How to Diagnose and Fix Google Maps Ranking Drops

Filtered or suppressed listing

Your listing disappears entirely from Maps for your top keywords, or appears only some of the time, creating a pattern of inconsistent visibility. This often indicates that Google’s local filter is impacting your listing, possibly due to duplicate listings or a competitor that is too close to your listing. 

Check for conflicting listings at the same or a nearby address, within 200 ft of your business listing pin. If you see a “Swiss cheese” pattern on a ranking report, where you are ranking for some pins but completely missing from the rankings for other pins, check whether a nearby competitor has the opposite pattern on their report (i.e. they are ranking for the pins you are not).

Suspension or disabled profile

If your profile shows it’s suspended, not visible to the public, or changes cannot be published, you may experience ranking drops. 

If your profile is suspended, it falls into one of two categories:

• Soft suspension: still visible to the public, but reverification is needed to make changes
• Hard suspension: profile is removed completely from Maps, and you have zero visibility. 

Both types of suspensions require a reinstatement process, which is most likely video re-verification. Only a hard suspension would cause your rankings to drop, as with soft suspension, your profile is still on maps and should not lose any rankings.

Traffic or call drop despite stable rankings

If your ranking position has not changed, but calls, clicks, and direction requests have dropped, the cause may be tracking issues, website problems, changes in the Google results layout, or changes in user intent. First, investigate your measurement setup to make sure it’s not a simple tracking issue. 

Then, compare before-and-after screenshots of the search results for your top keywords. Recently, in mobile search results, I’ve seen a trend where the local pack is being replaced by an AI Overview, and that AI Overview is showing local businesses. Seer Interactive did a study that shows the presence of an AIO in the search result significantly reduces CTR for everything showing in the SERP (including Ads!).