The landscape shifts, yet the underlying requirement – checkable, current data – has not.
Keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work.
Review of Drift
A profile can look perfect on the surface and still carry mismatched opening hours underneath. The return is durable: unlike ads, a corrected record keeps paying after the work stops.
More usefully, visibility in the map pack tends to follow within within a few weeks of a serious clean-up. For that reason, most damage here is self-inflicted: an inconsistent phone number introduced during a rebrand or a move, if only because no one else bothers.
Handle the high-authority sources by hand and batch the long tail afterwards. The businesses that win here are not the loudest, only the most consistent.
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected. Even therefore, left alone, contradictory data across sources spreads to sources the business never submitted to, if only because no one else bothers.
Prefer removing a wrong listing to leaving it half-corrected.
A workable routine is to reconcile at least annually and log every change with a date. What follows from this is that it is unglamorous work with an unusually reliable return.
The payoff indicates up as ranking stability, and it compounds sooner than most owners expect, even when nothing else changes. The finish line is not perfection; it is a profile that no one has to argue with.
At the same time, owners frequently catch branded queries moving before they catch the ranking change itself. Set aside time to cross-confirm whenever contact details change rather than treating it as a one-off project. Get the facts to agree, and business data providers will do the rest without being asked. No one sends a warning when an abandoned profile shows up, which is why audits find it years late.
Keep a change log; six months on, no one remembers which field was edited or why, if only because no one else bothers. Handled steadily, aggregator feeds stop being a project and become a habit, assuming the basics are already in place.