they say one precise thing. ChatGPT is about thirty times more selective than the pack, and AI assistants draw on sources the business controls: the listing, the directories, the website. For now these are figures measured in the United States. How to check where your name appears is in the guide to AI visibility; how to get into the answers, in the one on how to appear in ChatGPT.
Google Business Profile: when the source is Google itself
On the profile, the most quoted numbers are Google's. On the Google Business Profile support page, the company writes that customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they find a complete profile, 70% more likely to visit it and 50% more likely to consider buying from it. The page gives no year, sample or country.
These numbers can be quoted, as long as they are presented for what they are: claims by the company that runs the space, not results of independent research with a published method. How to complete a profile is covered in the guide to Google Business Profile.
What's missing is how many UK businesses have a well-kept profile. Nobody publishes it with a stated method, and the numbers on social media are estimates from companies that sell profile management software.
How many businesses compete for the same map
The other half of local search is competition. According to the government's Business population estimates 2025 (Department for Business and Trade, 2 October 2025), there were 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK at the start of 2025. 4.27 million had no employees and 1.15 million had between one and nine: together, more than 95% of the total. They are the ones mainly competing for the three places in the pack.
How many of them have a website is harder to say. The ONS's last published figure dates from 2019, when 81.4% of businesses with 10 to 49 employees had one (ONS, E-commerce and ICT activity, released 5 February 2021), and the series hasn't been updated since. For micro-businesses there is no equivalent figure at all.
In our Italian test, one organic result in three on local queries was a directory or portal (35.6%). On "ristorante vicino a me" (restaurant near me) from Rome, 9 organic results out of 10 were Tripadvisor and OpenTable pages, and for other places. In the UK the pattern is the same: on "plumber london", four of the ten organic results were Checkatrade, HaMuch, Bark and TrustATrader, and a fifth was a Facebook group; on "accountant birmingham" Bark sat in the organic results with a price range of £150 to £420. For a small business, the first competitor among the blue links often isn't another business but the portal it is listed on too: one of the reasons directory listings still count. Sector-by-sector data, with SERPs and reviews measured, are in the guides for dentists, restaurants and lawyers; what it costs to hire help, in the one on local SEO pricing.
The local statistic nobody publishes
The most reliable data on local search already exists, scattered across millions of dashboards: the calls, direction requests and website clicks that every Google profile records, split between search and maps. Nobody aggregates them. Fifty businesses in the same sector and the same city sharing those numbers would be enough for the first local search study with a real method, and it would be more useful than any US survey.
Meanwhile, your own business's numbers can be read by cross-checking the profile with Search Console, separating branded queries from those with the city name. It's the work we start from in our SEO service, and the same measurement method we used with Contesini Consulenze, two offices in the province of Mantua in Italy: 299 contact requests at €7.20 each, 68% of them judged workable by the sales team.
Frequently asked questions about local SEO statistics
There is no reliable public figure. The 46% that has been circulating for years comes from a slide Google showed at an event in 2018, reported by Search Engine Roundtable via a tweet and never published by Google with a method. For your own sector, the useful estimate comes from Search Console, filtering the queries that contain the city name or "near me".
Few. Official data show how much people use search: in May 2025, 82% of UK online adults used Google Search and 77% of adult smartphone users used Google Maps (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). There is no UK survey of how people behave with local listings; the Visilay test of October 2026, with 24 results pages on Google.it and 6 on Google UK, is one of the few direct measurements.
It depends on the city and the sector. In the Visilay test the median review count of listings in the pack ranged from 22 for plumbers in Rome to 1,500 for vets in Turin; in the UK check, from 222 for "plumber london" to 883 for "best italian restaurant leeds". The number to aim for is the one set by the three competitors currently in the pack for your query.
No, not on strictly local searches: in the Visilay test the AI Overview didn't appear on any of the 12 Italian local queries or the 4 UK ones, while the local pack was always there. Whitespark's 2025 study of the US market puts the AI Overview at 15% on these searches. The space shrinks on informational queries and on those with a price or cost.
As a trend yes, as a snapshot no. The Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 is based on 1,002 US adults. The closest UK figure is the 89% of UK adults who use online reviews when researching products or services (Which?), quoted by the CMA in March 2026: it covers products and services in general, not just local businesses.
