Local Search Implications of the Google API Leak

Last week's leak of Google Search API documentation has broad SEO implications relevant to local search, including the importance of SERP clickthrough patterns, site architecture, sitewide signals, page-level scoring, quality raters, mobile-friendliness, and the prevalence of entities.

The leak also reveals specific details about local search, such as the role of categories, local intent, query parsing, and the special treatment given to high-volume categories and brands.

While the documents do not provide a complete picture of Google's algorithms, they offer valuable directional information for SEO practitioners. As Mike King and others have noted, the leak suggests that a holistic approach to SEO, leveraging larger themes of site architecture, topical relevance, user intent, and entity-based optimization, may be more effective than targeting specific keywords alone.