Ask ten Fort Wayne business owners how Google Maps decides who ranks first, and most will give you the same answer: “more reviews.” It's a reasonable guess, and it's not entirely wrong — but it treats a complex, engineered system as if it were a single dial you can turn.
It isn't. In early September 2026, Search Engine Land reported on a recovered Google Maps binary that exposed the internal names of dozens of local ranking signals — a rare look at the machinery behind who gets found. The takeaway for a small business isn't the exact list. It's the shape of the system: Maps ranking is built from many signals across a few big categories, some of which you can influence and some of which you can't touch at all.
This guide translates that architecture into a practical question for an Allen County or DeKalb County owner: which signals are worth your time and budget this quarter, and which are fixed facts you should stop chasing? We'll ground every real ranking factor in Google's own documentation so you can tell the difference between confirmed guidance and interesting-but-unactionable trivia.
Key Takeaways
- Google publicly reduces local ranking to three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence — the confirmed framework every strategy should start from.
- Reporting on a recovered Maps binary named dozens of internal signals, but the weights were not recovered — so no one can honestly assign a percentage to any single factor.
- Distance is not a fixed radius. Testing showed the search area shrinks or expands depending on the query, which is why an Auburn business can win locally yet vanish downtown.
- The signals you can actually move are prominence signals: reviews, categories, accurate business info, citations, and photos.
- Chasing signals you can't influence — like a searcher's proximity — wastes budget better spent on the levers that respond.
What Actually Determines Google Maps Rankings?
Start with what Google states in public, because it's the only part of this system the company has confirmed. According to Google Business Profile Help, local results are ranked primarily on three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence.
Relevance is how well your Business Profile matches what someone searched. Google's guidance is blunt about the fix: “provide complete and detailed business info” so its systems can understand what you do and connect you to the right searches. A profile that lists one vague category and skips its services is handing relevance away.
Distance is how far your location is from the searcher — or from the location implied by their query. When someone doesn't specify a place, Google estimates it from what it knows about their location.
Prominence is how well-known and established a business is. This is where Google explicitly ties in reviews: “More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking,” alongside citations and links across the web that mention your business. Prominence is also the one Google is most direct about being earned, not bought — the company states plainly that “there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”
Those three categories are the trunk of the tree. Everything else — every named signal, every clever tactic — is a branch hanging off relevance, distance, or prominence. If you're weighing whether a task is worth doing, ask which of the three it strengthens. If the answer is “none,” it probably isn't worth doing. For the underlying local-search mechanics behind all three, our guide to Fort Wayne SEO fundamentals covers the groundwork this post builds on.
What Are the “72 Signals,” and Why Is the Number Misleading?
Here's where the recent reporting gets interesting — and where it's easy to draw the wrong conclusion.
The recovered binary reportedly exposed an internal system with 72 named ranking signals, according to Search Engine Land's account, corroborated by an independent breakdown from Relevant Audience's analysis. Of those 72, roughly one-third — 25 signals — were marked deprecated, meaning they may no longer be in active use. The same recovery reportedly surfaced hundreds of data-source providers and hundreds of distinct local search intent types, which tells you how many ways Google slices “local” behind the scenes.
The named signals map cleanly onto the three public factors. Engagement metrics Google observes directly — listing impressions, listing opens, direction requests, and website clicks — read as prominence and interest. Demand signals like how often people search for your business by name point to prominence too. Entity attributes — chain membership, a Wikipedia presence, nearby landmarks, road-usage data — help Google place and rank you.
But two honest caveats matter more than the list itself:
- The weights were not recovered. As Relevant Audience puts it, “the team recovered the signal names, not their current weights,” and “the coefficients that would say how much each signal contributes sit outside the scope that was recovered.” Proving a signal exists is not the same as proving how much it matters. Anyone selling you a “72-point checklist” with per-signal percentages is inventing the numbers.
- There is no single Maps formula. Different scoring and retrieval systems run at different stages. Treating the list as one flat ranking recipe misreads the architecture.
So the “72” is useful as a reality check — Maps ranking is genuinely a multi-signal system, not one review count — and misleading as a to-do list. We take the same evidence-over-hype posture when we look at 1.8 million Google Business Profiles and what actually correlates with ranking, versus what merely sounds authoritative.
Which Signals Can a Fort Wayne Business Actually Move?
This is the only question that changes what you do on Monday. Sort every signal into one of three buckets: fixed (you can't change it), slow (it moves over quarters), and fast (you can act on it this month). The table below groups the confirmed and reported factors that way — with the fixed ones flagged so you stop spending energy on them.
| Signal | Ranking factor | How much you control it | Where to spend effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Searcher proximity to your location | Distance | Fixed — you can't move the customer | Don't chase it; target where you can win |
| Your physical address | Distance | Fixed (short of relocating) | Choose service-area strategy instead |
| Primary business category | Relevance | Fast | Pick the most specific accurate category |
| Complete services, hours, attributes | Relevance | Fast | Fill every field; keep hours current |
| Review count and rating | Prominence | Slow | Steady, ongoing review requests |
| Review responses | Prominence | Fast | Reply to every review promptly |
| Citations / NAP consistency | Prominence | Slow | Audit and correct listings once, maintain |
| Photos and posts | Prominence | Fast | Add real photos regularly |
| Website clicks, direction requests | Prominence/engagement | Indirect | Earn them by improving everything above |
| Wikipedia presence, landmark data | Prominence | Fixed for most SMBs | Not a realistic lever for a local shop |
The pattern is clear once it's laid out: the movable signals are almost all prominence and relevance signals, and most of them are things Google itself tells you to do. Verify your profile, keep your information accurate and complete, respond to reviews, add photos, and gather reviews over time — that's Google's own improvement list, and it happens to be the same list that's within your reach.
Two of those levers deserve their own workstreams. Citations and NAP (name, address, phone) consistency are a prominence signal that quietly decays as directories drift out of sync — we walk through fixing it in our piece on NAP consistency for AI bots. And reviews do double duty: they influence both Maps prominence and how AI assistants describe you, which we cover in how reviews shape SEO and AI visibility.
Why Isn't Distance Just a Fixed Radius Around the Customer?
A lot of local-SEO advice imagines Google drawing a circle around the searcher and ranking whatever falls inside it. The recovered-binary testing suggests the truth is more dynamic — and it explains a frustration many Northeast Indiana owners feel.
In one set of measurements run in Paris, the effective search radius changed dramatically depending on the query. Relevant Audience reported a median search radius of roughly 6.87 km when geographic context was applied, but a radius stretching past 4,000 km when it wasn't — and dense, generic queries (think “pharmacy”) produced far smaller search areas than brand queries (a specific chain name). In plain terms: Google decides how wide to cast the net based on what you searched, not a single fixed distance.
An important honesty note: those specific figures were measured in Paris on French-language queries, and the analysis explicitly warns against treating them as universal numbers for other markets. Don't quote “6.87 km” as if it applies to Fort Wayne. Treat it as a directional insight: search radius is elastic, not fixed.
That elasticity is exactly why a home-services company in Waterloo or Auburn can rank well for searches near its own location but disappear for the same search run from downtown Fort Wayne. For a common, high-competition query in a dense part of the city, Google tightens the radius and favors businesses that are physically closer. You didn't get penalized — you fell outside the net Google drew for that query. The strategic response isn't to fight distance; it's to build genuine location and service-area pages that establish relevance for the places you actually serve, a tactic Backlinko's location-pages research ties directly to ranking and AI citations.
How Should You Prioritize Your Local SEO Budget This Quarter?
Put the architecture together and a prioritization order falls out. Spend from the top down, and stop when your budget runs out — don't skip ahead to exotic tactics while the basics sit half-done.
- Fix relevance first — it's fast and free. Choose the single most specific accurate primary category, then fill every service, hour, and attribute field. This is the cheapest ranking work you will ever do, and it's Google's first recommendation.
- Turn on a steady review engine. Reviews are a confirmed prominence signal, but they compound slowly, so start now. Ask every satisfied customer, and reply to every review — the response itself is a fast lever.
- Clean up citations once, then maintain. Get your NAP identical across the major directories. It's slow, unglamorous prominence work that stops you from leaking authority.
- Feed the profile. Real photos and regular posts keep the profile active and give Google fresh engagement signals.
- Then, and only then, invest in location and service-area content for the specific Northeast Indiana towns you serve.
Notice what's not on this list: buying your way up (impossible, per Google), obsessing over a searcher's proximity (fixed), or chasing per-signal weight percentages that don't publicly exist. A budget built on confirmed levers beats one built on rumor every time. If you're extending this into how AI assistants surface local businesses, our guide to local SEO for LLMs picks up where Maps leaves off.
The Northeast Indiana Angle: Winning Where You Actually Compete
For an Allen County or DeKalb County business, the practical lesson of the “elastic radius” is to be honest about your battleground. A dental practice in Auburn and a dental practice near Jefferson Pointe are not really competing for the same Maps searches — the distance signal quietly sorts them into different neighborhoods for most queries. Trying to rank a single Auburn listing for “dentist Fort Wayne” downtown is fighting the distance signal head-on, and distance is fixed.
The more productive play is to dominate the searches you can win. An HVAC company in Garrett should make sure its category, service list, and reviews are airtight so it owns Garrett and the surrounding DeKalb County towns, then build genuine service-area content for the Fort Wayne neighborhoods it truly covers — not a thin template with city names swapped in, which Backlinko flags as a failure pattern. A legal or home-services firm serving all of Allen County benefits most from prominence work — reviews and citations — because prominence travels with the business across the whole area, while distance is decided fresh for every search.
This piece is the “how the system works” companion to two posts worth reading next: our take on when Google Maps is the destination rather than a stop on the way, and the profile-data study linked above. Together they form the ranking picture: how the system is built, what correlates with winning, and where the customer journey now ends.
Turning the Architecture Into Rankings
Understanding that Maps ranking is a multi-signal system — with fixed factors you should ignore and prominence factors you should fund — is the hard part. Executing it consistently, month after month, is where most small businesses fall behind, not because the work is complex but because it's easy to deprioritize.
That's the gap we close. Button Block helps Northeast Indiana businesses audit their Business Profiles, fix relevance and citation issues, build a durable review engine, and create location content that earns rankings honestly.
Ready to Win Local Search in Northeast Indiana?
If you'd rather spend your time running your business than chasing a moving algorithm, we'll build a plan on the confirmed levers above — not guesswork. Explore our SEO services or reach out for a local-search audit.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How does Google Maps decide which businesses rank first?
- Google publicly ranks local results on three factors: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (proximity to the searcher), and prominence (how established and well-reviewed your business is). Everything else is a detail hanging off one of those three, and Google states there's no way to pay for a better local ranking.
- Are there really 72 Google Maps ranking signals?
- Reporting on a recovered Google Maps binary named roughly 72 internal signals, about 25 of which were marked deprecated. However, the weights — how much each signal counts — were not recovered, and there is no single ranking formula. Treat the number as evidence that Maps is a multi-signal system, not as a 72-point checklist with fixed percentages.
- Why does my business rank in my own town but not in Fort Wayne?
- Distance isn't a fixed radius — testing showed Google adjusts the search area based on the query. For competitive searches in a dense area, it tightens the radius and favors closer businesses. A business in Auburn or Garrett can rank well locally yet fall outside the net Google draws for a downtown Fort Wayne search.
- Which Google Maps ranking signals can a small business actually control?
- The movable signals are almost all relevance and prominence factors: your primary category, complete business information, review count and responses, citation/NAP consistency, and photos. Fixed signals — like a searcher’s proximity or your physical address — aren’t worth chasing. This mirrors Google’s own list of ways to improve your ranking.
- Do more reviews guarantee a higher Google Maps ranking?
- No. Google confirms that more reviews and positive ratings can help prominence, but reviews are one signal among many, and no single factor guarantees a rank. Reviews compound slowly and work best alongside accurate business info, consistent citations, and an active profile.
- How long does it take to improve a Google Business Profile's ranking?
- It varies by signal. Relevance fixes — category and complete info — can register quickly. Prominence signals like reviews and citations move over weeks and months because they depend on accumulating real customer activity and cleaning up listings across the web. Plan for a quarter of steady work, not an overnight jump.
Sources & Further Reading
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/inside-google-maps-72-ranking-signals — Inside Google Maps: 72 ranking signals and the architecture behind local search
- Google Business Profile Help: support.google.com/business/answer/7091 — Improve your Business Profile ranking on Google
- Relevant Audience: relevantaudience.com/seo/google-maps-72-ranking-signals-oyster-rank — Google Maps: 72 Ranking Signals Named, 25 Deprecated
- Backlinko: backlinko.com/location-pages — How to Build Location Pages That Rank, Convert, and Get Cited