Usually one of five reasons, and four are fixable.

They have reviews and you do not

Open both profiles side by side and count. This is the commonest answer and the least technical one, and it is decided by customers rather than by anything on your site.

It is also the fastest gap to close, because most of your customers would leave one and have never been asked.

Their listing is filled in and yours is not

Hours, categories, services, photographs, the description. Compare field by field. An empty profile is a business that looks closed to a system deciding which one to show.

They have pages about what people type

Search the thing you want to be found for and read what actually ranks. If the page above you is about that exact thing and yours is a homepage mentioning it once, the result is not mysterious.

This is the reason most worth acting on, because a page you do not have is a page you can write.

Somebody else links to them

A supplier, a local news site, a trade association, a partner. Each one is a vote from a machine's point of view, and they are hard to fake and slow to accumulate.

You almost certainly have three of these available and unasked: whoever supplies you, whoever you have worked with, and whichever local directory your trade uses.

They have simply been there longer

This is the one you cannot fix, and it is the reason to be honest about timelines. A domain with years behind it starts ahead.

It is also the least decisive of the five. Age alone loses to a shop with reviews, a filled profile and pages that answer the question.

Doing the comparison properly

Search from a phone, not from the computer you built the site on. Log out. Results are shaped by where you are and what you have clicked before, and your own screen is the least reliable one you own.

Questions worth asking

They are above me but their site looks worse. How?

Because the page is not the only input. Reviews, the listing, how long they have existed and who links to them all count, and a plain site with those four in place beats a beautiful one without them.

Does clicking their result help them?

Not usefully, and clicking your own does not help you. Repeatedly searching for yourself mostly teaches your own browser to show you what you want to see, which is how people convince themselves they rank.

Can I report them for something?

Only for a listing that is genuinely fake: an invented address, a keyword stuffed name, a business that does not operate there. That does happen and reporting it works, but it is rarer than the people losing assume.

How often should I check?

Monthly is plenty. Daily checking measures noise, and results move enough between one search and the next that a bad day looks like a collapse when nothing has changed.

What if they are a national chain?

Then compete where size does not help. A chain cannot be local in your street, cannot answer a question about your town, and usually has one page covering the whole country where you can have one covering your city.

Send us both addresses, yours and theirs, and we will tell you which of the five is doing the work. Get a free audit.

Updated 22 August 2026