For most of the last decade, “SEO” meant chasing the same ten blue links. That assumption is breaking down fast. Google’s AI Overviews now show up in roughly half of all US searches. By January 2026, they appeared in about 25.8% of queries overall — a sharp jump from a year earlier. Local businesses are watching their playbook change in real time.
Local searches are still mostly untouched — for now
AI Overviews barely touch local, transactional searches. They appear in around 7% of local-intent queries. Compare that to nearly 40% for purely informational searches like “how does X work.” Google built its summary layer to answer questions, not to recommend a plumber three blocks away. That makes the Local Pack and Maps results one of the more AI-resistant corners of the search results page — for now.
This doesn’t mean local businesses escape the shift entirely. The damage happens one layer up, in the informational content that used to pull people toward local searches in the first place.
The traffic hit is real, and it’s uneven
When an AI Overview appears, click-through rates drop hard. Pew Research measured a decline from about 15% to 8% across a large sample of queries. Other studies found even steeper drops, depending on query type and ranking position. Zero-click search now accounts for anywhere from a quarter to nearly 60% of all searches, depending on whose methodology you trust — and the number keeps climbing.
This changes what “success” means for a local SEO company Ottawa businesses hire to manage their accounts. Ranking #1 for an informational term used to guarantee traffic. Now it might just earn a citation inside an AI summary and nothing else. Agencies have started tracking AI citation rates alongside traditional rankings to compensate. Adoption of that practice still lags, though — a 2026 industry survey found only about 14% of marketers actively track AI visibility, even though most name it a strategic priority.
What actually earns visibility now
A few patterns show up consistently across 2026 data.
- Content depth and clarity beat backlink volume. Structured, readable, well-explained content earns AI citations more reliably than the link-building metrics that used to dominate SEO strategy.
- Longer, more specific queries trigger AI Overviews more often. Searches of eight words or more surface an Overview roughly seven times more often than short queries do. This pushes content strategy toward answering precise, multi-part questions instead of chasing single keywords.
- The AI platform landscape extends past Google. ChatGPT holds the largest share of the standalone AI assistant market, but Claude’s visibility in AI-search tracking grew sharply through 2026, and Gemini expanded too. Businesses that optimize only for Google’s AI Overviews are targeting a shrinking slice of where people actually ask questions.
Tracking this shift requires new metrics entirely. Teams now watch AI search visibility KPIs the way they once watched keyword rank, since a citation inside a chatbot answer doesn’t show up in a standard rank tracker. The same logic applies to link building for AI search: what earns a citation from an AI system looks different from what used to earn a backlink, and treating them as identical metrics undercounts real visibility.
Where this leaves local businesses
Don’t panic — AI isn’t “taking over” local search. The shift is narrower than that. Informational blog content sits under real pressure. Transactional and local-intent pages stay relatively protected. Businesses pulling ahead share one trait: they produce genuinely useful, specific, well-structured pages instead of generic filler. That’s exactly the kind of content both AI systems and human searchers reward.
A quick caveat on these numbers: methodologies vary a lot between the studies cited here. Sample sizes, industries tracked, and definitions of “zero-click” all differ, so treat these as directional trends rather than precise universal figures. One thing stays consistent across nearly all of them: less traffic from pure informational searches, more weight on content that AI systems can confidently cite, and local, transactional search holding up better than the rest of the results page — at least for now.
Related: BrandRank.AI Normalization Transformation Rules: What Everyone Gets Wrong
