Location and language can change the sources and recommendations in an AI answer. Include those conditions in both the content and the measurement method. A result in one market does not establish visibility in another.
Local questions need current facts
Local recommendations need current information about service area, opening hours, eligibility, and availability. Search results, business listings, and reviews may supply it. Inspect the sources used in your category rather than assuming a model has a complete local directory.Research sources and limitations. Identifies the available report data and the analysis still needed to support earlier draft figures.
Correcting current listings and pages is work you can verify directly. The time until a generated answer reflects the correction varies.
Maintaining local business facts
Maintain the business information customers use to contact and evaluate you. The checklist below covers common local facts.
- Profiles: maintain relevant business listings with current services, hours, contacts, and service areas.
- Consistency: reconcile names, addresses, and phone numbers across the sources you control.
- Reviews: review specific customer feedback and respond appropriately. Do not fabricate reviews or conceal a business relationship.
- Pages: provide useful location pages with visible facts and supported markup where appropriate.
For multiple locations, assign responsibility for each profile and page. Review them when hours, addresses, services, or contact details change.
Testing language and market differences
Test each relevant language. Models can produce different answers across languages, but those differences alone do not reveal the language composition of private training data.
A prompt’s language does not necessarily identify the language of its sources. Record the returned or cited pages where available. Compare source use and answer accuracy by market.
Publish localized pages that accurately describe the offer in that market. Use hreflang where it applies to Google’s language and regional versions. Review translations for product details, prices, units, and conditions.Google, localized versions documentation: hreflang maps equivalent pages across locales, while language detection reads the content.
Market prioritization with a limited budget
Prioritize markets by customer demand, commercial value, and the ability to maintain accurate local information. Use customer evidence to select products for testing instead of assuming the same assistant mix everywhere.
Start with access problems and incorrect local facts. Add localized explanations, reviews, and relevant coverage according to customer needs. Measure each market separately before combining results.
A local-business check
Compare the official location page with the business listing. Check the address or service area, regular and holiday hours, phone number, and available services. Resolve disagreements with the person responsible for that location.
Google describes local ranking in terms of relevance, distance, and prominence. Completing a Business Profile helps Google understand the business. It cannot make a distant location suitable for every local query.Google Business Profile: local ranking. Describes the factors used for Google local results. It does not define every assistant’s local recommendation method.
For each target area, run the same question with an explicit place name. Keep language and location separate in the record. If the answer names a branch outside the service area, record a suitability error even if the brand was mentioned.