Free Local Rank Tracker (2026): Free Tools, APIs and Real Cost

Search “free local rank tracker” and three different things come back mixed together. Free checkers that show one local result for one search. Grid apps with a small free plan. And Maps data APIs with a free tier. All three are real. None is unlimited, and none of the free parts will track ten keywords across a 49-point grid every day.

On 23 October 2026 we read the official pages for Google’s Business Profile Performance API, five local rank tools and four Maps data APIs, and worked out what a geo-grid costs per point.

The options at a glance

Grid apps charge in credits, and one credit is one point on the map. APIs charge per search, and one search is one point. So “per point” is the fair unit across both.

Checked 2026-10-23. Sources are linked in each section below.

Three things called a free local rank tracker

The three kinds solve different problems, so pick by the job.

• A checker. One search, one place, one moment. BrightLocal’s free Local SERP Checker shows localized results for “any country, city, or ZIP code”. It is good for a quick look and bad for a history.
• A grid app with a free plan. You get a map, a heatmap and a stored history. The free part is a few scans. These are the apps that answer “free geo grid rank tracker”.
• An API. You get raw ranks for any coordinate and write the loop, the storage and the chart yourself. It is the only kind where the price per point falls toward zero.

Google’s own Performance API is often mistaken for a tracker. It is free, and it does not do the job (below).

Why one local rank is never the whole answer

Google’s Business Profile help page says local results are “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity”. Distance means “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”. If a customer does not share where they are, “Google uses what it knows about their location”.

So the same keyword has no single rank. It has one per place. Google’s page on why results differ adds language, device type (mobile or desktop) and, for signed-in people, personalisation based on their account. The same page says the pizza search you type in one city returns results relevant to that city.

That is why a geo-grid exists. It asks the same question from a square of coordinates laid over the area you serve, and records your position at each point. The share of points where you sit in the top three is often called share of local voice. Our geo-grid guide explains the metric in detail.

Two honest limits apply to every tool here. A tracker measures a search from a point you choose; it cannot see each customer’s personal history. And Google states that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking”. A tracker measures your rank. It does not change it.

Google’s own free data: the Business Profile Performance API

The Business Profile Performance API lets merchants “fetch performance reports about their business profile on Google”. One method, searchkeywords.impressions.monthly, “returns the search keywords used to find a business in search or maps”.

What it is

• Monthly counts of how many people used each keyword to find your own listing. The call needs the business.manage OAuth scope for a location you manage.
• Daily metric series for the same listing, through two other methods.
• Low-volume keywords may come back as a threshold, meaning the true value is below it, instead of an exact count. The page does not print the cutoff.

What it is not

• Not a rank. It tells you which words surfaced your listing, not where you stood against competitors.
• Not other people’s listings, and not by location. There is no competitor view and no grid.
• Not instant. Google’s performance help page says the searches metric updates at the start of each month and can take up to five days to appear, and that performance data is only for verified profiles.

Access has a gate too: the API page says merchants “with a quota of 0 after enabling the API need to request access”. We found no price on the documentation page. Use it as a free companion for your own keywords, next to a real rank tracker.

Free checkers and free grid plans, one by one

BrightLocal

• Free part: the Local SERP Checker, with a daily search limit; past it, the page asks you to log in. The pricing page also gives 14 days of full access with no card.
• Paid: Track is $41 a month, or $31 on annual billing, for one location: a Local Rank Tracker (up to 100 keywords, four competitors) and a Local Search Grid for up to five keywords.
• Watch-out: the free checker is a viewer, not a tracker.

GTrack by Wiremo

• Free part: a free plan with 200 credits a month and one scan with no signup. The free plan covers Google Maps only and schedules up to 3 keywords. Pages and press material we saw in search results print other free amounts, so we quote the product page.
• Grid sizes: square grids from 3×3 to 13×13 (9 to 169 points), and custom shapes on paid plans.
• Paid: $19.99 a month for 5,000 credits, $29.99 for 15,000, $59.99 for 36,000, $99.99 for 81,000. The REST API is on Business and Pro.

Whitespark

• Free part: Local Ranking Grids starts with 200 trial credits and no card. One grid point costs one credit, and a grid holds up to 225 points.
• Paid: $10 a month for 2,000 credits ($0.005 each), $50 for 15,000, $100 for 32,000. “Unused credits expire after each billing period.”
• Also: its separate Local Rank Tracker has a 14-day trial and plans from $14 a month on annual billing for 100 location keywords.

Local Falcon

• Free part: 100 free credits on signup, no card. One credit is one map pin, so a 5×5 grid is 25 credits and a 9×9 is 81.
• Paid: $24.99 a month for 7,500 credits, $49.99 for 15,150, $99.99 for 31,250, $199.99 for 63,150. Pay-as-you-go credits are $0.05 each and never expire; monthly credits expire at month end.
• API: the data-retrieval API is free with plans above Starter. An on-demand API (running scans from your own code) is a $199 a month subscription plus $0.0032 per request.

GeckoGrid

• Not free, despite some summaries. GeckoGrid is a desktop app for Windows and Mac. Solo is $19 a month with a 7-day free trial, Agency $39, Lifetime $249.
• The appeal: local scans are unmetered because they run on your own computer with Chrome. It suggests at most 40 a day. Grids are 3×3 to 9×9.

Tools we could not verify

Local Viking’s old pricing address now redirects to a different site, Places Scout’s redirects to Yext’s home page, and the new pages did not give us readable prices. We did not read Semrush Local’s local-tracking pricing, Uberall or the GMB Everywhere extension, so we state nothing about them.

What free really costs you

Free is fine for finding out where you stand today. For a history, it hides five costs.

1. A handful of scans. Do the sums. Whitespark’s 200 credits cover eight 5×5 scans, once. GTrack’s 200 a month cover eight a month. Local Falcon’s 100 cover four. SerpApi’s 250 free searches cover ten 25-point grids a month. Serpent’s 10 free calls cover one 3×3 grid.
2. One keyword is not tracking. Ten keywords across a 7×7 grid is 490 points a run. Weekly, that is about 1,960 a month, ten times a free plan.
3. Expiring credits. Whitespark and Local Falcon monthly credits expire, so a quiet month cannot fund a busy one.
4. Missing pieces. GTrack’s free plan schedules 3 keywords and has no REST API.
5. Your time, if you build it. An API returns ranks, not a map. You write the grid, the storage, the schedule and the report.

A worked example, by our arithmetic. A dentist wants three keywords on a 5×5 grid, weekly. That is 3 × 25 × 4 = 300 points a month. It is above GTrack’s free 200, so the first paid step is $10 to $20 a month on the apps, or 3 cents on the API.

Near-free APIs for your own grid

All five services below take a coordinate for a Maps search. Each price is per search, which is one grid point. None is a tracker: you supply the grid, the schedule and the storage.

Serpent

• How location works: GET /api/maps/search takes lat and lng (or ll) plus zoom from 1 to 21, default 14. Or it takes a named location such as “Austin, TX”, never both. The API reference says wider zoom covers more ground per request.
• Price per point: a detail=0 call is Maps List: the ranked list and nothing enriched, $0.0001 per call for up to 20 places at the Default tier. Up to 100 places is a flat $0.0005. A one-time $100 deposit moves you to $0.00009 (Growth), and $500 to $0.00007 (Scale). The enriched Quick call is $0.015.
• What a point returns: places in rank order, each with rank, name, address, coordinates, rating, review count, phone and website. On a list-only record, a null means “unknown”, not “absent”.
• Free tier: 10 free calls on signup, shared across services and usable on Maps List. There is no subscription, the minimum first deposit is $10, and deposited credits do not expire (see pricing).
• Named places: /api/search targets by country only, so the place goes in the query text, and a Deep call returns a localPack array at $0.0006 per page on Default. See the local rank tracking API page.
• Watch-outs: a response can hold fewer places than you asked for and is still billed; counts and a delivery block say so. A 429 response means automated overuse or high server load, so pace the sweep. There is no map or heatmap: you build that.
• Where others beat us: every app above has a bigger free allowance. DataForSEO returns up to 100 listings for $0.0006, where Serpent’s 100-place list is $0.0005, so the gap on long lists is small.

DataForSEO

• Location: location_coordinate in “latitude,longitude,zoom” format, zoom 3z to 21z, default 17z.
• Price: per SERP of up to 100 listings: $0.0006 on the Standard queue, $0.0012 Priority, $0.002 Live. Location does not change the price.
• Watch-outs: Standard averages about 5 minutes with a 45-minute target; Live about 6 seconds. The pricing page sets a $50 minimum top-up and says the balance never expires. New accounts get a $1 trial credit.

SerpApi

• Location: the ll parameter, written “@latitude,longitude,zoom”, applied when type is search. Pages step by 20 results.
• Price: $25 a month for 1,000 searches, $75 for 5,000, $150 for 15,000, $275 for 30,000, $725 for 100,000 and $3,750 for 1 million. The free plan is 250 searches a month, 50 an hour.
• Watch-out: plans are monthly.

Scrapingdog

• Location: ll in “@latitude,longitude,zoom/map_height” format, required for pagination, per its Maps documentation.
• Price: a Maps request is 5 credits. Lite is $40 a month for 200,000 credits ($0.001 a request), Standard $90 for 1 million ($0.00045), Premium $350 for 6 million ($0.00029). The top plan, $30,000 a month for 1.1 billion credits, is about $0.000136 a request. The free start is 100 credits, or 20 requests.

SearchApi

• Location: ll as “@latitude,longitude,zoom”, with zoom 3z to 21z per its Maps docs.
• Price: $40 a month for 10,000 searches, $100 for 35,000, $250 for 100,000, up to $1,500 for 1 million. 100 free requests; the page does not say if that is one-off. The docs do not state results per page.

What a grid costs, per point and per month

A grid app and an API are priced differently, so start with the cheapest common denominator: one point. A 25-point grid for one keyword costs $0.0025 on Serpent’s Default rate, $0.015 on DataForSEO Standard, $0.125 on Whitespark’s smallest plan and $1.25 on Local Falcon pay-as-you-go credits. A 49-point grid is $0.0049, $0.0294, $0.245 and $2.45.

Now the same unit at four volumes. It is the lowest price you can reach at that volume on each service, by our arithmetic:

Checked 2026-10-23. Serpent Scale needs a one-time $500 deposit; the deposit is spendable balance. Scrapingdog is 5 credits a request: 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 and 5 million credits. *SerpApi and SearchApi assume one Maps search costs one search credit; neither page states the Maps credit cost. DataForSEO assumes one point is one SERP. Grid apps are in the next table because they sell plans, not searches.

Now three real workloads, priced on the smallest plan that covers each month. We assume four weekly runs a month, or daily runs where stated:

• Local shop: 3 keywords, 5×5 grid, weekly = 300 points a month.
• Serious single location: 10 keywords, 7×7 grid, daily = 14,700 points a month.
• Small agency: 20 locations, 5 keywords each, 7×7 grid, weekly = 19,600 points a month.

Checked 2026-10-23. Plans are the smallest that hold the month’s credits: GTrack Starter, Advanced and Business; Whitespark $10, $50 and $100; Local Falcon Basic and Pro. Local Falcon’s shop figure is 300 credits at $0.05, which beats its $24.99 Starter. BrightLocal Track includes a grid for up to five keywords; we could not verify limits on the larger plans. GeckoGrid suggests at most 40 local browser scans a day, and one scan here is one keyword over one grid. Serpent figures are the Default tier; Scale makes the second and third columns $1.03 and $1.37.

Read the table with care. The apps include a heatmap, scheduling, history and reports, and some add competitor tracking. An API call gives you none of those. The loop is cheap; the product around it is not free to build.

On price, the careful version. Among the services we read, Serpent’s $0.0001 for a ranked list of up to 20 places at a coordinate is the lowest printed per-search figure: six times lower than DataForSEO’s Standard queue and about 1.4 times lower than Scrapingdog’s top $30,000 plan. For lists of 21 to 100 places the Serpent price is $0.0005. We did not read every vendor, so we do not call it the cheapest. We also have not compared any service’s results with the others, so spot-check a few points by hand.

How to choose

• One look, once. A free checker, or a one-off GTrack scan.
• One business, a few keywords, a map by Friday. A grid app. GTrack’s free plan or Whitespark’s $10 plan covers a small grid, with heatmaps and history built in.
• An agency sending client reports. A grid app, if white-label reports matter more than cost.
• Many locations, many keywords, or a product of your own. An API. At agency size the loop costs dollars against tens or hundreds on a plan. On the numbers above, Serpent is the pick here: the lowest printed price per point we found, pay as you go, no plan.
• You can wait in a queue. DataForSEO Standard, after the $50 top-up.
• A steady monthly bill. Scrapingdog or SearchApi, depending on volume.
• Your own keywords, free, no rank. Google’s Performance API.

Related guides: geo-grid tracking and share of local voice, local SEO rank tracking by API, local rank tracking in Python and free Google Maps API. For general keyword tracking: free rank tracking API, rank tracking cost and free AI rank tracker API.

Quick start: a 25-point grid in Python

Send your key in the X-API-Key header. One grid point is one call. This is the single request:

curl -G "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/search" \
  --data-urlencode "q=plumber" \
  -d "lat=30.2672" -d "lng=-97.7431" -d "zoom=14" \
  -d "detail=0" -d "limit=20" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Do not combine lat and lng with location: the reference says sending two location forms is a 400. Here is the loop. The grid maths is simple: one degree of latitude is about 111 km, and a degree of longitude shrinks by the cosine of the latitude. We wrote it for this article and checked it by reading, but we have not run it, so test it on your own data first.

import math
import os
import time
import requests

API = "https://apiserpent.com/api/maps/search"
HEAD = {"X-API-Key": os.environ["SERPENT_API_KEY"]}

def make_grid(lat, lng, size=5, step_km=1.0):
    """size x size points centred on (lat, lng); use an odd size."""
    dlat = step_km / 111.0
    dlng = step_km / (111.0 * math.cos(math.radians(lat)))
    half = size // 2
    return [(round(lat + r * dlat, 6), round(lng + c * dlng, 6))
            for r in range(-half, half + 1)
            for c in range(-half, half + 1)]

def rank_at(lat, lng, keyword, business):
    resp = requests.get(API, headers=HEAD, timeout=60, params={
        "q": keyword, "lat": lat, "lng": lng, "zoom": 14,
        "detail": 0, "limit": 20,
    })
    for place in resp.json().get("places", []):
        if business.lower() in (place.get("name") or "").lower():
            return place["rank"]
    return None  # not in the 20 places returned for this point

points = make_grid(30.2672, -97.7431, size=5, step_km=1.0)
ranks = []
for lat, lng in points:
    ranks.append(rank_at(lat, lng, "plumber", "Acme Plumbing"))
    time.sleep(0.2)  # pace the sweep

top3 = sum(1 for r in ranks if r is not None and r <= 3)
print(len(points), "points;", top3, "in the top 3 =",
      round(100 * top3 / len(points)), "% share of local voice")

With size=5 the grid has 25 points, so this run is 25 calls: $0.0025 at the Default rate. Set size=7 for 49 points. Keep zoom and the spacing the same on every run, or two runs are not comparable. Store each run’s ranks with a date and you have a history. If business names collide, match on the website or phone from the same record.

The full parameter list is in the API docs, and you can try a single call in the playground first. The local rank tracking API page has the named-place version of this sweep, and our credit expiry post covers balances.

Limits and what we could not verify

• No measurements. We did not test accuracy, speed or coverage for any service, and we did not compare a coordinate result against what a person sees at that spot.
• Code is untested. The Python above is written from the documented request shape and has not been run.
• Free amounts move. GTrack’s free credits differ between its own pages and others; we quote the product page. Local Falcon’s FAQ credit ranges differ slightly from its price table; we quote the table.
• Units: SerpApi and SearchApi do not state the credit cost of a Maps search, and SearchApi does not say results per page.
• Not read: Local Viking, Places Scout, Semrush Local, Uberall, GMB Everywhere and BrightLocal’s API pricing.
• Assumptions: four weekly runs a month and the smallest plan that fits. Prices change, so check each page again before you commit.

FAQ

Is there a free local rank tracker?

Only in small amounts. Whitespark gives 200 trial credits, GTrack a free plan of 200 credits a month, and Local Falcon 100 credits on signup. One credit is one grid point, so 200 credits is eight 5x5 scans. BrightLocal's free checker shows one result at a time and limits searches a day.

Is there a free API for local rank tracking?

Not an unlimited one. SerpApi's free plan is 250 searches a month, Scrapingdog gives 100 credits, SearchApi 100 requests and Serpent 10 free calls. Google's Business Profile Performance API is free to call but only covers your own listing's search keywords. For ranks across many points, near-free APIs start at $0.0001 per point.

Does the Google Business Profile Performance API show my local rank?

No. It returns monthly counts of the search keywords people used to find your own verified listing, with low values shown as thresholds. It gives no position, no competitor data and no location grid. Google says the searches metric updates at the start of each month and can take up to five days to appear.

Why does my local ranking change from block to block?

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and distance is measured from the searcher. Location, language, device type and account personalisation also change what people see. A geo-grid checks the same keyword from many coordinates so you see where you rank, not just one average.

How much does a geo-grid scan cost?

One point is one credit in grid apps: $0.005 on Whitespark's smallest plan and about $0.0033 on Local Falcon's Starter plan. A 25-point grid is 25 credits, a 49-point grid 49. On an API it is one search per point: $0.0001 on Serpent's Default tier and $0.0006 on DataForSEO's Standard queue.

What is the cheapest way to track local rankings across many locations?

For many locations or keywords, an API loop. By our arithmetic, 19,600 points a month costs about $1.96 on Serpent's Default rate and $11.76 on DataForSEO Standard, against $59.99 to $100 on grid apps. Apps include heatmaps, scheduling and reports. With an API you build those yourself.

Sources

• Business Profile Performance API reference
• searchkeywords.impressions.monthly method
• Google: understand your Business Profile performance
• Google: tips to improve your local ranking
• Google: why your Search results differ from others
• Whitespark Local Ranking Grids
• Whitespark Local Rank Tracker
• GTrack by Wiremo
• Local Falcon pricing
• BrightLocal pricing
• BrightLocal Local SERP Checker
• GeckoGrid
• DataForSEO Google Maps SERP API pricing
• DataForSEO pricing and FAQ
• DataForSEO Google Maps Live Advanced docs
• SerpApi pricing
• SerpApi Google Maps API
• Scrapingdog pricing
• Scrapingdog Google Maps API docs
• SearchApi pricing
• SearchApi Google Maps docs