I set Google to seven lease companies' own towns. None of them made the first screen.
In mid-October I was prospecting, and I set Google’s location to the town where a small lease company is based. Then I typed “auto lease” and looked at the top of the page the way someone nearby would see it.
The first screen showed four sponsored results, and none of them was that company.
I’d come across that company, and six others like it, while working on Google Ads for other lease companies, and thought, let me check how easy they are to find when people nearby search Google. I checked all seven on October 14 and 15.
How I checked
Six of the searches were for “auto lease”, with the location set to the company’s own town (anything from a small town to a big city). The seventh was “auto leasen”, Dutch for “lease a car”. I set the location myself, since Google uses the searcher’s location even when they don’t type a town, and I only looked at the first screen, the part you see before you scroll.
The local company wasn’t on any of the seven.
Who was there instead
Each first screen had four sponsored results, so 28 ad slots in total. Of those, 27 went to national lease brands, national lease platforms or a car brand. Exactly one went to a regional company, a lease company from the east of the country whose ad called itself “the leasing company of the eastern Netherlands”.
Counting ads and organic results together, the same names kept coming back. DirectLease was on all seven first screens. FinancialLease.nl on five, DTC Lease and Justlease on four each, Ayvens and Autokan on three, Skoda on two, Lease.Auto on one.
What the ad library showed
So far, not that surprising. What made me look twice was Google’s public ad library, the Ads Transparency Center.
Four of the seven show up in there, with ads shown as recently as late May 2026. So they had advertised on Google in 2026, and still weren’t on the first screen in their own town in October.
Why, I can’t tell from the outside. Keyword choice, location settings, budget, a paused campaign, any of those could do it, and I’d only be guessing. What I take from it: having run Google Ads and showing up on the first screen in your own town are two different things, and you only find out which one you have by looking.
One of the seven doesn’t advertise at all. When I searched the lease term plus its town name it wasn’t on page 1, and for that search it only turned up in Google Maps. None of my seven first screens showed a map.
In the province of Utrecht alone, Google’s Keyword Planner shows these average monthly searches (September 2025 to August 2026, rounded into buckets, so read them as ballpark): around 2,900 for “private lease” (the Dutch term for a consumer car lease), around 1,900 for “financial leasen” (financial lease) and around 1,000 for “auto lease”.
Not just lease companies
I’ve been running into this a lot lately, with lease companies, car dealers and garages, and local service businesses in general. In May I talked to a garage owner with a well-reviewed Google Business Profile. One of his core services, the annual car inspection, wasn’t listed among the services on that profile.
None of this is a knock on the owners. Running the business is the job, and checking what a stranger in town sees on Google is easy to let slip.
Four checks
What I’d do, if one of these were my business:
Set Google’s location to your own town, type what your customer would type, and look at the first screen only. Skip your company name, since someone nearby who has never heard of you can’t search for it. They search for what you sell.
If you’ve run ads before, look yourself up in the Ads Transparency Center and see when your last one was shown.
Then check where your campaigns are aimed (a radius around your address, or the towns you serve) and whether they show for the plain term a stranger types or mostly for your name.
No ads at all? Check whether you’re on the map for that search, and whether your profile lists the service you do most.
Four sponsored spots on that first screen in mid-October, and the company in town wasn’t in any of them.