On November 2, 2026 we searched Google for 10 local trades in each of the 50 largest US cities, the way a customer would on a phone: "plumber Phoenix", "roofer Denver", "dentist Boston". The three businesses in the map pack on those 500 searches came to 1,436 listings. The median one has 373 Google reviews and a 4.9 rating.
The bar moves a lot by trade. The median HVAC company in the pack has 940 reviews, and the median landscaper has 116. We also ran 499 "best [trade] in [city]" searches, and those pages show AI Overviews and Reddit threads far more often.
Key findings
- The median map pack business has 373 reviews. The middle half have between 128 and 932.
- Ratings barely vary. The median is 4.9 in all 10 trades, and 2.2% of pack businesses are rated below 4.5.
- Only 5.2% of pack businesses have fewer than 20 reviews. BrightLocal found 47% of small businesses are in that group.
- More reviews don't guarantee the top spot. The #1 business has the most reviews of the three in 38.5% of packs, a little better than the 33% that chance alone would give.
- Big cities don't have a higher bar: a median of 365 reviews in the 10 largest cities and 378 in the next 40.
- Of the pack businesses with a website, 16% also rank in the regular top 10 for the same search. Yelp shows up in the top 10 on 86% of searches.
- "Best" searches get an AI Overview half the time (against 21% for plain searches) and a Reddit result in the top 10 on 61%.
- One in five pack businesses has no website at all.
How many reviews the map pack holds, by trade
HVAC and plumbing need roughly four times the reviews of roofing or electrical work, and eight times landscaping. The table adds the spread inside each trade. Treat the middle-half column as the working range: below its low end you are behind most of the businesses Google shows, and above its high end, your review count is unlikely to be what keeps you out.
| Trade | Median reviews | #1 spot median | Middle half of pack listings | Median rating | No website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HVAC | 940 | 1,200 | 209 to 2,800 | 4.9 | 10% |
| Plumbing | 924 | 831 | 382 to 2,550 | 4.9 | 16% |
| Garage door | 603 | 622 | 227 to 1,400 | 4.9 | 26% |
| Dentists | 549 | 732 | 336 to 896 | 4.9 | 8% |
| Pest control | 432 | 790 | 100 to 1,300 | 4.9 | 15% |
| Locksmiths | 403 | 547 | 128 to 824 | 4.9 | 42% |
| House cleaning | 321 | 432 | 143 to 610 | 4.9 | 23% |
| Electricians | 255 | 305 | 97 to 646 | 4.9 | 25% |
| Roofing | 232 | 262 | 105 to 592 | 4.9 | 14% |
| Landscaping | 116 | 138 | 55 to 186 | 4.9 | 31% |
"#1 spot median" covers only the business in the first position. "Middle half" is the 25th to 75th percentile of every pack listing in that trade. Sponsored pack listings are excluded.
Everyone in the pack has a 4.9
The median rating is 4.9 in every trade we checked. Locksmiths have the most pack businesses below 4.5, at 7.8%, followed by dentists at 4.8%. Customers notice the threshold too: in BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 31% said they only use businesses rated 4.5 or higher, up from 17%.
The review floor is just as consistent. Only 5.2% of pack businesses have fewer than 20 reviews, while BrightLocal's 2026 survey of business owners found 47% of small businesses have fewer than 20 Google reviews. Nearly half of small businesses sit below a line that 95% of map pack businesses have cleared, and 47% of consumers in the same survey said they won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
Pest control is the exception, with 17.3% of pack businesses under 20 reviews. Most of those have the city in their business name, a pattern we look at in the Google Maps section below.
More reviews don't decide the order
Review counts fall gently from first place to third: a median of 434 for the #1 business, 375 for #2 and 315 for #3. In 478 packs, the #1 business had the most reviews of the three only 38.5% of the time.
Reviews get a business into the group Google considers. Inside the pack, other factors pick the order. Distance to the searcher ranks second in Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, behind the primary category, and being open at the time of the search rose to fifth. Recent reviews count for more than the total: in Sterling Sky's study of 8,186 businesses, a dental practice earning over 60 reviews a month fell out of the pack after 18 days without a new one, while competitors earning 15 to 45 a month held their spots.
So a business with 2,000 reviews from five years ago can lose to one with 400 and a new review every few days. Plan for a steady weekly flow of reviews.
City size doesn't raise the bar
The 10 largest cities have a median of 365 reviews in the pack across all trades. Cities ranked 11 to 50 have 378.
The hardest markets in our data are Tampa (a median of 1,100 reviews across all trades), Nashville (1,000), Tulsa (736) and Minneapolis (723). The easiest are Oakland (65), Long Beach (105), New York (126) and Washington (162). The low ones are dense, likely because Google can fill a pack from the few blocks around the searcher when businesses sit close together. The full table for every city and trade is further down.
The map pack and page one are different races
We matched each pack business's website against the 10 regular results under the map for the same search. Only 16% of pack businesses with a website had it in that top 10.
Directories and social profiles take at least 36% of the top 10 results on a plain "[trade] [city]" search. These are the sites that show up most often:
A complete Yelp page with reviews, a Facebook page and a Thumbtack or Angi profile put a business on page one through those sites. A dedicated page for each service on the business's own site is the other route: it is the top local organic factor in Whitespark's survey.
"Best" searches bring AI Overviews and Reddit
Adding "best" changes the page. Google showed an AI Overview on 50% of "best [trade] in [city]" searches, against 21% of plain ones. The gap is widest for garage door repair (94% against 60%), house cleaning (92% against 26%) and HVAC (74% against 20%). Dentists barely moved, at 12% against 14%.
Forum results grow with it. A "Discussions and forums" block appeared on 64% of "best" searches against 23% of plain ones, and Reddit had a result in the top 10 on 61% of "best" searches. The map pack itself dropped to 67% of "best" searches, from 96% of plain ones.
We counted the sources each AI Overview linked to on the 249 "best" searches that had one:
| Source | AI Overviews citing it |
|---|---|
| Google Business Profiles | 59% |
| Yelp | 46% |
| Thumbtack | 20% |
| 19% | |
| Angi | 17% |
| 8% |
When someone asks Google for the best plumber in Phoenix, the answer is built from Business Profiles and Yelp pages more than from plumbers' websites. That lines up with outside research on AI assistants: in the Zarla AI Visibility Index, businesses the assistants named had a median of 444 Google reviews, against 192 for those they skipped.
Google Maps shows more spam than the search page
We also ran each trade's keyword inside Google Maps for every city. The top three there looked different. In Maps, 13.6% of top-three businesses had the city in their name and fewer than 20 reviews, against 3.7% in the search page's map pack. Pest control (33%) and HVAC (29%) had the most. The median top-three pest control business in Maps had 11 reviews.
A new listing with a keyword-and-city name and almost no reviews is the usual shape of a lead-generation or fake listing, though the pattern alone doesn't prove any single listing is fake. Sterling Sky's spam study got 87.6% of ranking garage door listings removed by reporting them. If you lose to listings like these, report them through "Suggest an edit" in Google Maps and Google's Business Redressal Complaint Form.
One in five pack businesses has no website
20.6% of map pack businesses list no website on their Business Profile. Locksmiths lead at 42%, followed by landscaping (31%), garage door (26%) and electricians (25%). Dentists are lowest at 8%.
A website isn't required to rank in the pack. It matters for the rest of the page and for AI answers: dedicated service pages rank first for local organic results and second for AI visibility in Whitespark's survey, and 84% of pack businesses with a website don't appear in the regular top 10.
What to do with these numbers
- Find your trade and city in the table below to see what the pack holds near the city center.
- Search your main service from your own shop or service area and count the reviews of the three businesses Google shows. They are your real competitors.
- Ask every customer after every job, with one neutral text sent within two hours. Google's rules ban asking only happy customers, offering anything in return and, since April 2026, asking customers to name a staff member.
- Keep the requests going every week, so no two-week gap opens between new reviews.
- Fill in your Yelp, Facebook and Thumbtack or Angi profiles. Between them they hold most of page one and get cited by AI Overviews.
- Publish one page per service on your website, with your own jobs, photos and prices where you share them.
Our industry pages cover the details for HVAC companies, plumbers, roofers, cleaning companies and dentists.
Median map pack reviews by city and trade
Each cell is the median review count of the three map pack businesses for "[trade] [city]", so a single business can swing it (Phoenix HVAC is 14,600 because two of its three pack businesses have over 14,000 reviews). "n/a" means Google showed no map pack for that search.
| City | HVAC | Plumbing | Roofing | Electricians | House cleaning | Pest control | Landscaping | Garage door | Locksmiths | Dentists |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, New York | 104 | n/a | 171 | 53 | 141 | 372 | 110 | 21 | 56 | 1,600 |
| Los Angeles, California | 416 | 490 | 97 | 111 | 243 | 100 | 166 | 163 | 682 | n/a |
| Chicago, Illinois | 207 | 1,600 | 163 | 155 | 282 | 166 | 70 | n/a | 514 | 763 |
| Houston, Texas | 527 | 158 | 473 | 363 | 1,600 | 3 | 168 | 1,100 | 944 | 497 |
| Phoenix, Arizona | 14,600 | 1,200 | 831 | 181 | 630 | 406 | 31 | 329 | 566 | 350 |
| Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 188 | 549 | 448 | 360 | 407 | 253 | 64 | n/a | 696 | 1,100 |
| San Antonio, Texas | 389 | 635 | 1,300 | 175 | 349 | 373 | 123 | 626 | 1,200 | 350 |
| San Diego, California | 1,600 | 853 | 122 | 452 | 740 | 249 | 57 | 1,300 | 889 | 244 |
| Dallas, Texas | 164 | 1,400 | 366 | 726 | 451 | 309 | 138 | n/a | 1,900 | 425 |
| Jacksonville, Florida | 1,200 | 1,100 | 232 | 1,000 | 337 | 1,400 | 242 | 45 | 829 | 910 |
| Austin, Texas | 3,900 | 343 | 358 | 499 | 433 | 1,200 | 228 | 596 | 404 | 916 |
| Fort Worth, Texas | 504 | 941 | 58 | 182 | 343 | 2,000 | 42 | n/a | 631 | 230 |
| San Jose, California | 489 | 908 | 189 | 335 | 122 | 381 | 34 | 64 | 210 | 358 |
| Columbus, Ohio | 4,800 | 786 | 153 | 2,700 | 358 | 330 | 97 | 686 | 96 | 437 |
| Charlotte, North Carolina | n/a | 1,600 | 600 | 466 | 434 | 1,400 | 304 | n/a | 123 | 623 |
| Indianapolis, Indiana | 674 | 6,500 | 2,400 | 341 | 269 | 194 | 117 | 1,300 | n/a | 522 |
| San Francisco, California | 800 | 790 | 74 | 255 | 574 | 107 | 43 | 371 | 133 | 378 |
| Seattle, Washington | 55 | 3,900 | 68 | 11 | 346 | 1,500 | 215 | 254 | 421 | 682 |
| Denver, Colorado | 3,300 | 792 | 843 | 384 | 494 | 486 | 112 | n/a | n/a | 668 |
| Oklahoma City, Oklahoma | 1,700 | 2,900 | 501 | 2,300 | 395 | 246 | 234 | n/a | 757 | 395 |
| Nashville, Tennessee | 2,600 | 2,600 | 952 | 236 | 791 | 1,600 | 139 | 1,200 | 1,200 | 1,000 |
| Washington, District of Columbia | 29 | 209 | 75 | 109 | 403 | 229 | 32 | 998 | 108 | 459 |
| El Paso, Texas | 3 | 201 | 306 | 125 | 315 | 1,100 | 131 | 50 | 462 | 524 |
| Las Vegas, Nevada | 2,600 | 982 | 156 | 1,300 | 973 | 538 | 187 | n/a | 206 | 5 |
| Boston, Massachusetts | 223 | 786 | 27 | 43 | 289 | 156 | 26 | 250 | 193 | 611 |
| Detroit, Michigan | 71 | 1,300 | 76 | 75 | 89 | 49 | 276 | 397 | 172 | 532 |
| Louisville, Kentucky | 6,000 | 2,600 | 270 | 526 | 380 | 133 | 140 | n/a | 36 | 370 |
| Portland, Oregon | 2,000 | 947 | 435 | 419 | 536 | 930 | 128 | 329 | 1,000 | 755 |
| Memphis, Tennessee | 867 | 741 | 190 | 90 | 113 | 678 | 208 | 818 | 528 | 582 |
| Baltimore, Maryland | 1,000 | 510 | 491 | 70 | 273 | 5 | 199 | 912 | 200 | 739 |
| Milwaukee, Wisconsin | 2,300 | 1,100 | 338 | 288 | 313 | 287 | 78 | n/a | 397 | 311 |
| Albuquerque, New Mexico | 5,800 | 3,600 | 246 | n/a | 259 | 1,300 | 162 | 1,300 | 142 | 363 |
| Tucson, Arizona | 2,300 | 512 | 623 | 269 | 177 | 888 | 133 | 1,600 | 413 | 780 |
| Fresno, California | 945 | 1,900 | 148 | 317 | 162 | 558 | 42 | 377 | n/a | 305 |
| Sacramento, California | 1,500 | 1,700 | 137 | 193 | 226 | 693 | 114 | 244 | 350 | 462 |
| Mesa, Arizona | 1,400 | n/a | 712 | 161 | 144 | 1,200 | 46 | 969 | 393 | 1,400 |
| Atlanta, Georgia | 56 | 986 | 655 | 541 | 191 | 12 | 120 | 336 | 24 | 888 |
| Kansas City, Missouri | 1,600 | 1,900 | 674 | 541 | 326 | 2,600 | 122 | 610 | 317 | 1,300 |
| Colorado Springs, Colorado | 1,000 | 2,000 | 592 | 792 | 147 | 1,300 | 90 | n/a | 569 | 724 |
| Omaha, Nebraska | 940 | 2,600 | 128 | 463 | 345 | 375 | 159 | 1,300 | 399 | 544 |
| Raleigh, North Carolina | 6,300 | 2,100 | 219 | 199 | 219 | 1,800 | 171 | 582 | 590 | 557 |
| Miami, Florida | 215 | 240 | 165 | 53 | 288 | 690 | 57 | 331 | 1,300 | 557 |
| Virginia Beach, Virginia | 1,100 | 782 | 437 | 474 | 559 | 1,300 | 224 | 861 | 1,600 | 155 |
| Long Beach, California | 22 | 215 | 105 | 83 | 80 | 147 | 24 | n/a | 344 | 164 |
| Oakland, California | 5 | 136 | 32 | 22 | 158 | 5 | 53 | n/a | 179 | 487 |
| Minneapolis, Minnesota | 4,400 | 5,900 | 59 | 1,200 | 182 | 964 | 71 | 939 | 410 | 395 |
| Bakersfield, California | 209 | 502 | 227 | 97 | 315 | 422 | 96 | 415 | 892 | 588 |
| Tulsa, Oklahoma | 3,200 | 2,000 | 663 | 426 | 850 | 2,400 | 114 | 665 | 151 | 491 |
| Tampa, Florida | 1,700 | 1,300 | 196 | 1,500 | 268 | 1,300 | 236 | 872 | 896 | 2,100 |
| Arlington, Texas | 977 | 2,400 | 198 | 80 | 329 | 7 | 59 | 307 | 403 | 768 |
Methodology
- Searches: 10 trades in the 50 most populous US cities. Keywords: "hvac company", "plumber", "roofer", "electrician", "house cleaning service", "pest control", "landscaping company", "garage door repair", "locksmith" and "dentist". Each ran as "[keyword] [city]" and "best [keyword] in [city]", for 999 searches (one failed).
- Setup: live Google results in US English on a mobile device, with the location set to the city, collected once on November 2, 2026.
- Map pack: the businesses in the local pack on the plain "[keyword] [city]" search. 479 of 500 searches showed a pack, giving 1,436 businesses. Sponsored pack listings (2.2% of slots) are excluded from every figure. Review counts and ratings are as Google displayed them.
- Website in the top 10: the website on each pack listing, matched by domain against the 10 regular results for the same search.
- Directories and social sites: counted by domain from a fixed list (Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, BBB, Facebook and about 60 others). Sites missing from the list count as businesses, so the 36% share is a minimum.
- AI Overviews: whether the result page showed one, and the domains of the sources it linked. Business Profile citations appear as links to Google and are counted as Business Profiles.
- Google Maps: the top 20 results of a "[keyword]" search in Google Maps for each city. "City in the name" means the city's name appears in the business name.
Limitations. This is one snapshot. Map pack results change from block to block with the searcher's location, so a city-level search shows one view of each city, and a business ranking across town will see different competitors. Review counts are what Google displayed after its own filtering. All findings are correlations; none of them shows that a given change moves a business up.
Download the data
The data behind this study is free to use. If you publish something with it, link to this page as the source.
- map-pack-listings.csv: every pack listing, with trade, city, position, business name, reviews, rating, whether it was sponsored, whether it has a website and whether that website ranks in the top 10 (1,468 rows, sponsored listings included).
- search-results-features.csv: each of the 999 searches, with whether it showed an AI Overview, a map pack, Local Services Ads and a forums block, and how many top 10 results were directories or social sites.
- median-map-pack-reviews-by-city.csv: the city table above.
FAQ
How many Google reviews do I need to rank in the map pack?
The median map pack business in the 50 largest US cities has 373 reviews, ranging from 116 for landscapers to 940 for HVAC companies. The three businesses Google shows near your own location set the real target, so count theirs.
Does a higher rating help me rank?
Nearly every pack business has a high rating (the median is 4.9 and only 2.2% are below 4.5), so a high rating gets a business considered without setting it apart. Below 4.5, customers start to drop off: 31% of consumers in BrightLocal's 2026 survey only use businesses rated 4.5 or higher.
Do I need a website to be in the map pack?
No. 20.6% of the pack businesses in this study list no website. A site with one page per service helps you show up in the regular results and in AI answers, where the pack listing alone doesn't reach.
Why do I rank in the map pack near my shop but not across town?
Distance to the searcher is one of the strongest local ranking factors, and nobody can change it. Every searcher sees a pack built for where they are standing, which is why this study uses city-level medians and why your own pack's competitors matter most.
Can I use these numbers in my own article or report?
Yes. Download the CSVs above and link to this page as the source.
Turning the study into a plan
Koala AI's Brand DNA imports your business from Google Maps, and KoalaWriter's service pages write one page per service from your real services, areas and jobs, ready to publish to WordPress. Start with the service your trade's customers search most, and check its map pack against the city table above.
