The Great Shake-Up 2025/26: Location Performance Benchmarks by Industry

Key findings

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.

How has local search changed for multi-location brands?

Ranking well on Google through classic SEO still matters, but it no longer covers the whole consumer journey. People now find local businesses on search engines, social networks, maps, apps and AI systems such as ChatGPT, which answer instantly. AI and traditional search are merging, and marketing teams have to manage data, reviews, engagement and conversion together.

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 their 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 LPO certification to accelerate your progress in the era of AI discovery.

What is Location Performance Optimization (LPO)?

Location Performance Optimization (LPO) builds on SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as one system for turning local discovery into revenue. It works across four pillars: visibility, reputation, engagement and conversion. Humans want accurate information, recent reviews and fast answers; machines need structured data and schema, fresh updates and contextual relevance.

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).

Brands that fail to implement LPO risk becoming invisible in both traditional search & the AI-driven discovery layer.

The four pillars of LPO

Every successful local strategy rests on four essential pillars, which are the foundation for driving business impact and revenue at the local level.

• Visibility
• Reputation
• Engagement
• Conversion

Location Performance Optimization aligns human trust & machine precision.

• Humans want: accurate, trustworthy information; social proof & recent reviews; fast answers & clear actions.
• Machines need: structured data & schema; fresh, consistent updates; contextual relevance & sentiment.

Visibility: Be discoverable everywhere your customers are searching

Humans want clear, reliable information they can act on. Machines need structured, current data they can interpret and surface with confidence.

• Accurate, complete listings across Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, and AI-powered assistants.
• Structured data and category alignment so algorithms understand your business. Include schema.org LocalBusiness types, services, products, menus, attributes, and holiday hours.
• Real-time syncing and deduplication to maintain a single source of truth that AI can cite.
• Consistent NAP, categories, and identifiers across networks to reduce ambiguity for LLMs.

Winning signals: Complete, consistent, AI-ready profiles across the web that LLMs can interpret and reference confidently

Reputation: Build trust with consumers & machines

43% said online reputation (positive reviews, high ratings) influenced their most recent visit decision. Source

Humans want to see proof of trust through authentic, positive reviews; machines need a steady flow of fresh sentiment signals to rank and recommend reliably.

• Collect reviews across key platforms and drive a consistent review cadence.
• Respond to reviews with brand-safe guidelines and fast turnaround times
• Monitor topics and sentiment to identify patterns across locations.
• Encourage first-party feedback on location pages to enrich AI summaries.

Winning signals: Fresh reviews, fast responses, and an average rating of 4.5+ stars.

Engagement: Show customers & algorithms that your brand is active & relevant

15% of consumers said that social media presence influenced their decision to visit a local business. 16% cited “social media engagement” as a top reason for revisiting a business. Source

Humans want to feel a business is active and relevant; machines need continuous, content-rich activity to confirm that relevance in results.

• Regularly upload photos, videos, and updates to your Google Business Profiles and other key directories.
• Publish location-specific content with Google Posts, Apple Showcases, social media posts, and FAQs.
• Differentiate brand-level messaging from local-level updates: Brand messaging encompasses company-wide campaigns, while local updates focus on location-specific news, offers, or events.

Winning signals: Social media profiles that feel alive and responsive. This boosts discovery in AI search and wins consumer confidence.

Conversion: Make it easy for discovery to turn into action

60% of consumers say they are likely or very likely to purchase in person after discovering a business online. Source

Humans want simple, frictionless ways to take action; machines need trackable, consistent signals that those actions are happening to keep surfacing the business.

• Add clear CTAs: Book Now, Call, Get Directions, Order Online, Sign Up.
• Create location pages that answer real customer questions.
• Track what drives action with UTM links, call tracking, and analytics.
• Resolve broken links and mismatched phone numbers promptly.

Winning signals: Growth in direction requests, calls, and bookings with reliable attribution that reinforces relevance signals to LLMs.

Common pitfalls

Execution falters when brands treat LPO as a one-off exercise or focus only on rankings. Some of the most common gaps include:

• Reviews managed reactively rather than proactively.
• Slow or inconsistent review responses that erode trust.
• Listings left to decay, creating outdated or duplicate profiles.
• No clear call-to-action strategy, leading to missed conversions.
• Sparse or outdated local content, which signals inactivity to both customers and AI platforms.

These gaps lead to consumer frustration, causing them to choose competitors over your brand. Moreover, such gaps train AI systems to overlook your brand in future recommendations.

Avoiding these pitfalls requires regular cadence, accountability, and a unified framework that connects all four pillars.

Signals of success

High-performing brands share consistent characteristics:

• Listings that are complete, current, and AI-ready across every platform.
• Optimized websites with local pages.
• A steady stream of reviews with fast, thoughtful responses.
• Local profiles that feel alive, with fresh photos, offers, and community interaction.
• Frictionless calls to action, from booking links to direction requests.

These characteristics are the signals AI platforms and search engines prioritize when deciding which businesses to surface. They’re also the ones that win consumer confidence.

Visibility gives AI systems accurate, structured data they can surface with confidence.

Reputation supplies the trust signals that LLMs use to rank and recommend businesses.

Engagement provides ongoing activity that shows platforms a business is active and relevant.

Conversion generates measurable actions that feed back into algorithms as evidence of value.

Together, these signals create a virtuous cycle where customers find answers they trust, AI systems highlight brands that demonstrate reliability, and businesses benefit from more visits, more conversions, and clearer ROI.

In short, LPO ensures your locations get discovered & chosen by both people & the AI systems shaping discovery.

How do industries compare on location performance?

Healthcare has the best average SEO rank (3.75) and restaurants the weakest (12.17), where lower is better. At the median, hospitality locations get the most direction and website clicks, and energy locations the fewest. Restaurants collect the most reviews per location (41.69), while energy and healthcare collect fewer.

How does your industry compare to others when it comes to Location Performance Optimization? These cross-industry comparisons highlight how each sector is performing on key metrics relating to the pillars of LPO.

Visibility by industry

Healthcare is benefiting from strong SEO alignment, while Restaurants face the most competition and weakest rankings (lower is better).

Recommendation: Restaurant brands should focus on local SEO fundamentals (category alignment, keyword strategy, and rich media) to push into the top 5.

Engagement by industry

Most industries underutilize posting features. This reduces freshness signals for AI and consumer perception. Engagement rates by platform for Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 come from Critical Truth and are shown in each industry chapter.

Recommendation: All industries should increase posting cadence. Engaging consumers through localized social media posts could drive bookings, enquiries, and visits. Crucially, it will also signal to AI platforms that your locations are active, increasing the likelihood they’ll be recommended.

Reputation by industry

Restaurants have the largest review per location footprint, giving them more social proof but also more to manage. Energy and Healthcare collect fewer reviews, risking weaker trust signals.

Recommendation: Implement consistent review-request workflows to boost volume and credibility. Utilise AI to ensure reviews are requested and managed promptly.

Conversions by industry

At the median, hospitality locations get the most direction clicks (4,213) and website clicks (2,796), restaurant and food & beverage locations the most calls (510), and energy locations the fewest of all three.

Recommendation: To lift conversions on the likes of Google Business Profile (GBP), brands should ensure every location profile has clear and compelling calls to action that match real customer intent. Adding direct booking links, menus, or service pages reduces friction and increases action rates. Regularly updating photos, posts, and FAQs keeps profiles fresh, boosting both visibility and consumer confidence. Finally, use UTM tagging and call tracking to monitor which actions drive results, and refine content accordingly.

Where are the benchmarks for each industry?

Each of the five industries has its own chapter. A chapter covers the four LPO pillars with one table each: the average, top performer and lowest performer for visibility, reputation and conversion metrics, and engagement rates by platform for Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. Uberall customer results sit under the pillar they illustrate.

Restaurant and food & beverage benchmarks

Restaurant and food & beverage brands average 85% profile completeness. Their average SEO rank is 12.17, where lower is better, and their average star rating is 4.07.

See the restaurant and food & beverage benchmarks

Hospitality benchmarks

Hospitality brands average 86% profile completeness. Their average SEO rank is 6.24, where lower is better, and their average star rating is 4.16.

See the hospitality benchmarks

Retail benchmarks

Retail brands average 89% profile completeness. Their average SEO rank is 6.58, where lower is better, and their average star rating is 4.16.

See the retail benchmarks

Healthcare benchmarks

Healthcare brands average 93% profile completeness. Their average SEO rank is 3.75, where lower is better, and their average star rating is 4.12.

See the healthcare benchmarks

Energy benchmarks

Energy brands average 85% profile completeness. Their average SEO rank is 5.64, where lower is better, and their average star rating is 3.67.

See the energy benchmarks

From benchmark to action: how can brands improve location performance?

The best-performing brands share common practices across the four pillars. They keep profiles rich and accurate with menus, photos, attributes and local pages; generate and answer reviews at scale; post local updates with a clear CTA on Google and Apple; and make click-to-call, directions and booking links easy to find while tracking which channels convert.

The data shows wide variation across industries, but the best-performing brands share common practices. These actions form a playbook that any multi-location business can apply to strengthen visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversions.

Visibility: Be found everywhere that matters

Top performers go beyond the basics of listings and ensure their profiles are rich, accurate, and up to date. Four priorities stand out:

• Menus & Services: Add detailed menus, service lists, or product catalogs to help customers (and algorithms) understand what each location offers.
• Photos & Videos: Upload high-quality, fresh imagery that showcases locations and builds trust.
• Attributes & Local Details: Highlight features like parking, delivery options, or accessibility to give customers confidence to choose.
• Local Pages: Build dedicated, optimized pages for each location on your website. These pages reinforce your visibility in search, support AI discovery, and give customers a trusted place to confirm details beyond third-party listings. Recommended resource: How Can I Optimize My Business Profile to Attract More Local Customers?

Reputation: Build trust through reviews

Customer reviews are one of the strongest signals for visibility and choice. Leading brands prioritize both volume and authenticity.

• Generate More Reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews via post-purchase emails, QR codes on receipts, or staff asking in person.
  Recommended resource: How to Ask Customers for Reviews
• Respond with Balance: Combine human responses with AI or templates to scale efficiently without losing authenticity.
  Recommended resource: AI Bulk Replies in Action
• Manage Negatives: Have a playbook for handling negative or fake reviews to protect brand trust.
  Recommended resource: How to Respond to Negative Reviews (Templates Included)

Engagement: Show up as active & relevant

Algorithms reward activity, and customers notice it too. High performers treat engagement as an always-on activity.

• Posts with a CTA: Share updates that drive action, whether it’s “Order now,” “Book today,” or “Find out more."
• Leverage Google and Apple: Prioritize Google Business Profiles and Apple Maps updates, the two biggest discovery platforms. Recommended resource: Apple Maps vs Google Maps: What’s Better for Your Business?
• Local Relevance: Complement national campaigns with local updates, such as events or seasonal offers, to connect more closely with nearby customers.

Engagement represents a significant opportunity for brands. As AI systems evolve, they will increasingly rely on fresh, localized signals to validate brand activity. Brands that act now will be positioned as leaders in this shift. Act now to boost local engagement through social and reap the rewards!

Recommended resource: How to Boost Visibility in AI Search Through Social

Conversions: Turn visibility into action

Strong visibility, reputation, and engagement create demand, but conversions determine whether that demand results in real outcomes.

• Ensure click-to-call, directions, and booking links are easy to find and work flawlessly.
• Track which channels drive the most conversions to focus investment where it matters.

Recommended resource: Future of Search: How We Used GEO Initiatives to Increase Brand Engagement and Clicks in 1 Month

Thrive in the AI era

Location Performance Optimization (LPO) provides the system to achieve this. The four pillars of visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversion guide brands in building strong local profiles that are trusted by people and prioritized by machines. Together, they form the foundation for local success in an environment where discovery happens across both traditional and emerging channels.

The opportunity is clear.

Brands that embed LPO as an ongoing discipline will capture more customers, build resilience across all discovery platforms, and strengthen their competitive advantage. The next stage of growth belongs to those who act now.

TLDR;

LPO is the framework that will define which brands thrive in the AI-first economy & remain relevant wherever customers choose to search.

How can Uberall help with Location Performance Optimization?

Uberall brings the four LPO pillars into one platform. Teams manage listings with AI-ready data across the network for visibility, monitor and answer reviews at scale with sentiment analysis for reputation, keep profiles active with posts, images and FAQs for engagement, and track clicks, calls and bookings for conversion.

Uberall is the only platform built for Location Performance Optimization. It transforms the four pillars of LPO into a repeatable and trackable system:

• Visibility: Manage listings across the full network with structured, AI-ready data that fuels discovery.
• Reputation: Monitor and respond to reviews at scale with workflows and sentiment analysis that protect and grow trust.
• Engagement: Keep profiles alive through posts, updates, images, and FAQs that show customers and algorithms your brand is active.
• Conversion: Track and optimize clicks, calls, bookings, and other actions that turn visibility into measurable revenue.

Take Action: Take our assessment to reveal your company's LPO Maturity and receive personalized recommendations to improve your local search performance.

Discover Your LPO Maturity

Methodology

The benchmarks draw on aggregated, anonymized data from Uberall customers: over 51,000 locations across 500+ multi-location brands worldwide, generally for H1 2025. The engagement rates per platform come from Critical Truth, for Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. Results are directional benchmarks at industry level.

This report is based on aggregated, anonymized data from Uberall’s global customer base across a range of industries. The analysis generally draws on performance data from the first half of 2025 (H1 2025), measured across the four pillars of Location Performance Optimization (LPO): visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversions.

The metrics highlighted are selected from those most relevant to LPO maturity, including location data quality, customer review activity, and local engagement signals. These serve as benchmarks to illustrate how brands are performing at an industry level, rather than at a regional or individual business level. For example, the restaurant and food & beverage insights reflect Uberall customers worldwide in that industry, not a single market.

While the findings provide a useful view into performance trends, they are not exhaustive. Results should be treated as directional benchmarks, intended to guide thinking and highlight areas of opportunity, rather than definitive measures of any industry as a whole.

• The benchmarks in this report have been selected to give directional insight into visibility, reputation, engagement, and conversion.
• “Top Performer” and “Lowest Performer” represent the highest and lowest per-location averages observed in the dataset for H1 2025. These figures illustrate the range of performance within each industry and may reflect outliers.

Averages are means or medians depending on the metric, as defined below.

Benchmark definitions

Visibility benchmarks

• Profile Completeness: Uberall’s score provides brands with a meaningful indicator of how well they've enriched their location data on key online directories. Average (mean) Profile Completeness scores are shown at a brand level.
• SEO Ranking: This metric represents ranking position in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). A ranking of 1-3 indicates top performance (Google Map Pack), 4-10 is good but not Map Pack, and 10+ suggests not visible on Google's first page. Average (mean) SEO Ranking scores are shown at a brand level.

Reputation benchmarks

• Average Star Rating: The mean customer review score across a brand’s locations, on a scale of 1-5 stars.
• Review Volume Per Brand: The median number of reviews received by a brand. The median is used to balance differences in brand size, since very large chains with hundreds or thousands of outlets naturally generate more reviews than smaller brands. For enterprise businesses especially, this provides a fairer picture of typical review activity across the network, without results being distorted by the very largest or smallest brands
• Review Volume Per Location: The median number of reviews each location receives. The median is used here to reflect the overall level of customer activity at an outlet level. This metric helps brands see whether review activity is evenly distributed across their footprint and spot locations that may be underperforming in attracting customer feedback.
• Review Response Rate %: The percentage of customer reviews that a brand responds to. The mean average is shown for industries in this report.
• Sentiment: A score out of 100 that shows how customers feel in their reviews. Using natural language processing, reviews are analyzed to see if the tone is mostly positive, neutral, or negative. In this report, we show the mean sentiment score for each industry.
• Review Volume Per Location Per Month: The median number of reviews each location receives per month. The median is used to smooth out spikes from unusually busy outlets and show a more representative flow of reviews across the footprint. For enterprise brands, this metric highlights whether locations are consistently generating fresh customer feedback, which is key for visibility, trust, and ranking in search.

Engagement benchmarks

• Engagement Rate: The percentage of interactions (likes, comments, shares, clicks, saves, etc.) a brand receives relative to its audience size. It measures how actively customers engage with published content. In this report, we show the mean engagement rate for each industry.

Conversion benchmarks

• Clicks for Directions Per Location: The number of times users clicked to get directions to a location, reflecting offline visit intent.
• Clicks to Website Per Location: The number of clicks leading from a listing to the brand’s website, indicating online engagement and information-seeking.
• Clicks to Call Per Location: The number of click-to-call actions from listings, a strong signal of direct customer intent to engage with a location.

All average conversion metrics for industries are shown as a median average unless otherwise stated.

Frequently asked questions

Which industries does The Great Shake-Up 2025/26 cover?

Five industries: restaurants and food & beverage, hospitality, retail, healthcare and energy. Retail covers 38 sub-industries, including consumer electronics, fashion, supermarkets and home improvement. Hospitality includes amusement parks, lodgings and resorts, and movie theatres. Energy includes electricity providers, utilities, renewable energy firms and EV charging point operators.

Did social engagement rates rise between Q4 2024 and Q1 2025?

Most did. In the Critical Truth data (data shown for restaurants, hospitality and tourism, plus retail, healthcare and energy), Instagram and Facebook rose in all four, Instagram from 1.60% to 3.7% in healthcare. TikTok fell in retail (1.2% to 1.0%), Instagram Reels and X dipped in energy, and a few rates held flat.

How does the report read SEO rank positions?

In this report, SEO rank is a brand’s average (mean) position in Google’s Search Engine Results Page, and lower is better. A ranking of 1-3 indicates top performance (Google Map Pack), 4-10 is good but outside the Map Pack, and 10+ suggests the business is not visible on Google’s first page.

How many reviews does a location get per month?

The median location received 5.96 reviews per month in restaurants and food & beverage, 2.88 in hospitality, 1.14 in retail, 0.67 in healthcare and 0.11 in energy. Top-performing locations reached 542.01, 28.79, 63.53, 3.75 and 7.01 reviews per month in the same five industries.

Which social platform has the highest engagement rate?

In the Critical Truth data for Q1 2025, LinkedIn has the highest engagement rate for restaurants, hospitality and tourism and for retail (3.90%), Instagram leads in healthcare (3.7%), and LinkedIn and Instagram tie in energy (3.8%). Facebook rates range from 1.3% to 2.0%, and TikTok rates from 1.0% to 1.3%.