Local Citation
A local citation is any mention of a business's name, address and phone number online, often shortened to NAP. It can be a full or partial mention, on a business directory, a website, an app or a social platform. Moz, the SEO software company, says citations help people find local businesses and can affect local search rankings.
Source: Moz, What Is a Local Citation?, checked October 29, 2026
What Local Citation means for your business
Some citations are listings you fill in yourself, on Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook or a directory for your trade. Others are mentions you don't control, like a local news story, a sponsor list or an event page, and Moz counts both.
Google's own help on local ranking talks about how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. It doesn't mention directory listings. So we'd judge each listing by whether buyers actually see it, and we'd rather have a short list of the right ones than hundreds of thin directory pages. The right ones are the places your buyers already look: the big map apps, your chamber of commerce, the association for your trade, and the sites that rank when someone searches your service and your town.
When your name, address and phone number read the same on every one of them, people call it NAP consistency. The cleanup side of that has its own entry under entity consistency. If your business is missing from the places your buyers check, or listed there under an old name, getting those listings found and fixed is work we take on.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview opened with Moz's definition and cited local SEO tool blogs, citation-building services and YouTube; it called citations "major ranking signals," credited to a citation vendor. ChatGPT cited nothing and gave a similar definition.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in entities and the knowledge graph
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