Possum update
Also called: Google Possum, Possum algorithm
The Possum update is a Google local search change from September 1, 2016 that filters local listings by a business's physical address and affiliation and gives more weight to the searcher's location, so affected listings get hidden rather than removed.
Local SEOs named it Possum because affected businesses looked like they had vanished from Google Maps when they were only filtered, playing dead but still there. It hit the local pack and local finder, not classic organic rankings.
What changed
Three mechanics matter. First, Google started filtering listings that share a physical address or a clear affiliation, so two firms in the same suite, or a dentist and their practice, rarely appear together in one three-pack. Second, the searcher’s location carried more weight, so results shift as the query location moves. Third, businesses sitting just outside official city limits, previously buried, began ranking for city-name queries.
A quick example: search personal injury lawyer from two blocks apart in the same city and Possum-era ranking can hand you different map results, because proximity now reorders and filters the set.
Joy Hawkins’ study of 1,307 businesses across 14,242 keywords, published on Search Engine Land, found about 64% of local results shifted after the rollout. A common fix was tracking rankings from the actual target location, not a generic city centroid.
One currency note: the November 2019 shakeup many called Possum 2.0 was officially the November 2019 Local Search Update, which Google confirmed was neural matching applied to local. That is a different mechanism from the 2016 address filter, so treat the two as separate events.
How it affects your traffic
If your listing shares an address or ownership with a related business, Possum-style filtering can quietly suppress it from the map pack, so you lose visibility that never shows up as a penalty. Proximity weighting also means one location cannot rank everywhere, which shapes how many storefronts or service-area pages you actually need. Our Local SEO work audits address and affiliation overlap, tightens Google Business Profile relevance signals, and tracks rankings from real searcher locations so filtered listings resurface where buyers are actually looking.
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