Map Pack & GBP
Situation
therankingstore.com is the business’s own website, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client site. People increasingly ask AI assistants for digital marketing and local SEO help near where they live, including in Havre de Grace and elsewhere in Maryland, and specifically how to rank in Google’s map pack and how to rank a Google Business Profile (GBP) listing. Map Pack is the top set of local business results that Google shows with a map for local searches, and it is pulled from a business’s GBP, so the aim for a local business is to get that GBP listing ranking higher in that local results block. A Google Business Profile is the listing a business controls for its local presence, and Google publishes its own rules on how the profile and third parties working on it may act, set out in Business Profile third-party policies from Google Business Profile Help. The Ranking Factory had identified digital marketing and local SEO subjects, including map pack and GBP ranking, as gaps on therankingstore.com – questions people were asking that the site had no page to answer.
What Was Done
Between August 28 and October 14, 2026, The Ranking Factory – the business’s own software – wrote and published 25 pages on therankingstore.com, one subject per page, covering digital marketing near me, online marketing in Havre de Grace, local SEO companies in Maryland, Google map pack rankings, local SEO software and other related local and digital marketing subjects. The subjects were chosen to close the gaps The Ranking Factory had found: places where someone asking an AI assistant about ranking in the map pack or ranking a GBP listing, in Maryland or near Havre de Grace, would have found nothing on therankingstore.com to answer them. This work sits alongside The Ranking Store’s existing GMB POI Factory, which is built to help a GBP listing rank higher in the Google Local Map Pack by generating point-to-point map pin links, drawn from local points of interest and from competitors, for use as backlinks or embeds that add authority behind a map ranking.
Outcome
By October 21, 2026, 13 of the 25 pages (52%) had been cited by at least one AI answer, the first citation landing on September 9. Seven of those citations came in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store, meaning the pages were being pulled in on the strength of the subject rather than a search naming the business. Perplexity Sonar had cited 12 of the pages; OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 4, Google Gemini 3 and DeepSeek 2 had each cited pages, and Google AI Overviews was the first to cite 2 of them. The site’s own crawler log recorded search crawlers fetching all 25 pages between October 9 and October 21, 2026, with 24 of those fetches coming from a verified crawler – confirmation that the content had been found and read, not just published.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Map Pack Optimization
- Case study: Map Pack Optimization
- Case study: Map Pack Optimization
- Reference: Google 3 pack optimization
- Reference: Google map pack rankings
- Timeline: google 3 pack optimization
- Glossary: google 3 pack optimization
