Spoke
What determines LSA placement
Google names the inputs but not the weights, and one of them is contested. Here is what is actually documented, what is inference, and the one factor that is a staffing decision rather than a marketing one.
Google names the inputs in its own material and documents that responsiveness affects ranking, but publishes no weighting, and third-party sources conflict on whether proximity is still listed. The named inputs are documented; the relative importance here is practitioner consensus and the conflict is shown rather than resolved.
Google names what feeds placement without publishing how much any of it counts. That is the normal situation on this site, and the useful work is separating the named inputs from the weighting everyone guesses at.
What are the Local Services Ads ranking factors?
Google's own material names review score and review count, responsiveness to customer inquiries, proximity to the searcher, business hours, and whether the business has received serious or repeated complaints. Google also describes placement as driven by how likely your ad is to produce a lead.
What Google does not publish is the weighting. Any source telling you review score is "the most important factor" is estimating, and this site does not repeat those rankings-of-the-rankings.
The inputs Google names
Review score and review count. The direct bridge to the reviews pillar, and the reason the review work is a prerequisite here rather than a parallel project. Note the subtlety covered in the LSA reviews spoke: the reviews that count are not simply the ones already on your business profile.
Responsiveness. Documented, and unusually concrete: Google states that regularly failing to answer calls or messages may affect ad ranking, and describes missed calls as potentially harming responsiveness. This is the factor that is a staffing decision rather than a marketing one.
Proximity. Named in Google's material as an input — and this is the contested one. See below.
Business hours. Running ads while closed produces leads nobody answers, which feeds back into responsiveness — and now costs money directly, because an unanswered call inside both your ad schedule and your Business Profile hours can be a charged lead. Hours stopped being an informational field and became a billing setting.
Serious or repeated complaints. Named as an input. The mechanism is not published, and the practical reading is that the product protects the searcher's experience over the advertiser's spend.
The bid, as a ceiling. Reported from Google's ad-rankings material: the bid caps what you can pay, while placement is driven by the likelihood of producing a lead. Bidding more does not purchase position the way it does in a conventional click auction.
The proximity dispute, left open
Google's FAQ material lists proximity among the inputs. At least one third-party source claims proximity has been removed from the official list of key ranking factors.
Those cannot both be current. This site does not resolve it, because resolving it would mean picking the source that sounds more confident:
| Claim | Source type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Proximity is a ranking input | Google's own FAQ material | Named, checked 15 Nov 2026 |
| Proximity has been de-emphasized | Third-party commentary | Unverified, no primary source seen |
If you are making a decision that turns on this — opening an office, or setting service areas — check Google's current documentation yourself rather than relying on either claim. It is the kind of detail that changes without an announcement, which is why this page carries a review date.
What this means in practice
The actionable order follows from which inputs you can actually move.
- Answer the phone. Documented, immediate, and entirely within your control. It is also the cheapest thing on this list and the one most often neglected because it is nobody's job.
- Keep reviews flowing. Named input, and the work is already specified in the reviews pillar.
- Set hours honestly. Running outside the hours you can answer converts a ranking input into a liability.
- Set service areas you can actually serve. Chasing reach produces leads you will want credited, which is an expensive way to discover geography.
- Treat the budget as a ceiling, not a lever for position.
What nobody can tell you
The weights. Google publishes the inputs and not their relative importance, and no third party has run an experiment capable of isolating them.
Published "LSA ranking factor" lists ordered by importance are inference presented as finding. The inputs above are worth acting on because Google names them, not because anyone knows which one matters most.
More in Local Services Ads
How LSA works
The eligibility gate, the verification badge, the pay-per-lead unit, and the question that decides whether the whole channel is profitable — what Google counts as a lead.
Credits & disputes
You pay for bad leads unless they are credited, which makes this the page that decides whether the channel works. The process changed recently and the sources disagree, so this page shows the disagreement.
Missed calls are charged
A call you never answered can now be a billable lead. That turns phone coverage from an operations detail into a direct advertising cost, and it is the single most expensive thing to misunderstand about this channel.
LSA reviews
Review score and count are named ranking inputs here, which makes the reviews pillar a prerequisite rather than a parallel project. The wrinkle is that this is not quite the review system you already manage.
LSA economics
Three channels with three different cost structures and three different failure modes. The comparison that matters is not cost per lead against cost per click — it is what each one does when you stop paying.
The PMax migration
Local Services Ads are moving into Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. The budget arithmetic changes, manual bidding goes away, and your historical performance reports do not come with you.