Business listing accuracy in the Jacksonville metro is worse than most owners would guess. We checked 600 local businesses across ten industries, and 42% have at least one directory listing that contradicts their own Google Business Profile: a different phone number, an old address, or another name. Another 16% have no listing we could find on any directory we checked.
The study is ours, and so is the interest in its answer. Narsil Creative sells local SEO, and the Citations Checker in our software, Narsil SEO, collected the data. Every figure below comes with how we got it, including where our own tool fell short.
What did we check?
We drew 60 businesses at random in each of ten industries: dentists, HVAC, med spas, moving, personal injury law, pest control, plumbing, pool service, real estate and roofing. They came from the businesses Google Maps shows for each industry's two biggest buying searches, run from 29 fixed points across Duval, St. Johns, Clay, Nassau and Baker counties.
For each business, the reference is its Google Business Profile: the name, phone and address Google shows. We searched Google for each one by name and by phone, across the web and on up to 12 directories' own sites, reading 30 results deep, and compared every listing we found on about 50 directories with the profile, field by field. The searches ran October 15 and 16, 2026.
Then people checked the tool, in a normal browser:
- every Yelp and Facebook listing the searches found (714 of them)
- every page our follow-up searches and a Yellow Pages fix added (433)
- every search our data vendor failed to answer (643)
- 140 listings drawn to test the tool's calls
- 20 businesses on six directories from scratch, to measure what the tool misses
Where a person made a call, it replaces the tool's. The full method, every hand check and the business-level data (no business named) are on the study page.
A listing is consistent when its name, phone and address agree with the Google profile. A location tag in the name ("Southside") or a missing suite number doesn't make it wrong. A different phone number does, even when it's a call-tracking number on purpose: the customer sees a number Google doesn't show.
How many directories list a typical Jacksonville business?
Two. The median business has a listing on two of the directories we checked (the middle half have one to three), and 16% have none we could find. HVAC (35%) and roofing (30%) businesses most often had no listing at all; plumbing least often (5%).
| Directory | Consistent listing | Listed, but wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Yelp | 40% | 21% |
| 38% | 12% | |
| BBB | 22% | 7% |
| MapQuest | 22% | 5% |
| Nextdoor | 16% | 4% |
| Yellow Pages | 7% | 4% |
| Apple Maps | 4% | 1% |
Share of the 600. "Listed, but wrong" means a listing there contradicts the profile and none matches it. Every Yelp and Facebook listing was judged by a person. Yellow Pages and Apple Maps are floors: our searches find few of their pages (below).
How often is a listing wrong?
42% of the 600 (95% range 38% to 46%) have at least one listing that contradicts their Google profile. Across all the listings we found, about 7 in 10 match the profile and 3 in 10 don't.
| Industry | At least one wrong listing | No listing found |
|---|---|---|
| Dentists | 58% | 8% |
| Moving | 53% | 7% |
| Personal injury law | 50% | 8% |
| Real estate | 47% | 10% |
| Plumbing | 40% | 5% |
| Roofing | 38% | 30% |
| Pest control | 37% | 25% |
| HVAC | 35% | 35% |
| Pool service | 30% | 17% |
| Med spas | 28% | 12% |
Sixty businesses per industry puts about 12 points either side of each share. Dentists (46% to 70%) clearly sit above med spas (19% to 41%); the industries in between overlap, so their order isn't a finding.
The wrong listings our team found were ordinary drift: a phone number that isn't the one on Google, an address from before a move, a practice listed under a former name or the dentist's own name.
Why does our own tool undercount?
It sees what search results show, and search results leave things out. For 20 businesses our team searched by hand on six directories, the tool found 41 of the 76 listings a person found (54%). On Yellow Pages it found 2 of 15, and on Apple Maps 4 of 16.
Its "consistent" was too generous too. Of 79 listings the tool called consistent, 10 (13%) had a different phone or address on the page itself, which the search snippet didn't show. Overall, a person's call differed from the tool's on 11 of 95 listings (12%), past the 10% line we set before collecting.
So every count in this article is a minimum, and a person with a browser still beats our tool. That's why Yelp and Facebook rest on hand checks for every listing. For BBB, MapQuest and Nextdoor most calls are still the tool's, so those columns likely understate how many listings are wrong.
Do businesses in the top three map results have better listings?
They have more consistent ones. We drew a second sample: 200 businesses in Google's top three map results and 200 at positions 10 to 20, twenty of each per industry. The top three had 1.85 consistent listings per business, against 1.41: a gap of 0.45 (95% range 0.16 to 0.73). The gap sits on Yelp (44% against 30%), Facebook (44% against 29%) and Nextdoor (20% against 11%). How often listings are wrong doesn't differ: 0.67 wrong listings per business against 0.68.
Consistent listings per business
Wrong listings per business
This is a correlation. Top-three businesses also differ in reviews, profile age and websites, and nothing here says listings cause the rank. Part of the gap goes with the Google profile itself: 16% of the lower group's profiles are unclaimed, against 6% of the top group's. Among claimed profiles only, the gap is 0.35 (0.05 to 0.66).
The 600 show the same thing about claiming. The 60 businesses with an unclaimed Google profile average 1.55 listings, against 2.48 for claimed profiles, and 33% have none we could find, against 14%.
How much search demand lands on directory pages?
Each month the ten industries' top ten buying searches (83,950 a month across the metro) send an estimated 1,800 to 5,500 clicks to directory list pages, the Yelp, BBB and Angi pages that list several local businesses. Those clicks become an estimated 40 to 257 leads a month on directories where a business is missing or listed wrong, counting only the directories we measured cleanly. Bought as Google Ads leads, they'd cost $9,000 to $218,000 a month.
For one industry, plumbing: each month about 270 to 820 buying searches in Jacksonville land on directory pages listing local plumbers, mostly Yelp's, where 53% of local plumbers are missing or listed wrong.
Read those ranges with their assumptions. Search volumes and bids are Google Ads data from our companion study of Jacksonville lead costs. Clicks use Advanced Web Ranking's September 2026 click-through rates, which don't separate out AI Overviews or the map pack, so clicks may run high where a map pack sits above the directories. Contact and conversion rates come from LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks. The dollar range spans about 24 times because four estimates multiply, which is why the leads come first. And these are totals for every business in an industry, not what one business stands to gain.
Check your own listings
This is the method our team used, without the spreadsheet. One sitting, a browser and your Google Business Profile.
LISTINGS CHECK
1. Copy your business name, phone and address exactly as your
Google Business Profile shows them.
2. On each directory (Yelp, Facebook, BBB, MapQuest, Nextdoor,
Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, and your industry's own: Angi,
Healthgrades, Avvo, Zillow), search the site by name, then by phone.
3. Search Google too: site:yelp.com "904-555-0100"
(your number, each directory's domain).
4. Compare name, phone and address on every listing you find:
- suite missing or written another way, same number and ZIP: fine
- a location tag, "Inc." or "LLC" added or dropped: fine
- a different phone, even a tracking number: wrong
- a different street number, ZIP or city: wrong
- another branch's page with its own phone and address: not yours
5. Claim each listing before you edit it.
6. Fix wrong phones first, then addresses, then names.
A wrong phone goes first because it's the field a customer acts on: they call it.
What will fixing listings do?
Fixing your listings won't buy a map ranking: the top-three gap is a correlation. What it does is plainer. The customers who find you on Yelp, Facebook or BBB reach your current phone and address, and the directories stop telling a different story from your Google profile.
You don't need to pay anyone for the check above, including us. If every listing you find matches your profile, you're done until you move or change numbers. For the listings that feed AI assistants, including Foursquare and Bing Places, which this study didn't measure, see how one set of business facts serves every AI surface and how Jacksonville businesses get recommended by ChatGPT. The wider playbook is in our guide to local SEO in Jacksonville. Listings work (cleaning up citations and directories) is part of our Jacksonville SEO service, for owners who'd rather hand it off.