Nobody Should Charge Your Shop for Google Posts as SEO. Including Us.

If an agency is billing you a monthly SEO line for daily Google posts, you're paying for activity, not position. Of 187 local ranking factors, posting frequency sits at #148.

Posts still have a job. It's just a different one.

Google posts are what a customer reads in the ninety seconds after they've found you and before they decide to call. A profile with nothing on it from the last six months reads like a shop that might not be there anymore. That's a conversion job, and conversion is where the booked work comes from.

So we do them. We just don't put them on the ranking side of the ledger, and we don't charge for them as if they were.

What's actually on the ranking side

The fields that carry the top ten factors: primary category (#1), proximity (#2), open-at-time-of-search (#5), high ratings (#6), additional categories (#8), reviews with text (#9), review recency (#11). Six of the top ten live in fields most shops have never filled in properly, and the ones that are filled in go stale inside a quarter.

Setting them is a day. Holding them is the year. That's what a 90-day ranking guarantee has to be written against, and it's what ours is.

Why the stakes just went up: AI search

BrightLocal's February 2026 survey found 45% of consumers now ask AI for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. ChatGPT leads at 31%, Google's AI Mode at 23%. AI is now the third most-used way people find local businesses, ahead of Yelp.

Before anyone panics: 88% of those people fact-check what the AI tells them against real review platforms. So the reviews still decide it. The question just gets asked somewhere new first.

Local Falcon ran 60,000 query simulations across 4,423 businesses. As of April 2025, 40.2% of local business queries triggered a Google AI Overview. One finding worth correcting because it gets misreported: distance had effectively no correlation with where you place in AI results once you appeared.

The useful part: there is no separate "AI optimization" to sell you, and anyone offering it is selling you the same profile work twice. The AI is reading your Google Business Profile and quoting it back to people. Whatever's wrong in there is now being repeated to customers you'll never see search.

What to ask any agency

• Which of the 187 ranking factors are you working on, and which are you not?
• Where is your "top 3" measured from?
• What happens if I'm not in the top 3 at day 90?

If the answers are vague, you're paying for posts. Here's what we do instead, and what we guarantee.

Want to know where your shop actually stands? Book a 15-minute call and we'll pull your Google ranking live across your service area and run your numbers with you. No pitch if it's not a fit. Book a call.

Sources: Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors, November 2025; BrightLocal, February 2026 (n=1,002); Local Falcon, April 2025.