AI Overviews and local searches: what actually shows

Most of what is written about this is alarmed, and the only primary research on the subject says something the alarm does not account for.

AI Overviews appear on roughly 7% of traditional local queries such as plumber near me. On local intent searches, the map pack still dominates.

So if you run a trade and your business depends on people typing your service plus near me, the thing you have been told to panic about is currently showing on about one search in fourteen.

Where the exposure actually is

That is not the end of the story, because near me is not the only search that matters to you, and the searches that sit either side of it are where this bites.

Zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. Those are not map pack searches. They are questions: what does this cost, how long does it take, is this urgent, what is the difference between these two options. Exactly the questions your content pages were written to answer, and exactly the ones an Overview can answer without anyone leaving the results page.

The second thing the data shows

Business Profile actions grew 41% year on year, against a backdrop of declining traditional organic traffic.

Read those two together and the picture is not that local search is disappearing. It is that it is consolidating onto the listing. People are doing more of their deciding on the results page and acting from the profile rather than clicking through to a website first.

For a business with a strong listing that is close to good news. For a business whose listing is an afterthought behind a nice website, it is not, and a 20-minute profile audit is the quickest way to find out which one you are.

One thing worth knowing about how Overviews rank

They do not apply the distance-based ranking that local packs use.

That is genuinely significant for anyone on the edge of their service area. The proximity handicap that keeps you out of the pack three suburbs over does not apply in the same way here, which makes this one of the few surfaces where being further away is not automatically a disadvantage.

What to actually do

For the near-me searches: nothing new

Category, address setup, enough reviews to match the businesses around you, prominence. The map pack still owns these and the work has not changed. Anyone selling you an AI strategy for plumber near me is selling you the local SEO you already needed.

For the research and cost content: change what you measure

Some of that traffic is not coming back, and continuing to judge those pages on visits will make you delete pages that are still working.

The page that gets summarised in an Overview is still doing something: it is the source, your business is named, and the reader arrives at the point of contact already informed. Judge those pages on impressions and on whether enquiries mention what they read, not on sessions.

Write the way a summary can use

• Answer the question in the first two sentences, before the context. A summary can only use what it can extract.
• Give real numbers and ranges rather than it depends.
• Use plain language. Overviews reward clarity, not clever copy, and marketing register is the first thing that gets skipped.
• Keep your facts consistent everywhere, because a business whose details contradict themselves is one a summary hedges about or omits.

The wider version of this, including how assistants outside Google choose which business to name, is in getting cited by AI assistants, and AI search and local SEO covers what did and did not change overall.