The four colors
Every point on a geo-grid heatmap gets colored by exactly one thing: where the business landed in that point’s Google Maps search results. Green means a top-3 placement — inside the local pack most searchers actually see. Amber means positions 4 through 10 — visible with a bit of scrolling, but past where most “near me” clicks happen. Red means positions 11 through 20 — technically present, practically invisible. Gray means the business didn’t show up in the top 20 at all from that point. Four colors, one honest read of exactly what a real searcher standing at that coordinate would see.
Read the shape, not just the dots
A single point tells you one fact. The pattern across the whole grid tells you the story. A tight core of green around the business address fading to amber and then red toward the edges is the normal shape of local ranking — visibility decays with distance, and the interesting question is where it decays, not whether it does. What’s worth stopping on is when the pattern breaks that expectation: gray patches close to the business’s own address point to a problem bigger than distance (a listing issue, a missing category, a genuine competitor gap right at the doorstep), and green patches in an unexpected corner of the grid usually mean a specific competitor doesn’t reach that far, leaving room open.
From colors to numbers
The colors are the fast read; ARP, ATRP and SoLV are the numbers behind it. SoLV is essentially “what share of the grid is green.” ARP averages position across the green-through-red points; ATRP folds the gray points into that average too, which is why a heatmap with a lot of gray at the edges and a strong ARP can still have a meaningfully lower ATRP — the color pattern is what makes that gap visible before you even look at the numbers.
Why the color scale does the selling
A spreadsheet of positions needs explaining. A red patch spreading across a neighborhood doesn’t — which is why the color scale is the whole visual argument behind a geo-grid scan in an agency pitch or a client report: a business owner can see, in the time it takes to glance at a screen, exactly where they stop showing up, without anyone needing to translate a number for them first.