🧭 Overview
Some customers notice that the Competitor Benchmark section of the GBP Audit lists businesses that don't make sense as competitors — either because they're geographically far away, or because they're in a completely different industry. These are two separate causes with two separate explanations below.
📍 Cause 1: Competitors in the Wrong Location
This behavior is related to how the GBP Audit tool pulls and processes competitor location data during benchmarking, which can surface businesses from the wrong geographic area — most often for service-area businesses (SABs) that hide their address on Google. If your business is an SAB and competitors appear hundreds of miles away, see the dedicated article on Fixing GBP Audit Errors for Service-Area Businesses Without a Fixed Address — that article covers this specific case in full.
🏭 Cause 2: Competitors in the Wrong Industry
Separately, competitors can be in the right location but the wrong industry — for example, a scientific lab-equipment supplier showing up as a competitor for a windows installer, because their product listings both mention the word "windows."
Root cause (confirmed): competitor selection pulls every business appearing in the local-pack search results for your tracked keywords, but does not filter by business category or industry. A business's category is captured and displayed, but it is never used to exclude an industry mismatch — so a pure keyword-term collision (like "windows" matching both a window installer and a lab-glass "viewport window" manufacturer) can surface a completely unrelated business as a top-ranked competitor.
This is a known product limitation, not an account-specific data issue — re-running the audit or fixing your GBP location will not resolve it, since the underlying selection logic doesn't check industry at all. It has been filed with our engineering team for a category filter to be added to competitor selection.
✅ What To Do Right Now
- If the competitor is far away, follow the SAB location-matching steps in the linked article above.
- If the competitor is nearby but a clearly different industry, this is a known category-filter gap — there is no self-serve fix today. Reach out via the live chat widget inside the platform so we can confirm it's the same issue and keep you updated as the fix ships.