The short answer
Local citations are mentions of your business's name, address and phone number (NAP) on other sites: Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, industry directories. Consistent citations help Google and AI assistants trust your details. Inconsistent ones, like an old number or a previous address, get repeated back to customers.
As a ranking boost, most local SEO practitioners rate them lower than they did a decade ago. As a source of truth, they matter more. Assistants answering questions about local businesses read directories as well as your site, and repeat what they find.
When AI answers a question about a local business, 93% of the distinct websites it cites are business websites. (Source: BrightLocal Local AI Visibility Tracker, August 2026 — 116,670 domains cited across Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and ChatGPT.)
Name, address, phone number.
Hardly. A different phone number or an old address does.
Only if it shows you exactly which listings it corrected. Piles of new, low-quality directory listings add little.
You can't edit what ChatGPT says, but wrong information about your business almost always comes from a source it read: an old directory listing, an outdated page on your site, your Google profile.
2 min readTo rank higher on Google Maps, work on the two of Google's three local factors you can influence.
2 min readBook a time with Lehvel and we’ll go through what your business actually needs.