Near-me insurance searches are the one part of this category Google has not taken over. Across the 1,308 near-me searches we ran in August 2026, a map appeared 99.8% of the time and an AI Overview only 6.3%. Google hands local intent to three businesses instead of writing its own answer.
So the question is worth asking plainly: across every metro we measure, who actually holds those three slots?
The method, in one paragraph
Twelve near-me insurance searches, geo-targeted to 109 metros across the United States and Canada, captured in August 2026. That produced 3,923 map pack slots, shared by roughly a thousand businesses. Every figure below is share of those slots. We publish the top ten businesses per metro, which covers 3,851 of the 3,923 slots, so the tail is present in the totals but not named. Each metro’s full board is at https://insuranceseosem.com/index/local/.
One note on brands that operate through named agents. Google lists each agent as its own business, so we aggregate by parent brand where the listing carries it, for example every profile containing “State Farm”. A business ranked eleventh or lower in a metro is outside the published top ten, so brand totals are a floor rather than a ceiling. Given those brands are absent from most metros entirely, the floor is the story.
The United States: Acceptance Insurance, and it is not close
| # | Business | Share of US slots | Metros | Avg slot | Avg rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Acceptance Insurance | 8.7% | 31 | 1.90 | 4.85 |
| 02 | Freeway Insurance | 5.2% | 33 | 2.36 | 4.77 |
| 03 | Direct Auto Insurance | 2.4% | 12 | 2.19 | 4.67 |
| 04 | Fiesta Auto Insurance | 2.3% | 13 | 2.24 | 4.65 |
| 05 | A-MAX Auto Insurance | 1.4% | 8 | 2.02 | 4.53 |
| 06 | Affordable Insurance | 1.2% | 4 | 1.88 | 4.60 |
| 07 | Cost-U-Less Insurance | 0.8% | 5 | 2.20 | 4.74 |
| 08 | La Familia Auto Insurance | 0.6% | 3 | 2.07 | 4.90 |
| 09 | 5-Star Insurance | 0.6% | 2 | 1.95 | 5.00 |
| 10 | L.A. Insurance | 0.6% | 3 | 2.47 | 4.73 |
Acceptance Insurance holds 310 of 3,566 US map slots. It leads 16 metros outright, against six for Freeway Insurance and two apiece for everyone else on the list. Freeway is in two more metros than Acceptance and holds two thirds fewer slots.
The gap is not reach, it is depth. In the 31 metros Acceptance contests it takes 27.7% of the available slots, against 15.8% for Freeway across its 33. Acceptance also sits higher on the page: average slot 1.90 against Freeway’s 2.36. Being in the pack and being first in the pack are different results, and only one of them gets the call.
Its strongest single market is Phoenix, where it holds 61.1% of every insurance map slot in the metro. Ten businesses share that pack and one of them takes six slots in ten.
Canada: Westland Insurance, from three cities
| # | Business | Share of CA slots | Metros | Avg slot | Avg rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Westland Insurance | 10.1% | 3 | 2.23 | 4.73 |
| 02 | Aviva Canada | 4.5% | 3 | 2.30 | 2.17 |
| 03 | YouSet | 3.4% | 1 | 1.00 | 4.80 |
| 04 | Begin Insurance | 3.4% | 1 | 1.10 | 4.40 |
| 05 | Maloway & Eliason | 3.4% | 1 | 1.20 | 4.40 |
| 06 | Cherry Insurance | 3.4% | 1 | 1.20 | 4.20 |
| 07 | Sharp Insurance (Edmonton) | 3.2% | 1 | 1.10 | 4.50 |
| 08 | Intact Insurance | 3.2% | 3 | 2.20 | 3.27 |
Westland holds a larger share of its national market than Acceptance holds of the American one, from three metros rather than thirty-one. Its penetration where present is 33.3%, the highest of any multi-metro operator on either side of the border. Winnipeg is its strongest board at 44.4% of the metro’s slots.
The concentration is nearly identical in both countries. The top two hold 13.9% of US slots and 14.6% of Canadian ones. What differs is who they are. American packs are led by non-standard auto storefronts. Canadian packs are led by full-service brokerages, with two national carriers, Aviva and Intact, holding slots directly rather than through agents.
Aviva and Intact are worth pausing on. They hold slots at average ratings of 2.17 and 3.27, far below anything in the American table. Brand strength is buying them placement that their review profile would not, which is a fragile position rather than a durable one.
Where are the State Farm and Allstate agents?
This is the question the tables above provoke, and the answer is the most surprising thing in the dataset.
State Farm and Allstate field the two largest agent forces in American insurance, tens of thousands of licensed agents between them, each with their own Google Business Profile. Aggregate every one of their listings in our data and here is what they hold:
| Brand | Agent listings | Slots | US metros present | Share of US slots | Avg slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Farmers | 14 | 45 | 14 | 1.26% | 2.59 |
| State Farm | 16 | 43 | 15 | 1.21% | 2.49 |
| Allstate | 5 | 7 | 5 | 0.20% | 1.74 |
State Farm, Allstate and Farmers hold 2.66% of American insurance map slots between them. Acceptance Insurance alone holds 8.69%.
The absence is close to total. State Farm appears in no map pack we measure in 84 of 99 US metros. Allstate appears in none in 94 of 99. Widen it to every captive and franchise brand in the data, including Nationwide, Brightway, Goosehead, Travelers and Progressive, and 60 of 99 US metros still return a pack with not one of them in it.
Where they do appear, they appear low. State Farm’s average slot is 2.49 and Farmers’ is 2.59, meaning both land in third position more often than first. Acceptance averages 1.90.
Two things explain this, and only one of them is fixable.
The franchise model fragments the brand by design. Acceptance runs corporate stores under one name, so every location compounds the same entity. State Farm runs thousands of independently managed profiles named after individual agents, so “Meilee Fu - State Farm Insurance Agent” competes on its own review count and its own proximity, and none of the brand’s national weight transfers to it. The listing that holds five New York slots earned them by itself.
Nobody is working the generic near-me query. Our twelve searches are unbranded: car insurance near me, insurance agents near me, and so on. A State Farm agent who optimises for their own name will win that search and never surface on these. That is a defensible choice if branded demand is enough. It also means the entire unbranded local market is being contested by somebody else.
For an independent agency this is the practical takeaway of the whole study. The two most recognised names in American personal lines are absent from the local map in roughly nine metros in ten, and the businesses filling that space are non-standard auto storefronts and single-office agencies.
Nineteen in twenty are in exactly one city
This is the finding that matters if you run an agency.
Of the businesses holding an insurance map slot in North America, 95.2% appear in a single metro. The national rollups are loud but thin: everything after the top five in the US table is under 1.5% of the market.
More to the point: of the 109 metros we measure, 68 are led by a business that operates in exactly one of them. Local operators lead the majority of North American insurance map packs.
The typical metro pack is shared by nine businesses, ranging from five to sixteen. The most open markets we measure are Louisville, Fort Worth, Miami, Reno, Sacramento and Tacoma, where the leading business holds under 20% of the slots. In those cities no one is running away with it.
And single-metro operators regularly beat the rollups outright. These businesses hold a full 12 of their metro’s 36 slots, matching or exceeding what Acceptance manages in most of its markets:
- YouSet, Montreal, average slot 1.00, rated 4.8 across 1,800 reviews
- Norrell Insurance Agency, St. Louis, average slot 1.00, rated 4.9
- Let’s Insure, San Diego, average slot 1.40, rated 5.0
- Latorre Insurance, Charlotte, average slot 1.70, rated 4.9
- Willoughby Insurance, Buffalo, average slot 1.50, rated 4.8 across 1,000 reviews
- Kind Insurance, Harrisburg, average slot 2.20, rated 4.9
Five businesses in our data never appear below first position at all: Affordable Insurance Solutions in Eugene, YouSet in Montreal, Norrell in St. Louis, The Insurance Specialists in Des Moines, and Branch in Columbus. Every one of them is a single-market operator.
The entry price is a rating, not a budget
Across 933 rated businesses holding a slot, the median rating is 4.9.
| Rating | Share of businesses holding a slot |
|---|---|
| 5.0 | 30.2% |
| 4.9 | 27.1% |
| 4.8 | 12.5% |
| 4.5 to 4.7 | 16.3% |
| Below 4.5 | 13.8% |
More than half of every insurance map slot in North America is held by a business rated 4.9 or better. At 4.5 you are behind roughly 86% of the field.
The bar is lower in Canada, where the median is 4.7 against 4.9 in the United States. A Canadian brokerage at 4.7 is at par at home and behind three quarters of the American field.
This is the cheapest competitive advantage in insurance search. A review programme costs a fraction of what ranking on page one costs, and unlike organic rankings it is not contested by national media budgets.
What this actually says
Three things.
The rollups win on repetition, not on any single market. Acceptance holds 8.7% of American slots by executing the same location playbook in 31 metros. In any one of those metros it is beatable, and in most of them somebody local is beating it.
Position inside the pack is a separate contest. Freeway is present in more metros than Acceptance and converts far less of it, because average slot 2.36 is a materially worse result than 1.90 for the same presence.
Local is the only insurance layer where scale is not the deciding factor. Carriers hold under 9% of map slots, and the two largest agent networks in America hold under 1.5% between them. On coverage questions Google now writes the answer itself. On near-me searches it still points at three businesses, and 95% of the businesses it points at operate in one city.
If you sell insurance in one metro, this is the layer to fight for.
Where the data lives
- Every metro board: https://insuranceseosem.com/index/local/
- The state and provincial boards for car, home and business insurance: https://insuranceseosem.com/index/
- How the captures are run: https://insuranceseosem.com/about/#methodology
August 2026 is a single capture per metro. Three-capture medians with a published spread begin in September, at which point these rankings become trend lines rather than a snapshot.