LOCAL PACK RESEARCHER Competitive Intelligence · Local Search
Get it on GitHub ↗
A Claude Project · Drop-in Knowledge Pack

Every local-SEO tool promises you rankings. This one tells you what it can't see.

You open Google, search a trade, and stare at the three businesses on the map. Now what? That's the gap this fills.

It won't recite the 200 ranking factors. It asks what you're actually trying to do, weighs every claim by where it came from, and finds the gap your own analysis missed.

ac repair near me
1Economy Heating & Air4.9 ★ · 347
2Royalty Heating & Air5.0 ★ · 382
3Belle Air Systems5.0 ★ · 106
The prize: three slots, one map. Who wins, and why?
01

We lead with the disclaimers. On purpose.

Local search is full of confident people selling guesses. The trust comes from saying plainly what this won't do.

WON'T — 01

Promise you a ranking.

Nobody can. Local rankings are partly opaque and partly outside anyone's control. Anyone guaranteeing a pack spot is guessing.

WON'T — 02

Pretend to see your pack.

Google personalizes results by location, so a search it runs won't match your customer's. It tells you exactly what to grab, then does the real work on that.

WON'T — 03

Recommend a shortcut.

No fake reviews, stuffed business names, or anything that gets a profile suspended. It flags competitors doing it — never recommends it.

02

Same question. Two kinds of answer.

A summarizer shrinks what you hand it. A researcher refuses to perform without scope. Flip the switch and feel the difference.

USER ASKS — "Research HVAC in Sacramento for me."
flip it — one starts wrong on purpose
✗ GENERIC · UNUSABLE

Here's an overview of HVAC SEO in Sacramento. The local pack is influenced by relevance, distance, and prominence. Top factors include profile completeness, reviews, citations, and on-page SEO. Sacramento is a competitive market with many established HVAC companies. To rank, focus on getting more reviews, completing your profile, and building local citations…

That's a generic article. It didn't ask why, it can't see the real pack, and it would read the same for any city.

✓ INVESTIGATION · SCOPED

Before I dig in, three quick things so I don't waste your time:

  1. The job. Are you pitching a Sacramento HVAC shop, diagnosing a client, or sizing the market to decide if it's worth targeting?
  2. The query. "HVAC" is broad — the pack for "ac repair near me" looks different from "hvac installation sacramento." Which one matters here?
  3. The data. Have you pulled the live pack yet? I can't see your local results from here — Google personalizes them by location — so a screenshot or rank-tracker export is gold. If not, I'll tell you exactly how to grab a clean one.

Quick gut check while you answer: who do you think is winning that pack right now? That tells me where to push.

03

Watch it on a real market.

A live read of the Roseville, CA HVAC pack — real profile data, no invented numbers. Here's the part a summarizer never reaches.

TIER 1 — DIRECT OBSERVATION
Captured pack for "hvac shop in roseville, ca"
1 Economy Heating & Air HVAC contractor · 15+ yrs 347 reviews
4.9 ★
2 Royalty Heating & Air Open 24 hrs · booking 382 reviews
5.0 ★
3 Belle Air Systems the prospect · closes 7PM 106 reviews
5.0 ★
THE CATCH — PROXIMITY

It's not a location problem.

The two shops beating Belle Air sit farther from the search center than businesses that ranked below them. So location isn't deciding this pack — prominence is. That's the good news: you can't move a building, but you can build reviews.

HONEST CAVEAT — QUERY

This isn't the money query.

The captured pack names the city, so Google weighs prominence. The real query — "ac repair near me" — anchors to the customer's exact spot and reshuffles by proximity. A useful proxy, not the final word. Confirm before promising anything.

THE PATTERN + DIFFICULTY

A ~250-review gap — the closeable kind.

Belle Air cracked the pack at a perfect 5.0, so quality isn't the wall — visibility is. Likely lever: review velocity. A multi-month grind, but winnable, because the thing holding it back is fixable.

Drop it into a Claude project. Tell it the trade and the town.

It'll ask you two or three sharp questions first — then research better because it knows the job. One metro, one trade at a time.

Get it on GitHub
STEP 01

Create a new Claude project and add the files to its knowledge.

STEP 02

Paste the one-line instruction from the README into custom instructions.

STEP 03

Start a chat. Name the trade and the town. Answer its questions.