Local SEO Stats Everyone Cites and Nobody Checks

Building my sourced stats page meant doing something tedious and clarifying: chasing every famous local-SEO number back to where it actually came from. Not the blog that quoted it — the study underneath. A lot of them didn't survive the trip. Here are the ones everybody cites, what's actually behind them, and why I still publish a couple of them anyway.

"46% of all Google searches have local intent"

This is the most-quoted stat in the entire field, and it's the shakiest. Trace it back and it dead-ends at a single remark by a Google representative at a 2018 conference, relayed secondhand — never published as a study, never updated, never independently verified in the years since. I still cite it on my stats page, but flagged, out loud, as exactly what it is: an old conference aside that's directionally useful and nothing more. Most pages quote it bare, as if it were a fresh, hard fact. It isn't, and pretending otherwise is how folklore launders itself into "data."

"1.5 billion 'near me' searches a month, up 900%"

You've seen this one in a hundred decks. Some version of it — 1.5 billion near-me searches a month, up 900%, 50 million a day — gets pasted around endlessly. I went looking for the Google source behind any of those figures and came up empty. There isn't a traceable original for the numbers as they're repeated. That doesn't mean near-me search is small; it obviously isn't. It means the specific numbers are folklore, and a number you can't trace is a number you shouldn't cite. So I don't.

The sourceless round number

Then there's the whole genre of clean, authoritative-sounding stats with nothing behind them — "70% of businesses fail," "X% of buyers do Y." BrightLocal, which actually runs the canonical local-search surveys, has pointed out that even the famous "70% of businesses fail" can't be tied to an original source. My rule, which is the whole design of the stats page: if a figure has no study and no year behind it, it doesn't go in. I'd rather publish 30 numbers you can trust than 80 you can't.

Why the tracing is the point, not the chore

Here's the meta-lesson, and it's the reason this post exists. The discipline of naming your source, linking it, and flagging the weak ones isn't just intellectual hygiene — it's increasingly how you get cited at all. AI answer engines and skeptical readers both reward the page that shows its work and quietly discount the one that laundered a folklore stat. Being citable is becoming its own ranking, and citability starts with being honest about which of your numbers would survive someone checking.

Every stat on my dataset page carries its source precisely so you can check it — and so the shaky ones come with a warning label instead of a confident face. That honesty is the whole asset.