Most businesses don’t miss out on local pack rankings because they lack reviews, links, or proximity. They lose long before that, simply because Google never even treats them as eligible. This is a consistent pattern in local search that nearly everyone misses. Google first decides what you are, and only after that does it decide how relevant you are. From exact matches to broad intent: How eligibility evolves For very specific queries, Google is trying to find a 1:1 match. It wants high-certainty entities that leave no room for ambiguity. But when you pull back to a broader query like “restaurants,” that strict matching relaxes. The Map Pack suddenly includes a wider range of related categories. At this stage, less visible ranking factors—clicks, NavBoost, reviews, and even live signals like whether you’re currently open—start to matter more. Your business name and primary category combine into a single signal that defines your “entity boundary.” For thousands of companies, a name that’s overly narrow becomes a technical constraint, blocking them from showing up in those lucrative, broad-intent Map Packs. On the flip side, if you’re trying to own a niche, tightly aligning your name and category can act as a powerful “cheat code” for eligibility. Dig deeper: How to choose the best Google Business Profile categories Eligibility as gatekeeper: Interpretation before ranking In practice, you’re not only competing with other businesses; you’re also competing with Google’s demand for interpretive certainty. The Google Content Warehouse API Leak has given us a glimpse into the system powering this, including NlpSemanticParsingLocalBusinessType. This is the upstream…