Contents6
In short
A ranking only makes sense with a location, a language and a device.
The national average hides the areas where you are absent.
Measuring more widely is not measuring better: you track what serves a decision.
Why check city by city
Google adapts its results to the location of each search. A single check, taken from one point in the country, therefore describes that point and nothing else. Tracking by city replaces a blurry snapshot with a map: on each key query, the ranking in each of the areas where your customers are.
The list of areas is not decided in the tool, it comes from the strategy: the cities and countries your customers search from, not a default list of big cities.
What we really measure
The check
The ranking, by query, city, language and device
The blocks shown above: map, questions, AI summary
The sites holding the top spots
The reading
The gaps between areas on the same query
The trends over several checks, not an isolated point
The competitors rising in a specific area
The ranking alone is not enough. Third place under a map, questions and an AI-generated summary does not have the visibility of third place on a bare page. That is why we also record the make-up of the page, not just the rank.
The pitfalls that cost a lot
Watch out
The national average
An average ranking of 5 can hide first place in three cities and complete absence in the fourth, the one where your best customers are. The average reassures exactly where you should be worried.
Second pitfall: wanting to check everything too deep. Tracking every query down to the tenth page multiplies the cost of each check for information that is of no use: nobody clicks on page seven. We check in depth only the queries that are rising, to see a page coming before it reaches the first page, and stay at the surface for the rest.
Third pitfall: checking too often. A ranking moves from one day to the next for no usable reason. A regular rhythm and trends over several checks are worth more than a daily table that makes you react to noise.
Fourth pitfall: forgetting the device. On mobile, the page is narrower and the blocks take up more room: the same ranking gives less visibility there.
From the field
A client was tracking several hundred queries, in all the big cities of its country, every day, in depth. The tracking budget was heavy and nobody read the tables. By cutting back to the areas where its customers were and to the queries that led to a decision, it got less data and more action.
From check to decision: the role of AI and the expert
For a company of 20 to 500 people present in several markets, you quickly reach thousands of checks per cycle, by country, city, language and topic. Nobody reads that line by line. The system works in three stages:
From raw check to decision
- Check
In bulk, automatically, at a fixed interval.
- Sort
AI isolates the gaps and trends that stand out from the noise.
- Decide
An expert chooses the action, or to do nothing.
AI surfaces “this query lost its place in Lyon while this competitor was rising”. The expert knows whether it is a page to strengthen, a technical problem, or a fluctuation with no consequence. It is the core of our rank tracking on Google and in AI.
When the gaps show that pages are missing for whole areas, the answer is often programmatic SEO: pages per city or per market, each with content of its own. We explain when this approach works, and when it fails.
And visibility in AI?
The same reasoning applies to the answers of assistants, which also vary with language and location: see local GEO.
Frequently asked questions
Isn’t Search Console enough?
It gives an average ranking per country, based on your real impressions. That is valuable, but it does not go down to city level and says nothing about the queries where you do not appear.
How often should you check?
Often enough to see a trend, not so often that you react to noise. The right rhythm depends on how fast your market moves, and is set with the strategy.
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
Also in seo and ai visibility
Understand4 min
Why Google shows different results in Paris and Dubai
Location, language, device, the context of the query: the same search does not return the same page depending on where it is typed. What this changes for an SEO strategy, and why a "national" ranking tells you almost nothing.
Understand3 min
Building your SEO strategy where your customers search
Your head office is not your market: a useful SEO strategy starts from the map of your customers: where they are, which language they search in, which queries they use. Method, trade-offs and common mistakes.
Understand3 min
Local GEO: AI answers change with location
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or AI Overviews do not recommend the same providers depending on the language of the question and where it is asked from. Why, and how to track your AI visibility market by market.