Proximity dominates local-pack and is uncontrollable — ~55% of weight

Claim: Whitespark 2026 puts proximity at ~55%: "A mediocre business one mile from the searcher will often outrank an excellent business five miles away."

A separate Search Atlas machine-learning study of thousands of businesses independently estimated proximity at ~55% of visibility for positions 1-21.

Source: Whitespark 2026 (vendor); Search Atlas (vendor, independent corroboration).

Confidence: Industry-consensus.

Why this matters for Candid: PROXIMITY CANNOT BE OPTIMIZED. The widget must say this plainly when classifying a local difficulty case — a business simply far from the searcher cannot win some queries regardless of effort.