## **📋 Overview**

The **GBP (Google Business Profile) Audit** inside Search Atlas automatically selects competitor businesses to benchmark your profile against. Some customers have noticed that the competitors chosen do not always match their expected scope of work — for example, businesses from unrelated industries or incorrect service areas may appear in the benchmark.

This article explains how competitor selection currently works, why mismatches can occur, and what you can do in the meantime.

## **🔍 How Competitor Benchmarks Are Selected**

When Search Atlas runs a GBP Audit, it automatically identifies nearby businesses to use as competitor benchmarks. However, the current system does **not yet apply a category filter**, which means businesses outside your industry can sometimes be included in the benchmark comparison.

This is a known limitation the team is actively working to resolve.

## **⚠️ Why You May See Incorrect Competitors**

There are a few reasons why the auto-selected competitors may not reflect the right scope for your business:

- **No industry/category filter:** The competitor selection algorithm currently pulls nearby businesses without filtering by business category, so unrelated businesses may appear.
- **Location radius overlap:** Businesses that share a geographic area with your GBP listing are included even if they serve a different market.
- **Manual adjustment not yet available:** At this time, there is no option within the platform to manually add or remove individual competitors from the benchmark.

## **🚀 What Is Being Done to Fix This**

Search Atlas is actively developing improvements to address this limitation. Updates to competitor category filtering and manual competitor management are in progress. The manual competitor management interface will be announced when it becomes available.

## **🛠️ What You Can Do Right Now**

While full customisation is not yet available, here are the recommended steps to manage this limitation:

1. Review the competitors currently shown in your GBP Audit benchmark and note any that appear to be from unrelated industries or service areas.
2. Consider using those benchmark results only for the data points that are still relevant to your business category (e.g., review counts, response rates) and disregarding comparisons where the competitor is clearly out of scope.
3. Re-run the GBP Audit periodically, as improvements to competitor selection are being rolled out — the benchmark may become more accurate over time as updates are released.
4. If the incorrect competitor selection is significantly impacting your audit results or client reporting, escalate to the support team with your project name, the specific GBP location affected, and a description of the mismatched competitors you are seeing so the team can investigate and flag your case for the engineering team.

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.