If you are comparing BRD Media vs LocaliQ, you are probably a local business owner who got a polished sales call from a very large company and wants to know what is behind it. Fair question. LocaliQ is owned by Gannett, the publisher of USA TODAY, and it is one of the biggest local marketing vendors in the country. We are a small Chicago shop. This is obviously not a neutral article, so we will keep it factual: what each company does, what each costs, and what business owners and PPC practitioners say in public reviews and forums. You can verify every source linked below.
LocaliQ is a scale business. It grew out of ReachLocal, which was founded in 2004, went public in 2010, and was acquired by Gannett in 2016. Gannett then folded ReachLocal, WordStream, and ThriveHive into one brand: LocaliQ. The model: a large sales force, proprietary technology, campaigns managed mostly by automation with reps overseeing many accounts, results reported through LocaliQ's own dashboard, and pricing by custom quote.
BRD Media is a depth business. Small client roster, custom WordPress sites the client owns, SEO where every audit fix actually gets implemented, ads that run inside the client's own ad accounts, reporting from the client's own Google Analytics, and pricing published on our site before you ever talk to us. Neither model is evil. But they produce very different experiences, and very different exits.
Credit where due. LocaliQ has real reach: it is attached to the USA TODAY network, it has two decades of history in local advertising, and it can stitch search, social, display, and listings into one contract with one invoice, in any city in America. For a franchise group that needs 400 locations handled identically by a vendor that will still exist in ten years, that is a legitimate offer. Their current Trustpilot profile sits at 4.0 from 108 reviews, and the positive ones consistently praise individual reps who care. Worth noting: it is a claimed profile with a paid Trustpilot subscription, which typically means actively invited reviews. That does not make the reviews fake. It does mean you should read the unhappy ones too.
This is where the sales pitch and the paper trail separate. Three patterns repeat across public sources:
1. The account-access problem. In a long-running r/PPC thread on LocaliQ's sales claims, the story that set practitioners off was a pitch claiming cheaper clicks through buying power, with no access to the ad account. Representative replies: "no such thing as getting cheaper clicks from Google... not providing access to the Ads account is also a huge red flag" and "If they won't give you admin access to your Google Ads account... run don't walk away." When your campaigns live in someone else's account, your history, your audiences, and your conversion data walk out the door with the vendor.
2. The automation problem. From a separate r/PPC thread asking for direct experience: "They're not sketchy, they're just not good. Their services are all running with automation, with limited manual adjustments by the reps, and you have no ability to adjust things yourself." Another business owner in the same thread reported average click costs three to four times higher than what he achieved managing the same ads himself.
3. The accountability problem. LocaliQ's BBB profile currently shows a B- rating, is not BBB accredited, and lists failure to respond to a complaint as a reason for the grade. For a company of this size that is not a disaster, but it is not the picture the sales deck paints either.
Read the sources yourself. We linked them all.
Real results, verifiable: PV Medi Spa went from 13% to 62% margin on the program we run. Wellness Homes reached 70% local search visibility and roughly 30 new patients a month at about $6,000 lifetime value each. The CJ Aiello law firm SEO rebuild is documented in our case studies.
| Category | LocaliQ | BRD Media |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Volume across thousands of accounts nationwide | Depth with a limited Chicago-area roster |
| Ownership | Gannett (USA TODAY network) | Independent, founder-run |
| Ad accounts | Campaigns typically run in LocaliQ-controlled accounts (top practitioner complaint) | Always in accounts YOU own |
| Management style | Automation-first, reps oversee many accounts | Human-run, automation as a tool |
| Website | Their platform and templates | Custom WordPress you own |
| Exit scenario | Reviewers report losing account history and data | You keep every asset and every byte of data |
| Reporting | LocaliQ dashboard | Your own Google Analytics + your CRM |
| Pricing | Custom quotes, spend minimums per product | Published: $2,500 / $4,000 / $6,500 per month |
| Guarantee | None published | 90-day ranking milestone in writing |
| Reviews | Trustpilot 4.0 (108, paid profile), BBB B- not accredited, rough r/PPC threads | We rank ourselves on the terms we sell. Google it. |
LocaliQ does not publish standard pricing for its managed services. You get a custom quote after a sales call, and public reviews describe monthly spends from a couple thousand dollars to five figures, with recurring complaints about what the fees actually covered. That is not automatically predatory. It is just unaccountable: when nobody knows the list price, nobody knows if they got a fair deal.
We publish ours: $2,500, $4,000, and $6,500 per month, and each tier lists exactly what is in it: the site work, the implemented SEO, the content volume, the ads management, the tracking, and speed-to-lead follow-up on lead campaigns. No setup fee. The audit that starts the process is free either way, so you can price-check us against any LocaliQ quote with zero risk.
Every marketing vendor says they are good at marketing. Very few can show it on their own domain. We hold number-one rankings on a dozen-plus competitive Chicago marketing terms, built with the same SEO services in Chicago that we run on our own site first, and you can check any of them from your own laptop right now, logged out, in an incognito window. Search the services we sell and see who shows up. LocaliQ's promise is Gannett's reach. Ours is a search results page you can verify in ten seconds.
Our honest take: LocaliQ is not a scam. It is a scale machine, and most of the bad reviews read like a scale machine being sold as boutique service. If you need one vendor to cover 300 locations identically, a scale machine is the right buy. If you are a local business that needs your next 30 customers, you need someone who treats your account like it is the only one, keeps everything in your name, and shows you numbers from your own Analytics. That is the entire disagreement, and it is the first question to settle before you sign anything with anyone, including us.
Free audit. We will show you where you are invisible, which competitors are winning those searches, and what we would attack first. If a LocaliQ quote is on your desk, bring it. We will tell you honestly if it is a fair deal.
Show Me What I'm LosingSources: Trustpilot: LocaliQ · BBB: LocaliQ · r/PPC on LocaliQ's claims · r/PPC: Thoughts on LocaliQ · Wikipedia: ReachLocal
No. LocaliQ is a legitimate, twenty-year-old business owned by Gannett, and its Trustpilot profile shows plenty of happy clients. The recurring complaints are structural, not criminal: automation-run campaigns, custom quotes with unclear line items, and ad accounts the client does not control. Read your contract, and specifically ask who owns the ad accounts and the data before you sign.
Ask them directly and get it in writing, because practitioner threads on Reddit consistently flag this as the trap: campaigns built inside LocaliQ-controlled accounts mean your history, audiences, and conversion data may not transfer when you leave. At BRD, every account is registered to you from day one, so the question never comes up.
LocaliQ prices by custom quote, and public reviews report monthly totals from a few thousand dollars into five figures. BRD publishes flat tiers at $2,500, $4,000, and $6,500 per month, each listing exactly what is included: implemented SEO, content, ads management in your accounts, tracking, and lead follow-up. The starting audit is free.
Honestly: large multi-location brands and franchise groups that need hundreds of markets handled identically by a vendor with national infrastructure. If that is you, a scale vendor makes sense. If you are a single-location or regional business that needs measurable local growth, a small implementer with published pricing will almost always out-deliver per dollar.
By Chris DeWilde. Chris runs BRD Media, a Chicago digital marketing company focused on medical, legal, and home-service businesses.
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