October 2026 snapshot: who held page one for "storage units" in 14 towns
On October 22, 2026 we ran one search, "storage units [town] [state]", in each of 14 county seats and mid-size towns, on a desktop browser, signed out, and wrote down what the first page held. It covers one search phrase on one day. Google's results vary by device, location and time, so it cannot tell you what your town shows today. The tables below are the whole record.
MethodOne search per town
How the searches were run
Each search was typed as a person would type it: "storage units tyler tx", "storage units joplin mo", and so on. The browser was a desktop browser 1,366 pixels wide, set to English and the United States, signed out of any account, with the search location left to Google. The searches were run from Austin, Texas, on October 22, 2026.
For each page we recorded: whether an AI Overview appeared; how many businesses the map pack listed with a rating; whether any sponsored listing sat inside the map pack (an ad with a description where the rating would be); how many organic web results the first page held; and what kind of site held each one. The kinds are: the site of an individual facility, a publicly traded storage company, national operator or the national moving-and-storage brand, a listing marketplace or review site, and other (a civic or unrelated site).
Text ads were not counted. Google shows them unevenly to a signed-out browser, so their absence on a given page means nothing. The towns: Tyler TX, Joplin MO, Bowling Green KY, Grand Junction CO, Dothan AL, Hattiesburg MS, Bend OR, Muncie IN, Yakima WA, Lafayette LA, Johnson City TN, Rapid City SD, Florence SC and Sioux City IA.
The inventoryWho held each web result
Who held each page-one result, town by town
Read each row left to right as the first page of web results, top to bottom. Hover or tap a square for what it is.
Site of an individual facility
Publicly traded storage company, national operator or the national moving brand
Listing marketplace or review site
Sponsored listing inside the map pack
Dashed squares: no result in that position (five towns returned eight). "Other" sites (one civic site in Hattiesburg) are drawn dashed. Self Storage Marketing Company, October 22, 2026.
The counts
A publicly traded storage company, national operator or the national moving brand held at least one web result in 14 of 14 towns. On average 2.4 of the first page's 8 or 9 results, and 4 of them in Bowling Green and Lafayette.
A listing marketplace or review site held at least one web result in 14 of 14 towns. On average 1.8 per town, up to 3. The listing sites we saw were SelfStorage.com, SpareFoot, RentCafe and StorageCafe; the review site was Yelp (in 13 of 14 towns).
Sites of individual facilities held an average of 4.4 of the results. Hattiesburg, Muncie and Lafayette had the fewest (2 each); Joplin, Grand Junction, Yakima and Rapid City the most (6 each).
Sponsored listings inside the map pack appeared in 6 of 14 towns. 8 listings in all; most of the ones we could identify were publicly traded companies or national operators, one was a listing marketplace, and three could not be identified from the ad text. In Lafayette the only listing in the pack that we could record was a sponsored one.
The map pack appeared in 14 of 14 towns, with three rated facilities in 13. Lafayette's pack showed no rated listing, only a sponsored one.
No AI Overview appeared on any of the 14 searches.
The tableEvery row
"storage units [town] [state]", first page, October 2026
"Individual facility sites" includes a few regional multi-site operators we could not classify, so the publicly traded and national count is a floor. Lafayette's map pack showed listings, but the only one with a description we could record was sponsored. Hattiesburg's eight results include one civic site counted in none of the three columns.
The earlier sampleFour towns, five years
Four towns, seven independent facilities, five years of rankings.
Earlier in October 2026 we looked at independent businesses in Tyler, Texas; Joplin, Missouri; Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Grand Junction, Colorado, using third-party estimates of how many searches each business ranks for today compared with five years ago. A business counted as having lost ground when a third or more of those rankings were gone.
Among self-storage facilities, 3 of the 7 independents we could check had lost a third or more of their rankings. A national storage brand was running Google ads in 3 of the 4 towns, and a listing marketplace was on the first page in all 4. Seven facilities is a small sample and third-party ranking estimates are estimates; we report it as a reason to look closer, not as a finding about the industry.
Courthouse square, Angola, Indiana. A county seat's square still fills a lot of units; the renter who drives past it looks the facility up before calling.
The renterPublished surveys
What the published surveys say about how renters find a facility
Our snapshot shows who holds the page. The surveys show who is looking at it. Storable's 2024 Tenant Insights survey of more than 1,000 tenants found 63% learned about facilities through online search engines, 51% through friends and family, 12% through TV, radio or print and 11% through social media ads; price was "very important" to 69%, and reviews and ratings were the top influence on the choice. Storable, 2024 Spring Tenant Insights Report.
The Self Storage Association's 2023 Demand Study, as reported in the 2025 Self-Storage Almanac, found 58% of renters rent from the first facility they contact, that drive-by traffic still produces more than 30% of leads, that over 69% of renters travel less than 20 minutes to their unit, and that half of searching (50.4%) happens on a smartphone. First contact breaks down like this:
How renters first contacted the facility they rented from (SSA 2023 Demand Study, as reported in the Self-Storage Almanac 2025)
Self-Storage Almanac 2025, Section 5, chart 5.4. The categories do not sum to 100 because the study records other first-contact channels separately.
Six in ten renters learned about the facility through a search engine, half of them searched on a phone, and most of them call the first facility that looks right. The page they see in a small town has two or three spots already taken by companies and marketplaces that built their way there (and, in six towns, bought a sponsored spot in the map pack). The facility that wins the call is the one in the map pack with current hours, real photos and a steady flow of answered reviews, and the one with a page that answers the exact question the renter typed.
CaveatsWhat this cannot tell you
Read it as a snapshot.
One search per town is one day's result. Google's first page changes by the hour, by device, and most of all by where the searcher stands; a person at the courthouse square sees a map pack weighted to the courthouse square. Our searches were run from Austin with the town in the query, which is how an out-of-town mover searches and not how a local does. The snapshot covers one search phrase; "storage near me", "climate controlled storage" and "rv storage" produce different pages. We counted kinds of sites by their domain names, and a few regional multi-site operators are probably counted among individual facilities. None of this is a ranking of any town or any business, and we do not name the businesses we saw.
If you want to see what your own town's page looks like with your facility marked on it, that is the first section of the free ranking check.
