This isn’t a good thing – Google can show a carousel feature of competitive businesses in the area when someone specifically searches for your company name in Google. So for a branded search that brings up a local knowledge panel for that business, Google can show competitive listings above the local knowledge panel!

Here is the screen shot from Mike Blumenthal’s post on Twitter:

Here is what Mike said about this:

Now, Google had this feature since last year, so this really isn’t new, but looking at it this way is kind of shocking.

This is recently after Google showed ads of a competitor in a branded local knowledge panel.

Not good Google – maybe you can do something about these types of competitive issues?

Forum discussion at Twitter.