The biggest local search themes of 2024

At Near Media, we pride ourselves as being the go-to source for analysis of key local search developments and market dynamics through our twice-weekly newsletter, weekly podcast, bi-weekly deep dive pieces, and consumer search research.

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Without further ado, here’s our take on the biggest themes of the past 11 months:

Google doubles-down on self-preferencing

Six multinational gatekeepers, including Google, were due to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act as of March 2024. The most relevant provision of this Act for local search marketers is article 6(5) prohibiting self-preferencing.

Google introduced a number of new user interface elements to the local SERP as part of its DMA compliance response, but in our analysis of over 700 European consumers’ search journeys for restaurants, hotels, and home services, these elements received fewer than 2% of all clicks.

Meanwhile, Google’s own Business Profiles continue to eat 50%-80% of all user engagements when users see them. (The lowest engagement we’ve seen occurred in the Hotels vertical, where barely 50% of users scrolled past the ads at the top of the SERP).

At the public compliance workshop hosted by the European Commission in March, Google jaw-droppingly attempted to argue that Google Business Profiles, featuring the company’s own business data and first-party reviews from Google users, which resolve to Google.com URLs, were somehow not subject to the DMA’s provision against self-preferencing.

A European Commission decision on Google’s compliance in Flights, Shopping, and Hotels is due in the first part of 2025.

Google continues to double- and triple-down on displaying more and more modules featuring first-party local, flight, hotel and shopping data. Aside from the financial risk of regulatory penalties in Europe, Google’s product decision to continue to bloat the SERP with these modules (AI-organized or not) is even more bizarre when you compare the cognitive load required for searchers to process them vs. SearchGPT’s minimalist responses.

High-profile hacks & fakes continue to plague Google Business Profiles

Despite Google’s assurances of addressing fraudulent activities, it remains alarmingly simple to alter a business’s phone number on its Google listing, posing significant risks to both businesses and consumers.

Despite being reported in March 2024, the “Map Pin Hack“—where malicious actors manipulate a business’s Google Maps pin to a different location, adversely affecting its visibility and customer directions—remains unresolved, with Google yet to implement a fix.

A meme originating in Tennessee has led to numerous schools worldwide being (humorously?) renamed “Hawk Tuah School” on Google Maps, highlighting ongoing vulnerabilities for massive business harm posed by Google’s “suggest an edit” feature.

While not a hack per se, Google has added unauthorized “Reserve with Google” booking buttons to healthcare providers’ Business Profiles, allowing third-party platforms to manage appointments without the providers’ consent, leading to patient confusion and scheduling issues.

Despite a high-profile lawsuit and subsequent $5 million consent decree against Seattle’s Allure Esthetic for falsifying online reviews and suppressing negative feedback, Google didn’t remove the fraudulent reviews from its platform, continuing to display 4.8 stars and over 900 reviews–not to mention a keyword-stuffed business name–even today.

Google’s decision to allow such rampant malicious activity on Business Profiles, especially while amplifying their visibility, fits FTC Chair Lina Khan’s characterization of a monopoly as “too big to care” to a T.

SearchGPT’s makes a genuinely impressive local search introduction

While I don’t expect SearchGPT to overtake Google anytime soon, it could make a meaningful dent in Google’s market share as soon as 2026. Here’s why:

Content Generation: SearchGPT excels at creating detailed content outlines from simple queries, outperforming many paid SEO tools specializing in this exact task.

Context Retention: It maintains context across multiple searches, enabling natural and refined interactions without the need to restate details.

User Interface: The platform offers concise and relevant local search results with a dramatically cleaner interface compared to Google’s module- and ad-heavy pages.

Personalization: SearchGPT leverages user history to personalize results, enhancing relevance (but posing challenges for tracking visibility and rankings).

Distribution via Chrome extension & Apple Search: Alongside the SearchGPT rollout, OpenAI has aggressively promoted its chrome extension which prompts users to replace their default search engine. While Apple’s Text-to-Siri interface is largely hidden from view in its current beta incarnation, it appears Text-to-Siri (backfilled by ChatGPT search results) could be a pixel-for-pixel replacement of Spotlight Search in the iPhone interface.