Where AI Overviews show up in local search, and where they do not

What happened?

Search Engine Journal published a piece on how AI assistants narrow local options before a person ever reaches a website. It leans on a Whitespark study of 540 queries across Houston, Phoenix and Denver in six service industries, published in May 2025. That study found AI Overviews on 15 percent of direct local-intent searches, 92 percent of informational searches, and 97 percent of hybrid searches such as the cost of hiring a lawyer. Google separately documents that AI Overviews and AI Mode may run a query fan-out, issuing several related searches to build one answer.

Why does it matter?

The split by query type is the useful part. When someone searches for a clinic or a service in your city by category, the map pack still dominates and your listing does the work. When they ask a question around that service, how long it takes, what it costs, whether they need it at all, an AI Overview usually answers and your listing never enters the picture. Those question-shaped searches are where a lot of people start. If you have no page answering them plainly, an engine will find someone else who does.

Should I do anything?

Write down the one question people ask you most before they become a client, member, or patient, the one you answer on the phone every week. Search that exact question with your city in it and see whether an AI Overview appears and who it cites. If it is not you, that question becomes your next page: the question itself as the heading, a direct answer in the first two sentences, and your service area in plain text. One question, one page.

Learn more

• Whitespark: AI Overviews in local search (May 2025)
• Google: AI features and your website
• Search Engine Journal coverage
• Our guide: local visibility audit