If your local pack rankings moved this year and you cannot point to anything you did differently, you are not imagining it. Google has been quietly reworking how much weight it gives physical distance in local results, and the effects have been uneven enough to confuse many business owners.
Worth clarifying up front: Google never released a standalone, officially named “proximity update.” The changes arrived folded into the broader core updates, most visibly the March 2026 core update, which took roughly two weeks to roll out and carried unusually heavy local components. Practitioners named the pattern afterward because the local pack behaved so differently once it settled.
The Short Version of What Shifted
Proximity used to function like a hard gate. If you weren’t physically near the searcher, you weren’t showing up, no matter how strong your profile was. That is no longer reliably true, and two separate factors pull in opposite directions.
In highly competitive categories, Google tightened the radius. Businesses sitting on the edge of a service area lost pack visibility for high-intent queries they used to pick up. Think emergency plumbers, personal injury attorneys, urgent care. Where the searcher expects to reach someone quickly, distance now matters more, not less.
In everything else, proximity lost ground to relevance and prominence. A business three miles farther out with a complete profile, consistent posting, and an active review stream now routinely outranks a closer competitor who treats the listing as set-and-forget. Google has grown more confident recommending the better business over the nearer one when the query does not demand immediacy.
Query Intent Now Sets the Weighting
The most useful mental model from these changes is that there is no single proximity weight anymore. Google reweights dynamically based on what the searcher appears to want.
A “near me” query pushes proximity up. A “best” query pushes reviews and behavioral signals up. An “open now” query pushes hours accuracy and popular times data up. The same business can rank first for one phrasing and fall out of the pack entirely for another from the same physical location.
This is why geo grid tracking stopped being optional. A single rank check from one point tells you almost nothing now. You need to see how visibility decays across the map, and how that decay pattern differs by query type, before you can diagnose anything.
The AI Layer Ignores Distance Almost Entirely
The more striking finding sits one layer above the map pack. Local Falcon’s 2026 analysis of AI Overviews found effectively no correlation between a business’s distance from the searcher and its position within AI Overview results, with a correlation coefficient of 0.001.
That is close to zero. For the AI layer, being nearby buys you nothing.
What does appear to matter there is third-party presence. The same analysis found that most AI Overview citations for local business queries point to directories and publishers like Yelp, Reddit, and Thumbtack rather than the business’s own website. AI Overviews now sit above the local pack for a large share of local queries, so this is not a side channel anymore.
The practical implication is that citation work and directory consistency, long treated as basic hygiene, have become a visibility strategy in their own right. Solid map pack seo now has to account for both the map unit and the AI summary sitting above it, and those two surfaces reward partially different things.
What Actually Moved Rankings
Looking at the businesses that gained rather than lost through these changes, a few patterns hold up.
Profile completeness scoring got stricter. Incomplete profiles that used to coast on proximity no longer do. Categories, hours, attributes, service descriptions, and photos all feed into this, and most profiles are particularly thin on photos.
Review recency beat review volume. Businesses with large but stale review profiles dropped. Businesses with moderate counts and active responses gained. Total count alone no longer carried the weight it once did.
Location-specific website content became a differentiator. Google elevated real location signals on business sites. This rewards genuine city and service area pages with substantive content, not the thin templated pages with a swapped city name that used to be standard practice.
Primary category accuracy got more valuable. Category relevance was reweighted upward in a prior core update, and that carried through. An accurate primary category plus fully used secondary categories is one of the few free lifts still available.
Where to Start
If you lost visibility, resist the urge to assume the fix is a link campaign. Pull a geo grid report first and identify whether you lost radius or lost position at your own address. Those are different problems with different fixes.
Radius loss usually means relevance and prominence work: content, reviews, citations, categories. Position loss at your own address usually means profile quality or a competitor who got more active than you did.
The businesses holding steady through all of this have one thing in common. They stopped treating the Google Business Profile as a listing and started treating it as a channel that needs consistent attention.
