Kelly,
I noticed the same thing and I did a test to compare competitive travel websites. I have four homes in an exclusive community south of Atlanta. Peachtree City was selected by Expedia as one of the Top 19 places to visit in 2019.
If you perform a simple location search for Peachtree City GA with NO other information you will get amazing results. The first four hits were a condo in downtown Atlanta (30 miles away), a townhome in Hampton GA (not nice and 20 miles away), a home in Jonesboro GA (so so area and 20 miles away).
If you do the same search with Homeaway you will get only Peachtree City listings with the mileage from the center of Peachtree City.
FlipKey shows Peachtree City listings and then has a colored banner STATING the following below lisitngs are within 20 miles.
I think Airbnb's search algorithms are both misleading travelers and unfair to HOSTS who have bought and established great listings in the more desirous areas.
And you can forget trying to call Airbnb to speak with their technical team to talk about search algorithms. They won't talk to you.
While I like certain aspects of Airbnb this is a problem.
Mark