On 17 September 2026 we measured local search visibility for SEO services across Northamptonshire three ways: Google’s map pack, Google’s normal organic results, and what AI assistants answer. We ran the AI questions repeatedly rather than once, because the answers move between runs.
The short version: these are three separate contests with three different sets of winners, and the one most local businesses buy (SEO for the organic results) is not the one that decides whether Google’s map pack or ChatGPT recommends them. We have included our own scores, including the questions where we do not appear at all.
How much local demand there actually is
First, the size of the prize, from Ahrefs UK search volumes:
| Search | UK searches a month | SERP features |
|---|---|---|
| seo northampton | 500 | Map pack, People Also Ask |
| seo agency northampton | 350 | Map pack, People Also Ask |
| seo northamptonshire | 250 | AI Overview per Ahrefs, People Also Ask. Our own live pull the same day did not show one |
| seo wellingborough | 200 | Map pack, People Also Ask |
| seo company northampton | 150 | Map pack |
| seo company wellingborough | 80 | Map pack, People Also Ask |
Two things worth noting before anyone quotes bigger numbers at you. Northampton carries roughly three times Wellingborough’s demand. And the county-level search is the one where Ahrefs records an AI Overview, although our own live pull that day returned none, which is a fair illustration of how unstable these features are: whether an AI answer sits above the results can change between checks.
A warning about a number you may have seen in your own Search Console: until September 2025, queries like “seo corby” showed us 800 to 1,300 impressions a month at average positions of 60 to 80. That collapsed to single digits when Google removed the num=100 parameter, which rank-tracking tools had been using to pull 100 results at a time. A large share of deep-position local impressions in historic data was tools, not buyers. Do not build a content plan on it.
Contest one: Google’s map pack
Searched from inside each town, the three map pack results were:
| Search, from that town | Map pack, in order |
|---|---|
| seo wellingborough | SEO Moves, Straight Up Search, Seventy9 |
| seo company wellingborough | SEO Moves, Straight Up Search, Seventy9 |
| seo northampton | Springhill Marketing, A1 SEO Northampton, Sweven Studio |
| seo agency northampton | Sweven Studio, Springhill Marketing, GWCM |
Every pack slot in Northampton is held by a business with a town-centre or near-centre address. Our office is in Great Doddington, about ten miles out, and we do not appear in the Northampton pack at all. That is proximity doing its job, and no amount of SEO overrides it. If an agency tells you it can put your ten-mile-away business in a town’s map pack, ask how.
Reviews are the other visible pattern. The Northampton pack holders sit at 26 and 72 reviews. We sit on 10. In a pack contest, that gap matters more than anything on your website.
The map pack gets seen and barely clicked
Here is the finding that surprised us most, from 16 months of our own Search Console data. Our website link has been shown thousands of times for Wellingborough SEO searches at an average position between 1 and 3, and clicked almost never: two clicks in 16 months against roughly 20,000 impressions for “seo wellingborough” alone.
Those impressions are overwhelmingly the map pack, not a blue link. People in a map pack call, ask for directions or read reviews. They do not often click through to the website. So if you judge your local SEO by website clicks in Search Console, a well-performing map listing looks like a failure, and if you judge it by impressions, a listing nobody acts on looks like a success. Neither is the truth. Google Business Profile’s own calls, direction requests and website-click data is the measure, and tagging the profile’s website link is the only way to see it in your analytics.
Contest two: the organic results
Different winners again. The top five organic results:
| Search | Organic top five |
|---|---|
| seo wellingborough | eightyeight.digital, SEO Moves, a LinkedIn post, 1pcs, Springhill Marketing |
| seo northampton | Loop Digital, seonorthampton.net, NeSEO, eightyeight.digital, Nettl |
Only one business appears in both a pack and the organic top five for the same search. Directory pages also rank here: a “best SEO companies in Wellingborough” listing and an agency comparison page both hold first-page positions, which means getting onto those lists is a route to the first page without ranking your own site.
We are not in the organic top ten for any of these searches. Our Wellingborough and Northampton pages existed but were thin and years out of date, one of them still quoting a price we have not charged since 2023. We rebuilt both the day we ran this study, which is the honest version of “we are working on it”.
Contest three: what the AI assistants say
We asked three questions of ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, three times each with web search on, from a UK location: 27 answers in total.
| Question | ChatGPT | Google AI Mode | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|---|
| best SEO agency in Wellingborough | named us in 3 of 3 runs | 2 of 3 | 0 of 3 |
| best SEO agency in Northampton | 0 of 3 | 0 of 3 | 0 of 3 |
| best SEO company in Northamptonshire | 0 of 3 | 0 of 3 | 0 of 3 |
The same question, asked three times, does not give the same answer. Google AI Mode named us twice out of three identical runs. Any agency showing you one screenshot of an AI answer, theirs or yours, is showing you a coin toss. Sampling repeatedly is the minimum standard for a claim about AI visibility.
Across all 27 answers, the businesses named most often were SEO Moves (17 mentions), Eighty Eight Digital (12, counting both spellings), onefoursix (11), Loop Digital (8), Springhill Marketing (7), Newedge and JDR Group (6 each). We were named 5 times, all of them on the Wellingborough question.
Which sources the AI answers actually cite
This is the most useful table in the study, because it says where the influence sits. Domains cited across those 27 answers:
| Source | Times cited | Type |
|---|---|---|
| onefoursix.co.uk | 12 | Agency site |
| google.com | 10 | Google properties, including Business Profiles |
| jdrgroup.co.uk | 9 | Agency site |
| eightyeight.digital | 7 | Agency site |
| agencies.semrush.com | 6 | Third-party directory |
| nettl.com, eelavan.co.uk, seomoves.co.uk, springhillmarketing.co.uk | 6 each | Agency sites |
| linkedin.com | 6 | Profiles and posts |
| 123internet.agency, newedge.co.uk | 5 each | Agency sites |
Two things stand out. First, the agencies the AI recommends are mostly the ones whose own pages it cites, so a substantive local page still does the heavy lifting. Second, the Semrush agency directory is cited as often as most agency websites, and LinkedIn appears repeatedly. Getting your business into a well-maintained third-party directory, and keeping a genuine LinkedIn presence, is doing measurable work here. That is a much narrower claim than “get 50 citations and AI will rank you”, which we do not believe and cannot show.
What we would do if we were a Northamptonshire business
- If your customers come from nearby, work on the profile first. Complete Google Business Profile, correct primary category, and a steady flow of genuine reviews. The pack is the cheapest local visibility there is, and it is proximity-weighted in your favour.
- Tag your profile’s website link so pack clicks show up in your analytics. Otherwise you are guessing whether it works.
- Do not judge local SEO by Search Console clicks alone. Read the profile’s calls and direction requests next to it.
- One good town page beats ten thin ones. The pages ranking here are substantive. Thin, near-duplicate town pages have been discounted for years.
- Get into the lists the answers cite. The Semrush agency directory, a maintained LinkedIn page, and any local “best of” list that already ranks for your term.
- Sample AI answers repeatedly before believing any of it, including anything we tell you.
Method and limits
Search volumes: Ahrefs, UK, September 2026. Map pack and organic results: DataForSEO live desktop results geo-located to Wellingborough and Northampton, 17 September 2026, 20 results deep. AI answers: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity via DataForSEO with web search enabled, UK market, three runs per question per engine, same day. Impression data: our own Google Search Console, 16 months to 15 September 2026.
Limits worth stating. This is one snapshot of a set of results that move daily. Local packs vary by the searcher’s exact position, so your view will differ from ours. Our AI sample is three runs per question, which is enough to show that answers vary and not enough to rank agencies by AI visibility. Search volumes are vendor estimates, not Google’s own numbers. And we are an agency in this market, so read our own absence from the Northampton results as the check on our bias: we published the numbers that make us look worst.
We re-run this monthly. If you want the same read on your own business, across Google and the AI platforms, that is what our GEO service measures, and our Northamptonshire page explains how we work locally. Or just ask us and we will tell you which of the three contests is worth your money.
