The Great Shake-Up 2025/26

Are You Local Enough?

Benchmarks every multi-location brand needs to drive location performance in the AI era.

Discover how brands in your industry are adapting to the biggest shifts in location marketing. This report reveals the benchmarks, gaps, and opportunities shaping multi-location success in 2025/26.

The way consumers search & choose local businesses has entered a new era.

For years, success meant ranking high on Google and driving clicks through conventional SEO practices. While that model still plays an important role, it is insufficient for today’s consumer journey.

Consumers now discover businesses everywhere: on search engines, social platforms, maps, and apps, and increasingly through AI-driven systems like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. These platforms deliver instant, answer-first recommendations, replacing linear funnels with fragmented journeys.

This is the Great Shake-Up.

What makes this shift so disruptive is that AI and traditional search are converging. People expect speed, trust, and relevance, no matter the platform. Marketing teams can no longer work in silos; every signal matters, whether it’s accurate data, fresh reviews, visible engagement, or seamless ways to convert. Together, these signals amplify one another, creating outcomes greater than the sum of its parts for the brands that get it right.

For multi-location leaders, the questions are urgent.

Are our locations discoverable in AI-powered search?

Do people trust our brand enough to choose us over the competition?

How do our results compare with peers & leaders in our industry?

Over 51,000 locations across 500+ multi-location brands worldwide.

This report provides answers.

Drawing on aggregated, anonymized data from over 51,000 locations across 500+ multi-location brands worldwide in H1 2025, it benchmarks performance across the four pillars that now define local success: visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversions. The findings reveal what top performers are doing differently, where industries are falling short, and which opportunities offer the biggest gains.

The message is clear: location performance is now a decisive advantage. Brands that embrace Location Performance Optimization (LPO) are excelling across those four pillars, building trust, earning recommendations, and driving measurable results across every channel where consumers make decisions. Use this report to see where you stand, and take the next step with our maturity diagnostic to accelerate your progress in the era of AI discovery.

LPO -

The New Standard for Local Success

58% of consumers use generative AI for product & service discovery.

30% prefer AI-powered search results to visiting business websites.

To turn discovery into local revenue in this AI-first world, brands need Location Performance Optimization (LPO).

LPO incorporates and goes beyond both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to form a complete system that aligns what people want (trust, clarity, fast answers) with what machines reward (structured, current, context-rich data).