UULE Parameter

Google's search results are location-aware. The same keyword returns different results depending on where the searcher is located — that's by design. A search for "pizza" from Manhattan returns different restaurants than the same search from Brooklyn. For local SEO measurement, this is both a feature and a problem.

The feature: proximity is a ranking signal, and geogrids let you see exactly how that signal plays out across an area. The problem: if you're measuring rank without controlling the geographic location, you can't isolate what's actually happening. Standard single-IP rank trackers report one number from one IP. They miss the whole geographic dimension.

UULE solves this by letting you specify the location for each individual request. Run a search with UULE set to a coordinate near your business, then run the same search from a coordinate three miles away. Different results. That difference is what geogrid scans measure.

A UULE parameter looks like this in a live URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=pizza&uule=w%2CCAIQIFIfCgkIKxACCCgiARoONzA4MzksNDAyODEwMBjqTg%3D%3D

The value is base64-encoded location data. When decoded, it contains the latitude, longitude, and search radius (in meters or kilometers) that should be used to localize the results.

You don't encode UULE manually — third-party APIs handle it internally. When you request a geogrid scan with a center coordinate and radius, the API generates the UULE value for each point in the grid, appends it to the Google search URL, and returns the localized results. The encoding is consistent across API providers because the format is reverse-engineered from Google's own search behavior.

When you run a geogrid scan via the Local Rank Tracking API, you provide: a business name, a keyword, a center coordinate, and a grid size. The API does the following for each cell in the grid:

1. Calculate the latitude and longitude of that grid cell. 2. Encode those coordinates into a UULE parameter (with a standard radius, usually 500m-1km). 3. Append the UULE to a Google search URL for your keyword. 4. Fetch the results and extract your business's rank (or note that it doesn't appear). 5. Move to the next cell and repeat.

For a 5×5 geogrid, that's 25 individual searches, each with its own UULE value, each returning location-aware results. The results get aggregated into a matrix and rendered as a heatmap.

This is why geogrid scans are expensive (in terms of API credits) and why single-cell rank checks are cheap — a single request with UULE is just one localized search.

UULE isn't just for geogrid scans. It's the foundational technology for any location-aware rank measurement:

• Geogrid scans: Multiple cells, multiple UULE values, measuring rank across an area.
• Local Pack checks: A single UULE targeting a business's exact location (or nearby) to see its position in the local 3-pack.
• Proximity studies: Running the same keyword from different distances to understand how rank degrades with distance from the business.
• Competitive mapping: Using UULE to measure rank for competitor businesses from their own coordinates, then from your client's location, to quantify proximity advantage.
• AI agent workflows: Agents can chain UULE-based lookups into larger workflows — run a geogrid, identify weak cells, then investigate competitor rank at those cells, all with different UULE values per request.

Without UULE, all of these use cases collapse into a single IP-based rank number that tells you almost nothing about competitive reality.