Citation building

A local citation is any third-party mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number — the “NAP” triplet. The canonical example is a listing on a directory like Yelp, Yellow Pages, or Bing Places, but unstructured mentions on news sites, chamber of commerce pages, and trade-association rosters all count. What matters is that the NAP shows up on a domain other than your own.

Citations come in two shapes. Structured citations live on directories with a fielded NAP record (Yelp’s “Business Info” block, Apple Maps’ place card). Unstructured citations are free-text mentions on the open web — a local newspaper article, a sponsor list on a non-profit’s site. Structured citations are easier to audit; unstructured ones add up in aggregate.

Two reasons. First, direct discovery — searchers on Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, and Yellow Pages don’t pass through Google at all, so a complete citation on each surface puts you in front of an audience Google Business Profile alone can’t reach. Yelp drives significant restaurant traffic; Apple Maps owns most iPhone navigation queries; BBB drives consideration for services where trust matters.

Second, Google’s local-pack algorithm uses NAP consistency across these directories as a ranking signal. When your name, address, and phone are identical across the major citation sources, Google treats your business as a well-established local entity — that’s one of the foundational inputs to the Local Pack ranking. When they drift (your Yelp address is the old suite number, BBB still has the previous owner’s phone), the signal weakens and so does your Pack ranking — usually without any other obvious cause.

rank.ai monitors the 8 directories with the highest combined SEO weight and consumer reach in the US. Implementation lives in backend/app/core/citations/discovery.py (P-18); each adapter discovers listings via Serper organic search with a site:directory.tld filter, except Apple Maps which uses a coordinate-anchored SerpApi lookup.

• Yelp — dominant review surface for restaurants and consumer services; high SEO weight.
• Yellow Pages (YP) — legacy directory with broad category coverage and persistent citation value.
• Apple Maps — iOS / macOS default navigation surface; can’t reach this audience via Google alone.
• Bing Places — Microsoft’s business directory; powers Bing Search + Cortana + Outlook map embeds. Public profiles live at bing.com/maps?ty=18….
• Better Business Bureau (BBB) — trust-anchored directory; matters for service categories where reputation is the buying signal.
• Foursquare — venue and category metadata that feeds into a long tail of third-party apps and mapping providers.
• Manta — small-business directory; long-running citation source with consistent crawl coverage.
• MapQuest — historic mapping surface; still indexed and still a citation source for Google’s aggregation layer.

Building citations is the one-time cost. Keeping them consistent is the ongoing one. The pure NAP comparator lives in backend/app/core/citations/nap_diff.py and runs against every discovered listing each week. Name matches use a case-insensitive substring rule (directories often append qualifiers like “Acme Plumbing - SF Branch”), phone is normalized to digits-only, website is protocol-stripped, and address fields are case-insensitive whitespace-collapsed equality.

When the comparator finds a mismatch — your GBP says “123 Main St Suite 4” but Yelp still says “123 Main St”, or your phone changed and Yellow Pages hasn’t caught up — the weekly cron emits a NAP_DRIFT ChangeEvent so the dashboard surfaces it and your team can fix it before it costs you Pack ranking.

Honest framing: rank.ai monitors citations and detects NAP drift. It does not auto-submit your listing to new directories on your behalf — that workflow (account creation per directory, captcha solving, ownership verification, multi-step approval flows) is in our roadmap, not shipping today.

In practice, citation submission is a one-time setup task that’s well-suited to a virtual assistant or a per-listing service like BrightLocal or Yext. The monitoring side — telling you which of the 8 directories have your listing, where the NAP drifts drift, and when something flipped — is what rank.ai ships today, on a weekly refresh cycle, on the same subscription as the rank tracker and GBP grader.