What your competitors' categories reveal, and how to find them

Most competitor research is a waste of an afternoon. You look at their website, notice their photos are nicer, feel bad, and change nothing. Category research is different because it produces one concrete decision.

Either the businesses beating you are in a category you are not in, or they are not. If they are, you have a fifteen minute fix. If they are not, you can stop wondering about categories entirely and go look at the actual constraint.

Why is the category the thing worth researching?

Because it is the highest-scoring individual factor anyone has measured, and it is fully visible on your competitors' profiles.

Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report had 47 local search experts score 187 factors. Primary GBP Category came first at 227 points, ahead of proximity to the searcher at 225 and keywords in the business title at 223. Additional categories sit eighth at 173. The report has run since 2008, and primary category has been the top individual local pack factor in every edition.

The survey is expert opinion, so the large-n work matters more. Darren Shaw's study of 1.8 million Google Business Profiles across 4,209 categories, published on Search Engine Land in August 2026, found that the exact-match category outperforms adjacent categories. For hair salons, the `Hair salon` category outranks every adjacent option; for plumbers, `Plumber` outranks the rest of the industry set. His words: "The pattern repeats for almost every category in the dataset."

That is the whole reason this research pays. You are not looking at a hunch. You are looking at the highest-weighted setting on the competitor's profile, published, for free, under their name.

What can you actually learn from a competitor's categories?

Three things, and all of them are actionable.

Which pool the winners chose. If the top three results all share a primary category and yours is different, you are competing in a different filter than the one that is paying out.

Where the specificity line sits in your market. The 1.8 million profile finding says exact match wins, so if every top result in your city is narrow and specific, specificity is the price of entry there. If they are all broad, it may still be available to you.

What services they claim. Secondary categories often reveal lines of business a competitor does not advertise prominently. A cleaning company quietly listing post-construction cleanup is telling you where the margin is in your market.

None of that requires a subscription tool. It requires twenty minutes and a phone.

How do I find a competitor's primary category?

Search the term in Google Maps and read the line under the business name.

That line is the primary category. It is public, it is exactly what the owner set, and it updates when they change it. On desktop, open the business panel and it sits directly beneath the star rating.

Do this from a phone, on the actual search you care about, and do it a few times from different parts of your service area. Proximity to the point of search is the second-highest scoring factor in that same survey, which is why the list changes as you move, why a single ranking number is misleading, and why the three competitors you see from your office may not be the three your customers see.

Write down the top three for each of your main terms. Patterns show up fast.

How do I find their secondary categories?

Secondary categories are not displayed on the profile, but they are present in the page data.

Open the business listing in a desktop browser, view the page source, and search the source for the primary category name you already know. The other categories the business has set usually appear near it in the same data block. It is clumsy, it is free, and it works.

Browser extensions exist that surface the same information in a cleaner panel. They read the same underlying data, so use one if you would rather not read raw source. Do not pay much for it either way, because you are only doing this a few times a year.

One warning worth having. Secondary categories tell you what a competitor claims, not what they are good at. Do not add a category because a competitor has it. Add it because you would happily take the customer it brings.

How many competitors am I actually fighting?

Should I be researching who AI recommends instead?

No, and the numbers being used to sell you that research do not survive a source check.

Two figures circulate in vendor blogs: that only 45% of businesses winning the Google map pack are recommended by AI assistants, and that just 12% of ChatGPT's citations match URLs on Google's first page. Neither has a traceable methodology. No sample size, no query set, no dates, no disclosure of which engines were run or how many times. They exist to make map pack research look obsolete so that something else can be sold alongside it.

Google's own guidance is blunter than anything I would write: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." And on the category as a whole: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

There is a real measurement problem underneath the fake numbers, which is that AI answers are not stable enough for a single check to mean anything. That is worth understanding properly, and it starts with what Google's own documentation says about optimizing for AI. What it does not justify is replacing a free, visible, highest-weighted setting on your competitor's profile with a vendor's unsourced percentage.

Does this work for businesses without a storefront?

Yes, with one adjustment.

Service area businesses show categories the same way, but they hide their address, which changes how you read the competitive set. You are comparing coverage areas rather than street corners, and the businesses appearing in your searches may be based well outside your neighborhood.

There is a scoring consequence too. In the 2026 survey, having an address showing on the profile rather than running as a service area business sits seventh at 176 points, and the same edition added showing an address when you are genuinely a service area business to its list of new suspension-risk factors. So a hidden address is a real handicap and faking one is a real risk.

If you run without a storefront yourself, the category research is the same but the ranking mechanics are not, and service area businesses have their own rules for ranking that are worth reading before you draw conclusions from a competitor comparison.

What do I do when their categories match mine exactly?

Then categories are not your problem, and that is genuinely useful information.

It means the difference is elsewhere: reviews, proximity, profile completeness, or the strength of the website behind the listing. You have eliminated the cheapest possible explanation, which lets you stop rearranging profile fields and go look at the harder thing.

Most owners never get to this point, because they never check. They assume the category is fine, spend six months on content, and discover the mismatch later.

For medical and dental practices there is a second layer here. Competitor research on reviews is fine, but replying to your own patient reviews carries a compliance risk most owners underestimate, and what you can legally say back is narrower than it looks.

What to do this week

Pick your three highest-value search terms. Run each one in Google Maps from your phone, from five points across your service area.

For each observation, record the business and the primary category listed under the name. Count the distinct businesses, then count how many share a category you do not hold.

Circle any category that appears more than twice and that you are not currently using. That is your candidate. Compare it honestly against what you actually do before you change anything.

Then pull the secondary categories for the single strongest competitor, and see whether they claim anything you also do but never listed.

While you are in there you will notice which competitors post constantly. Do not copy that reflex, because Google Business Profile posts affect less than people assume.

Questions about your competitive set?

Email me at eric@seod.com with your business name and your top search term. I will run the Maps search from a few points across your service area and send you back the primary categories of everyone beating you, with a note on which one I would take. Takes me about fifteen minutes.

I do these personally and there is no sequence behind it. If your categories match theirs and the gap is somewhere else, I will tell you where I think it is.

Reading the winners' categories once tells you where you stand today. Search visibility works your profile week to week and reports keyword position and calls, so you can see what is changing without checking everything by hand. Or keep reading the rest of the local search library.