55% of Google Maps Results for Moving Company Searches Aren't Movers

More than half of what Google Maps lists for a “moving company” search is not a moving company.In September 2026 we sorted all 9,985 places Google Maps returned for “moving company” searches in 95 cities across seven US states. 5,523 of them (55%) were storage facilities, trucking and logistics firms, truck rental locations and unrelated businesses. Position changes the picture: movers held 255 of the 267 places we recorded at positions 1 to 3 (96%), but only 33% of the places past position 20. The fight for the top of the map is mover against mover, and 50 of those 267 top spots went to national brands.

Search “moving company” plus your city and scroll. Somewhere after the first screen the list stops being about moving. A self-storage facility, a trucking yard, a truck rental counter, a junk hauler. We wanted to know how much of the map that is, and what it means for a mover trying to get found.

What does Google Maps show when someone searches for a moving company?

Fewer movers than you would expect. Here is every place from the seven state pulls, sorted by the business type Google gives it.

Movers, independent and national together, come to 4,462 of 9,985 (45%). The biggest single intruder is trucking: 1,127 places carry Google's “Trucking company” category, and 1,162 are self-storage facilities. Of the 447 truck and trailer rental locations, 333 are U-Haul. “Everything else” is a long tail led by house cleaners (74), department stores (69), junk removal (63) and towing (63), plus 196 listings Google files under a moving category that our filter set aside because the name points elsewhere, such as storage units, junk removal, towing, trucking or moving buildings.

Does your position on the map change who you compete with?

Completely. Near the top, Google is confident about what you searched for. Further down, it fills the list with anything nearby that moves, stores or hauls.

So there are two different markets on the same map. In the top three, a local mover is up against other movers, and one spot in five (50 of 267) belongs to a national brand or franchise. Past position 20, two listings in three are not movers at all, and a real moving company sits between a storage facility and a freight yard.

Which states have the most non-movers in their results?

Compare states on the last column. The pulls went to different depths, from about 50 places per search in Florida to roughly 150 to 210 in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the deeper a pull goes the more non-movers it collects. Positions 1 to 20 are the fairer comparison.

Florida and Texas have the cleanest results: more than eight in ten of the first 20 places are movers. In Illinois and Pennsylvania it is closer to six in ten, which means a mover just outside the top few in those states shares its part of the list with four non-movers in every ten.

What should a moving company do about it?

1. Check your Google category first. Google's guidelines for representing your business say to use as few categories as possible, to choose ones that are as specific as possible but representative of your main business, and to pick categories that complete the sentence “this business IS a”, not “this business HAS a”. If you move households and also rent storage, you are a mover that has storage. A profile filed under storage or trucking competes in the wrong pile.
2. Fight for the top three against movers, not against the whole list. That is where 96% of the places are movers, and Google says its local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence, with reviews and ratings part of prominence. Our count of 152,700 Florida mover reviews shows how far apart the leaders and everyone else already are on that one.
3. Tell machines what you are, on your own site. Schema.org has a MovingCompany type for exactly this. In 76 mover websites we scanned in August 2026, 27 (36%) had no business schema of any kind in their code. An AI assistant building a shortlist of movers has the same sorting problem Google Maps has, and a page that says plainly “we move households in this city” is easier to place than one that does not.

How we measured this

• Google Maps results for “moving company [city] [state]” in 95 cities across Florida, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, pulled with a Maps scraper between 11 and 17 September 2026. 9,985 places in all, each counted once per state.
• The scraper ran each search across several map views of the area, 956 result lists in all. Position means a place's rank in the list where it first appeared. A place that showed up again in a later list was not counted twice, so the top positions hold fewer places than the number of lists.
• A place counts as a mover when Google's main category is a moving category (for example Mover, Moving and storage service, Piano moving service) and nothing in the category or the name marks it as storage, trucking, towing, junk removal or building moving. National brands and franchises are identified by name. The other groups follow Google's category: storage facilities, truck and trailer rental, and trucking, freight, logistics, shipping, courier and delivery.
• Limits: these are the places Google returned for one search phrase, not every mover in each state. The depth of each pull differed by state, which is why the state table also shows positions 1 to 20. 53 of the 9,985 places were marked closed; they are included because Google still listed them. Categories are what each business, or Google, chose, so a real mover filed under trucking counts as trucking here. The filter leaves doubtful listings out: even if all 196 moving-category listings it set aside were real movers, movers would still be 4,658 of 9,985 (47%).
• No company is named, apart from one national rental brand. The point is the shape of the results, not a leaderboard.

Sources

• Google Maps results in 95 cities across 7 states, pulled 11 to 17 September 2026, analysis by Boosted Movers.
• AI SEO for Movers, Boosted Movers, scan of 76 verified mover websites, August 2026.
• Guidelines for representing your business on Google, Google Business Profile Help.
• Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, Google Business Profile Help.
• MovingCompany, Schema.org.