For searches with clear local intent, such as "dry cleaner open now", Google still usually leads with the map pack. The change is around it: AI Overviews answer research questions before people choose, AI Mode lists places with ratings and hours, and Ask Maps answers questions about a place from its profile and reviews. Expect fewer website clicks and more weight on your profile.
A caveat before any advice: what appears differs by query, device, country and even the day, and Google changes layouts often. Generalisations about "how AI Overviews treat local businesses", including the ones in this tutorial, are starting points. The only reliable picture of your situation comes from running your own customers' searches and writing down what you see, which the worked example below shows how to do in about an hour.
Four kinds of local search, and what AI changes in each
Local searches aren't all the same. Separating them shows where AI answers matter for you and where the old map pack still does the work.
| Kind of search | Example | Where the answer appears | What changed | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Find a business | "garden centre open Sunday" | Mostly the map pack; sometimes AI Mode's list of places | Little for simple searches; AI Mode adds context from reviews | Accurate hours, categories, location |
| Research before a visit | "when to plant tulip bulbs", "how often should kids have an eye test" | AI Overviews, with links to sources | Many people get the answer without clicking any site | Genuinely helpful pages that are cited as sources |
| A specific question about a place | "does [optician] do contact lens trials for teenagers?" | Gemini-generated answers in Maps and Search, from the profile, reviews and website | The old public Q&A section has gone; AI answers instead | Complete profile fields; reviews and pages that mention the detail |
| Compare and choose | "best pet shop for raw dog food" | AI Overviews and AI Mode, mixing businesses and advice | A shortlist with reasons, often drawn from reviews | Reviews that describe what you're good at; clear service pages |
The second and fourth rows are where small businesses lose or gain the most. A customer researching "raw feeding for puppies" used to land on a pet shop's guide page and see its products. Now the AI Overview may answer the question itself. Whether the shop is cited as a source, and whether its name comes up in the comparison search later, decides whether it's in the conversation at all.
What Google's AI reads about your business
When Google's AI answers a question about a place, it draws on the same information that powers Maps and Search. Google has said Ask Maps analyses information from over 300 million places, including reviews from more than 500 million contributors. For your business, the inputs are:
- Your Business Profile: categories, description, services, products, hours, attributes (accessibility, parking, payment types), photos and posts.
- Reviews: the words, not only the stars. A review that says "they fitted my son's first contact lenses and were patient with his nerves" is information an AI can use to answer a question about teenagers and contact lenses.
- Your website: service pages, prices, policies and answers to common questions, if the pages are indexed and eligible for snippets.
- Other listings and mentions across the web, which help confirm details are consistent.
Google wound down the public questions-and-answers section on Business Profiles from late 2025, replacing that user-written thread with AI-generated answers. That's significant: if the answer isn't in your profile, your reviews or your website, the AI either can't answer or guesses from elsewhere.
AI Mode also displays local businesses directly. Google has described it showing ratings, reviews and opening hours for places like restaurants, salons and shops, with options to call or get directions, and it has been adding bookings through partner platforms, starting with restaurants and naming salon booking platforms such as Booksy among its partners.
Why review wording now matters as much as the star rating
Star ratings still matter for ranking; Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. But AI answers work with the words. A 4.8-star optician whose reviews all say "great service, lovely staff" gives the AI little to say. A 4.6-star optician whose reviews mention children's eye tests, dry eye clinics and late appointments gives it specific reasons to recommend them for specific questions.
You can't write customers' reviews or tell them what to include. Google's policy says businesses shouldn't request that specific content be included, and incentivised reviews are banned. What you can do legitimately:
- Ask soon after a specific service. A review request sent the day after a child's first eye test naturally tends to produce a review about a child's eye test.
- Ask everyone, not just happy customers. Filtering who gets asked is review gating, which breaks the rules.
- Reply with detail. Your replies are public text too. "Thanks, we're glad the dry eye clinic helped" adds context without putting words in the customer's mouth.
Setting up requests that follow these rules is covered in getting more Google reviews with automated requests.
How the change plays out in an optician and a nail salon
The same shift looks different depending on what customers search for. Two illustrative cases.
The optician: research questions answered before the visit
Parents search questions like "how often should children have an eye test?" and "signs my child needs glasses". An AI Overview now answers these directly, citing a few sources. An independent optician's page on children's eye tests had the answer buried in its fourth paragraph, after two paragraphs about the practice's history. It wasn't cited. The practice rewrote the opening so the answer came first, in its own words and based on its optometrist's advice:
Before: "At our family-run practice, we've been caring for local families' eyes for over 30 years, and children's vision is something we're passionate about..."
After: "We usually recommend an eye test every year for children, or sooner if they squint, rub their eyes, sit close to screens or struggle with reading. Your child doesn't need to read letters for us to test their eyes; we use pictures and lights for younger children. The test takes about 20 minutes."
Whether a rewrite gets a page cited is never guaranteed, and national health sites often dominate these answers. But the second version is also better for the parent who does click, and it gives Google's AI a clear, specific passage to draw on. The practice paired it with its profile: "children's eye tests" listed as a service, with the same facts.
The nail salon: chosen from a list, booked without a website visit
For "gel nails open late Thursday", a customer may see the map pack or an AI Mode list of salons with ratings, snippets from reviews and opening hours. Many salons take bookings through a booking platform linked to their profile, so a customer can go from search to booked appointment without ever loading the salon's own site. For the salon, that means the profile photos, the latest reviews and the accuracy of its late-opening hours matter more than its homepage. An illustrative salon found its profile still showed summer hours in November; two customers turned up to a closed door before anyone noticed. Setting a monthly reminder to check hours, and adding special hours for holidays, cost two minutes and fixed it.
A pet shop's AI visibility check across 12 searches
An illustration of the check every local business should run. An independent pet shop listed 12 searches its customers plausibly make, ran each on a phone in a private browsing window from the shop's location, and logged what appeared. It took about an hour.
| Search | AI answer shown? | Shop mentioned or cited? | What the AI said, in brief |
|---|---|---|---|
| pet shop open Sunday | No, map pack | Yes, position 2 | n/a |
| best pet shop for raw dog food | Yes | No | Named two chains and a competitor whose reviews mention raw food |
| how much raw food for a puppy | Yes | No | General feeding guidance, cited a manufacturer and a vet site |
| [shop name] do they sell live crickets | Yes, AI answer about the place | Yes | "Information not available" |
| [shop name] parking | Yes | Yes | Correct: free car park behind |
| where to buy guinea pig hay in bulk | Yes | No | Online retailers only |
| dog grooming and pet shop together | Map pack | No | Shop doesn't list grooming, which it offers twice a week |
| (five more searches) | Mixed; the shop appeared in three | ||
The log pointed to specific fixes rather than a vague "improve SEO":
- Profile gaps. Grooming wasn't listed as a service; live foods weren't in the products. Both added the same afternoon.
- A missing page. The shop had raw food on its shelves and a knowledgeable member of staff, but no page on its site. It wrote a practical raw-feeding guide based on what staff tell customers, including portion guidance checked by a local vet the shop works with.
- Bulk buying. The shop sold hay in bulk bales but never said so anywhere online. One line in the description and a product entry fixed that.
- Reviews. Review requests started going out after every raw food and grooming purchase, with no instructions on what to say.
Six weeks later, a rerun of the same 12 searches (still illustrative) showed the shop mentioned in six instead of three, including the crickets question, now answered correctly from the profile. It still wasn't cited for the general puppy-feeding question, which is dominated by manufacturers and vets. That's a realistic outcome: some research questions belong to bigger, more authoritative sources, and effort is better spent on the questions only a local shop can answer.
Where the clicks go now, and how to measure it
AI answers change which numbers move. A local business often sees website clicks from search flatten or fall while calls and direction requests hold up, because people get enough from the AI answer and the profile to act without visiting the site.
- Search Console counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode within its overall Web search figures; you can't separate it. Watch impressions against clicks on your research-type pages. Rising impressions with falling clicks suggests your content is being shown or used in AI answers.
- Business Profile performance shows calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings and messages. For many local businesses these are the numbers that pay the bills.
- Booking platforms linked to your profile (for a nail salon, whichever booking system it uses) may show where bookings came from.
- Ask new customers. "How did you find us?" with "Google Maps", "Google search", "an AI assistant" and "someone told me" as options, recorded for a month, beats any dashboard.
A fuller setup for tracking AI-driven visits, including referrals from ChatGPT and other assistants, is in tracking whether AI search is sending you customers.
What to change on your website
Your website's job has shifted slightly. It's still where customers check details, but it's also the source AI answers draw on for questions your profile can't hold. Pages worth having:
- A page per real service with what happens, how long, what it costs or where prices are, and who it suits.
- A practical questions page built from what customers actually ask at the counter or on the phone: "Can I bring my dog in?", "Do you take cards only?", "Can I drop off before opening?". An illustrative garden centre found that "are dogs allowed?" was its most-asked phone question and had no answer anywhere online. One sentence on its visiting page and a profile attribute fixed it.
- Prices, or at least ranges. AI answers to "how much does X cost at Y" can only use numbers you publish.
- Policies stated plainly: returns, cancellations, deposits, age requirements.
Keep facts identical across your site and your profile. Conflicting hours or prices give an AI answer two versions to choose between. The profile side is covered step by step in optimising your Google Business Profile with AI, and the jobs AI itself can take off your hands are sorted in what AI can and can't do for your local SEO.
Things that won't help, whatever you're sold
- Special files or markup "for AI Overviews". Google's documentation says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google has said llms.txt files and special markup aren't used for them. Normal structured data still helps Google understand your business; it's not a secret switch.
- Mass-produced location pages. Twenty AI-written "optician in [town]" pages are the scaled content pattern Google's spam policies target.
- Bought or incentivised reviews. They breach Google's policy, and Google has been displaying warnings on some profiles after removing suspicious reviews.
- "Guaranteed AI Overview placement" packages. Nobody controls which sources Google's AI cites. Ask any supplier which specific searches they'll measure and how.
For the wider idea of optimising for AI answer engines beyond Google, see what generative engine optimisation is.
A 20-minute monthly routine
- Rerun your 12 searches and update the log (10 minutes). Note any new AI answers, and whether you're mentioned.
- Read one AI answer about your business closely (3 minutes). Is anything wrong or missing? Fix the source: profile, page or listing.
- Check profile performance against the same month last year (3 minutes).
- Reply to new reviews with specific, factual replies (4 minutes, or less with an AI draft you edit).
Twenty minutes a month keeps you aware of how Google's AI describes your business, which is more than most of your competitors know about theirs.
Questions about AI Overviews and local businesses
Can I see how many customers found me through AI Overviews?
Not separately. Google includes traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the overall Web figures in Search Console's Performance report. For local businesses, the more useful numbers are in your Business Profile's performance section (calls, directions, website clicks, bookings) plus simply asking new customers how they found you.
Do I need special markup or an llms.txt file to appear in AI Overviews?
No. Google's documentation says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal SEO, and that pages need to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Google has said it doesn't use llms.txt files for these features. Accurate profile details and helpful pages matter far more.
Can I stop Google's AI from summarising my website?
You can limit it with the same controls that govern normal search snippets, such as nosnippet, data-nosnippet or max-snippet, or noindex for pages you don't want in search at all. For most local businesses that's counterproductive: the AI answer is often where a customer first sees your name. Blocking it rarely brings the click back.
Will AI Overviews replace the map pack?
Not for now. Searches with clear local intent still typically show the map pack of businesses. What's changing is everything around it: research questions answered before anyone looks for a business, and specific questions about a place answered from its profile and reviews. Check your own key searches monthly, because Google changes these layouts often.
Further reads
- How Wedding Businesses Get Found When Couples Ask AI for Suppliers — How one sector gets found when customers ask AI for suppliers.
- What Is Review Gating and Can It Get Your Business Penalised? — The review request practices that can get you penalised.
- How to Write Google Business Profile Posts With AI Every Week — Keep your profile active with weekly AI-drafted posts.
- How to Reply to Negative Reviews With AI: Examples and Pitfalls — Replies to bad reviews that AI answers will also read.
- How to Choose an SEO Agency That Understands AI Search — What to ask an agency that offers AI search services.
- How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and AI Search — Getting recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants too.
- How to Write Website Articles With AI That Still Rank on Google — A step-by-step method for AI-assisted website articles that rank: evidence packs, outline and draft prompts, the edit pass, and what to check in Search Console.
- How to Do Keyword Research With AI for a Small Business Website — Brainstorm and group search phrases with AI, check them against Google's free data, and build a keyword map for each page, with a bookshop worked through.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Google Search Central documentation on AI features and your website (AI Overviews and AI Mode); Google's posts on AI Mode updates (May and August 2025) and on Ask Maps; Google Business Profile Help on local ranking; Google Maps user-contributed content policy.