What changes for a local business
For twenty years the goal of search work was the click. Page in results, click, visit, enquiry. AI Overviews cut the middle out of that route: the user gets the answer immediately.
For an online shop that is a problem, because traffic is the product. For a local business the situation is different and arguably better. The customer never intended to read your website. They wanted to know where to go and when you open. If Google’s answer carries your name and address, the job is done without a click.
What does change is what is worth measuring. Ranking stops being a good indicator, because you can sit third and never appear in the answer above.
Where Google gets the names
For local questions the sources are predictable and overlap with what every other assistant looks at:
- The Google Business Profile and the data flowing from it into maps
- Customer reviews, wording included
- Pages that name the business: local news, roundups, directories
- Your own site, if it answers the question the user asked
Work that helps in AI Overviews helps in ChatGPT and Perplexity at the same time. These are not three separate projects. We cover it in the post on generative engine optimization.
Three things that raise your odds
Sentences that can be quoted
Google assembles the answer from fragments. "Parking is free for customers for the first two hours" is a ready-made fragment. "We provide comfortable parking facilities" is not.
A questions page
The question-and-short-answer shape is exactly what a summarising model wants. Ten real customer questions with two or three sentence answers is the cheapest content you can make and the most frequently quoted.
Structured data
Hours, address and trade in a format that cannot be misread. Ready code is in the post on LocalBusiness structured data.
Can it be measured
AI Overviews have no public API, so they cannot be queried automatically the way ChatGPT or Perplexity can. You check them by hand: type the question into Google from a private window and see whether the answer at the top names your business.
That is why our reports measure four engines with an official API automatically and check AI Overviews and Copilot by hand. We say so plainly rather than pretend everything can be queried at the push of a button. The scope is on the Method page.
If you would rather start with a number than a theory, order the free scan.