I checked 12 Surrey businesses on Apple Maps. Eight were wrong.

I drove home from a coffee meeting last Saturday and asked Siri to find me a dim sum place open late.

Siri sent me to a restaurant that had closed an hour earlier. The owner I'd just been talking to swore his Google hours were correct, and they were. The problem wasn't Google. It was Apple Maps, which Siri reads from, and which nobody had updated since 2022. So I went home, made a list of 12 Surrey businesses I know personally, and looked up each one on my phone.

What I found embarrassed me, because I should have caught this for our clients months ago.

Why Apple Maps still matters in 2026

About 60% of Vancouver-area smartphone users carry an iPhone, last time I checked Stat Counter. Most of them never open Apple Maps as an app. They don't have to.

Apple Maps is the data layer behind Siri queries, CarPlay directions, Spotlight searches ("dim sum near me" typed into the home screen), Messages location pins, and the Apple Intelligence summary that pops up when you ask your phone where to grab dinner. iPhone users who religiously use Google Maps for routing are still hitting Apple Maps data through Siri and don't realize it.

Bing fed Apple Maps for years. That changed. Apple now runs its own map data for most North American cities and pulls business listings from Apple Business Connect, which launched in 2023 and is free to use. If you've never logged in, your listing is whatever Apple's automated scrapers cobbled together from yellow pages, partner data, and old web sources.

What I found across 12 Surrey businesses

I picked businesses I know well enough to verify: two restaurants on Scott Road, a contractor in Newton, a dental clinic, a Pakistani sweets shop my mom uses, a tile retailer, and a few others. Same audit each time. Search Apple Maps. Ask Siri for directions, hours, and "is this place open right now."

The dental clinic showed up as "medical office" with no specialty filter, which means nobody searching "dentist Surrey" through Siri or Spotlight finds them in Apple results at all. Their Google category was correct. Different system, different problem.

One contractor still listed his old Cloverdale address from 2021. He moved to a Newton showroom two years ago. Google had it right. Apple still sent leads to a residential street where some other family lives now.

The Pakistani sweets shop had the right address but a stock photo Apple's algorithm pulled from somewhere. I think it's a generic "South Asian food" image scraped off a partner directory. The owner's actual photos sat unused on Google.

The 20-minute fix

Go to mapsconnect.apple.com on your laptop. Sign in with an Apple ID. The same one you use on your phone is fine. Apple will ask you to verify ownership of the business, usually by phone call to the listed number or a code mailed to your registered address.

Once verified, you can edit:

• Hours, including special hours for holidays. Apple shows these prominently when Siri reads them aloud.
• Category. Pick the most specific one available. "Dentist" beats "medical office" by a wide margin in search filtering.
• Photos. Upload your own, the same way you would on Google. Apple displays up to 12 last time I tested.
• Description. Short copy that Apple Intelligence summarizes when users ask about your business.
• Action buttons. Direct call, directions, order or reserve links if your category supports them.
• Address pin position. Drag to the correct entrance. Matters if your front door is around the back of a strip mall.

Verification usually takes a day or two. Edits propagate within a few hours after that. I've done this for four clients in the past three weeks and the slowest verification was three days.

One thing nobody tells you. The description field has a 150-character limit but Apple's summary algorithm uses your category, hours, and photos far more than the description text. Don't agonize over the wording.

A wrong address on Apple Maps costs more than a wrong meta tag. The customer just doesn't show up.

What about reviews and ranking

Apple Maps doesn't host its own review system the way Google does. Reviews come from Yelp and Tripadvisor partner integrations, which means your Yelp profile matters more than most Surrey owners realize. If you've ignored Yelp because you "don't get leads from it," your Apple listing inherits that silence.

Ranking on Apple Maps is less transparent than Google. From what I can tell (and the official documentation is thin) Apple weights category accuracy, hours completeness, photo count, and proximity heavily. Reviews matter less than on Google. Distance matters more.

This is good news for small Surrey businesses. The barrier to ranking on Apple Maps is mostly the verification step, which 90% of your competitors haven't bothered to do. Get verified, fill out the listing properly, and you'll outrank older businesses that haven't.

The bigger pattern

Most local SEO advice still treats Google Business Profile as the only thing worth optimizing. That made sense in 2018. It doesn't anymore.

Siri usage in cars went up sharply after CarPlay became standard on most new vehicles. Apple Intelligence rolled out on every iPhone newer than the 15. Apple Maps is the default on iPhones, and most users won't switch even when they prefer Google's product. The data layer behind those queries isn't Google's. It's Apple's, which means your visibility there is a separate project from your NAP cleanup on Google.

I'm not suggesting Apple Maps is more important than Google. It isn't. But if you've spent two years getting your Google listing perfect and your Apple listing still says you're a "medical office" with hours from 2022, you're leaving leads on the table that take a Saturday morning to recover.

Anyway, that's the project I'm running with our clients this month. Three down, a dozen to go. If you want to do this yourself, the local SEO service page has the full checklist we use.