**James Dooley:**
Google’s Brain Lock. Today I’m joined by Paul Truscott and we’re talking about something I’d never even heard of before in relation to Google Business Profiles and local map rankings. Paul, let’s get straight into it. What is Google Brain Lock?
**Paul Truscott:**
Brain Lock is essentially the system Google uses for everything related to geolocation, geospatial relevance, and geotopicality. The “loc” part literally stands for location. That system underpins how Google understands place, proximity, and relevance, especially for Maps, but it also affects web pages.
It’s particularly important for people who overproduce location pages, because many of those pages end up cannibalising each other. That usually happens because they are built for the wrong places. Brain Lock is critical if you operate in local search, whether you focus on Maps, websites, or both. If you do both, the effects compound.
Starting with web pages, Google creates a centroid for every location along with a defined boundary. If you go to Google Maps and search for a city, you’ll see a red dotted line showing that boundary. Sometimes the city appears smaller than expected, especially in the US, because many areas we would call suburbs are incorporated cities in their own right.
That boundary usually defines a single SERP. In smaller towns, nearby villages may be folded into the same SERP for efficiency. The problem arises when people do not understand where that boundary sits. If you create multiple location pages within the same boundary, those pages will almost always cannibalise each other because they are targeting the same SERP.
**James Dooley:**
I’ve seen that with places like Manchester. You get the red dotted line, but inside it you still see areas like Oldham or Rochdale. They have their own boundaries, yet they sit within the wider Manchester area.
**Paul Truscott:**
That’s right. Large cities like London, Manchester, and Birmingham are subdivided. London is broken down by borough, Manchester by suburb, New York by borough. Smaller cities like Coventry are usually a single SERP. In the US, most mid-sized cities work the same way.
Even when a suburb has its own boundary, if users are searching at a city level, suburb pages often cannibalise each other because Google still treats them as part of the same broader entity. That’s why understanding how Google subdivides locations is so important when you plan local pages across a region or country.
You should always look at Google itself. The SERP and Maps tell you almost everything you need to know. Searching the place name, checking the boundary, and clicking “get directions” shows you the centroid. That centroid is not always visually central, but it represents the location entity Google uses.
All of this sits within the Brain Lock system. Google looks at your content and decides which location it belongs to, then assigns weights to your signals accordingly.
**James Dooley:**
If you were entering a new country, say Spain, and building local pages from scratch, would you use Brain Lock to decide which locations to target?
**Paul Truscott:**
You use Google to extract the data, and Brain Lock is the system processing it. Practically, you would spoof your location using a Chrome extension or a mobile location changer. You find the city boundary, then run the same “near me” search from different sides of that boundary.
If the SERP stays the same, it’s a single SERP city. If it changes significantly, the city has been subdivided. Once you know that, you avoid wasting time building unnecessary pages and avoid cannibalisation. The key thing is you only need to do this research once per location. It does not change by industry.
**James Dooley:**
That makes sense for web pages. What about Google Business Profiles?
**Paul Truscott:**
This is where it gets really interesting. Google has never publicly documented this, but testing shows that every city has a single pair of geo coordinates that represent the city entity. That pair is the centroid.
Manchester, for example, is defined by one coordinate pair. The closer your business is to that point, the more relevant you are to searches that include the city name. The further away you are, the less relevant you become.
This matters hugely for keyword plus city searches. Businesses closer to the centroid need fewer reviews, less authority, and less content to rank. Distance can be overcome by prominence, but proximity gives a massive advantage.
If you are a new business and you can legitimately locate close to the city centroid, even via a serviced office, ranking becomes significantly easier. This applies only to city-based queries. For “near me” searches, the user becomes the centroid.
**James Dooley:**
So “plumber Manchester” uses the city centroid, but “plumber near me” uses the searcher’s location?
**Paul Truscott:**
Exactly. If the query contains a city, that city’s centroid is the reference point. If it is “near me”, the user’s device location is the centroid.
That’s why service area businesses matter. You want your virtual or operational location aligned with where searches and calls actually come from. It is all nodes and edges. The shorter the spatial distance between nodes, the stronger the relevance.
**James Dooley:**
What about something like “near me in Manchester”?
**Paul Truscott:**
That’s a good one. I suspect Google weights the city first and confirms the user is within that boundary, then blends the signals. I’ll test it properly, but that would be my expectation.
**James Dooley:**
Paul, this has been incredible. I’ve been in local SEO for over 15 years and had never heard the term Google Brain Lock. The insight you’ve shared is next level. Thanks for coming on.
**Paul Truscott:**
Thanks, James. Absolute pleasure.
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