By hyper local I mean something relevant to a small geographic region like a city or state.

To be clear, that aspect was mostly tangential to my point.

I think the point is Google is really bad at understanding web apps, online services, or really any site that isn’t information rich.

The majority of web apps for example only really need a landing page and a sign up form. But if that’s all you have Google’s algorithm is going to show zero interest. And it seems that’s the case even if you put in the work and optimize the content and provide plenty of meta data.

Imagine you own a pizza joint, but the only way Google shows your site to any of your potential customers is if you dedicate to publishing an article about pizza every month. That’s basically the boat a lot of us are in with web apps, and other online services.

> I think the point is Google is really bad at understanding web apps, online services, or really any site that isn’t information rich.

You keep using that phrase, but it doesn't select for information richness, it selects for verbiage. This is at best orthogonal and more usually opposed to information richness.

Verbiage is the result of bad copy writing and/or lazy keyword stuffing. I don’t think they select for or reward verbiage, but for sure they’re not doing enough to treat it as a negative signal.

Well not directly, but you're heavily penalized for not keyword stuffing and then passing it through an AI tool until it is 'simple to read' (ie. says what you're trying to say extremely badly five times with almost-correct words to avoid anpiece of jargon).

As a result even the content made with earnest intent to communicate has to read exactly like blogspam in order to rank.