Should Businesses Bother With Local Listings in 2026?

Even though I’ve never been a big directories guy, I’ve always recommended some degree of local push with my ongoing clients. If for nothing else, to say that we’ve checked all the foundational boxes.

There are two major things I’ve noticed in the last few months, however, that are making me doubt the viability or importance of directories as a real part of anyone’s SEO plan.

I’ll unpack those here.

Directories are Spam Magnets

I’ve been that “shoe cobbler with broken shoes” business for years, often not bothering to do much SEO for myself because I considered doing SEO for SEO to be an unideal time:reward scenario. I say that to say, I’ve not had The SEOptimist on many directories.

Very likely in the past, where you’d probably see my business pop up places was probably because those directories scraped the info without consent, which a lot of them do.

Why am I telling you that?

Because this spring I decided to engage much more deliberately in my own marketing. Publicly listable phone number in hand, I updated my Google Business Profile and organized a directories list that I intended to systematically work through.

One week, I made it through the first of them and ran out of time. But what immediately happened was ~83 spam calls per week. (I counted.) From being on GBP and ONE directory. To say this was intrusive is an understatement, and it has remained true for 3 consecutive weeks thus far.

On some level I knew that being on these places would open a business up to spam calls. My clients have mentioned to me before that more of the incoming calls than they’d like are BS solicitations and robo-calls. But I didn’t fully realize the insane degree to which it does this, and suddenly I felt mixed about every recommendation I’d ever made for a client to be in these places.

Practical takeaway: Even if there is still local SEO reinforcement from being on a bunch of local directories, I am skeptical at this point whether the measurable SEO boost would be worth the absolute tidal wave of spam calls they generate.

I think there’s a tendency in SEO to focus on anything that improves rankings, and as long as we can measure that something does have an effect we add it to the to-do list. Sometimes we get so fixated on that that we forget to zoom out and ask ourselves if, big picture, some of those steps have a net positive with all other things considered.

This is especially worth considering when you also try to quantify:

• What is the energy or efficiency cost of all the interruptions and distractions per day for these (waste of time) calls? Functionally, as the work goes.
• Even if you have someone else dedicated to answering the phones, what is their billable time spent answering all these waste-of-time calls? And how demoralizing is it for them to answer the phone all day, for nothing?

The Spam Calls Pollute The Data

Not to mention, this degree of spam pollutes the GBP data. I’ve been excited in the past to meet with a client and point out that they had been getting 13 calls per month off of GBP — and then after my SEO we could see they were getting 50. Big improvement, right? But then the client told me the vast majority of those calls were spam.

Worse yet, we now had one less metric we could meaningfully measure because it now means nothing. (If the majority of calls are spam, logging an increasing call number now probably only means more and more spam.) I’ve had several examples like that.

In several of those cases the SEO work was still a success and demonstrated real ROI over time. But, it was successful in spite of these things being true. (Maybe eventually they did get a meaningful increase in calls from GBP amidst the spam, but the spam persisted.)

Google Seems To Be De-Prioritizing Directories

I mentioned in a recent blog about May’s core algorithm update that Edward Sturm covered changes in directory rankings. In his example, plumbers (and other industries) that had ranking local listings saw that they fell immediately out of the top 5, often all the way to rank 13. Seemingly overnight.

It’s fair to say that relying on a directory listing to rank and be seen in itself was never really the goal. So in a sense, who cares about their rankings falling? But what’s important is what it communicates in a bigger picture sense.

A quick recap of that analysis: Google is clearly trying to clear unnecessary middlemen from the process. Since most of these directories are restating information found elsewhere, whether on someone’s own website or Google Business Profile, the feeling is evidently that listing these directories adds no value.

That’s probably a fair sentiment, since SEOs have been saying for years that humans don’t really visit the majority of these directories. That the primary value they provided was the brand reinforcement and extra local ranking signals.

It’s not unreasonable to conjecture from this that the directories’ positive signals about a brand may be diminishing as well. (And that bit was arguably the only value they ever had.)

It makes sense to ask at this point: If humans already don’t visit the majority of these local directories, and Google is now de-prioritizing them, does investing time here still add any value?

Especially when weighed against the spam cost I mentioned above.

The full answer remains to be seen, and I’ll report more as I test and measure. But my suspicion at this point is that the heyday of local directories is over. Maybe it’s been over for a while and Google is just mashing our faces in it.

SEO is about prioritizing time: There is always more we could do. And I mean “we” collectively as anyone doing SEO. No matter how much time we devote to something meaningful, there was arguably something else we could also have done.

(This is the reason prospectors can always point at someone’s work and find “fault” with it to a client.)

The strategies I create for folks are very much based on this. Where is the best bang for the buck? What things move the needle the most this month? If we had to leave things aside, which things make sense not to worry about so we don’t get distracted? (And do we keep making that same decision month after month about what gets left aside?)

My conclusion at this point: Directories aren’t completely worthless, but for most businesses in 2026 they’re probably a low-return activity with too little meaningful impact to be worth the spam.