Your Phone Isn't Ringing Like It Used To
You haven't changed anything. Same website. Same Google Business Profile. Same service area. But something feels off — the calls have slowed down, the form fills are thinner, and you can't quite put your finger on why.
You Google your own service — "AC repair near me" or "best plumber in [your city]" — and you see it. Right at the top of the page, before any business listings, before any maps, before you, there's a big gray box with Google doing its best impression of an expert. It's summarizing the topic, answering the question, and sending customers wherever it feels like. Your business? Nowhere to be found.
You're not losing to a competitor. You're losing to Google's own AI.
What Are AI Overviews? (In Plain English)
Google rolled out something called AI Overviews — a feature that uses artificial intelligence to generate a direct answer to a search query right at the top of the page. Think of it as Google cutting in line in front of every business that used to show up first.
When someone types "how do I know if my water heater needs replacing" or "what does an HVAC tune-up include" — instead of showing them a list of local businesses or articles, Google now generates its own answer on the spot. Sometimes it cites sources. Sometimes it doesn't. Either way, the customer gets their information without ever scrolling down to your listing.
This isn't a glitch. It's not going away. Google is betting its future on AI search, and local businesses are feeling the impact in a very real, very painful way.
Why Local Businesses Are Getting Hit Hardest
Here's the thing about AI Overviews: they're particularly brutal for service-area businesses — plumbers, HVAC techs, pest control companies, house cleaners, roofers, landscapers. Here's why.
You rely on "near me" searches. Those are exactly the kinds of high-intent queries AI Overviews are now intercepting. Someone types "emergency plumber near me" and Google's AI box pops up with a general answer — sometimes pulling from random articles, sometimes from competitors with more robust online content, sometimes from nobody's business specifically.
Your website content isn't feeding the machine. Most local business websites are thin. A homepage. A services page. Maybe a contact form. That's it. AI Overviews pull from structured, authoritative, recent content — and if you don't have it, you don't get cited. Period.
Your competitors are starting to figure this out. The businesses showing up in AI results — or staying visible despite them — aren't necessarily bigger or better than you. They're just creating the right kind of content signals. More on that in a minute.
The net result: click-through rates for local businesses are dropping. A study from early 2026 showed organic clicks fell by as much as 34% on queries where AI Overviews appeared. If you've felt that in your lead volume, you're not imagining it.
The 3 Things That Feed AI Overviews
This is where it gets useful. If AI Overviews are pulling content to generate answers, the question is: what content are they pulling from?
Based on what we're seeing in local search data in 2026, three signals stand out:
1. Structured Content — Not Just Words
Google's AI doesn't just read your homepage and move on. It looks for content that's organized and easy to parse: FAQs with clear questions and answers, service descriptions that explain what you do and why it matters, structured data markup that tells Google exactly what kind of business you are, where you operate, and what you specialize in.
If your online presence is basically a digital brochure, you're invisible to the machine.
What to do: Build out your FAQ pages. Create service-specific landing pages for each city or neighborhood you serve. Use schema markup. Make it easy for Google to understand exactly what you do and where.
2. Recency — The Algorithm Rewards Fresh
AI Overviews aren't pulling from a static index. They favor recent content — content that signals your business is actively engaged, actively serving customers, and actively generating new information.
Think about it from Google's perspective: if you haven't updated your website or generated new signals in six months, why would it trust you as the authoritative answer for someone's urgent problem today?
What to do: You need a steady stream of fresh, localized content. Not blog posts written once a quarter. Not a set-it-and-forget-it profile. Regular, consistent activity that proves you're an active business in your market — right now.
3. Local Specificity — Hyper-Local Beats Generic Every Time
Generic content doesn't win local search anymore. "We're a great plumbing company serving the tri-state area" is noise. What Google's AI is looking for — what actually gets cited — is content that's specific to a place.
"We just completed a water heater replacement for a customer in the Riverside neighborhood of Denver. Here's what we found and what we fixed."
That sentence is loaded with local signals: city, service type, recent job. It tells Google exactly where you operate and exactly what you do. That's the kind of content AI Overviews can grab, contextualize, and cite.
What to do: Document your work. Every job is a content opportunity. Every city you serve in is a keyword cluster waiting to happen.
How to Fight Back: The Practical Playbook
Here's the honest truth: you can't out-tech Google. But you can out-local it. AI Overviews are good at synthesizing general information, but they're only as good as the local signals that exist. If you're generating high-quality, hyper-local, recent signals at scale — you become part of the answer instead of a casualty of it.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Step 1: Claim and fully optimize your Google Business Profile. This sounds basic because it is, but you'd be shocked how many businesses have incomplete profiles — missing services, no photos, outdated hours. AI Overviews pull heavily from GBP data. Fill every field. Add photos from actual jobs. Post updates regularly.
Step 2: Build service-area pages. Don't just have one "Plumbing Services" page. Create a page for each city you serve. Each page should be specific — what you do there, common problems you solve there, actual jobs you've completed there.
Step 3: Generate reviews with location context. Reviews aren't just social proof anymore — they're a content signal. A review that says "Fixed our AC unit in the Midtown area, showed up same day, explained everything clearly" is a piece of geo-tagged content Google can use. Reviews that say "Great job!!" are not.
Step 4: Document your work after every job. This is the one that separates businesses who adapt from businesses who disappear. Every time you complete a job, create a record of it: where it was, what you did, what problem you solved. This creates a continuous stream of the hyper-local, recent, structured content that AI Overviews crave.
Steps 3 and 4 sound simple. The execution is where most businesses stall out — because it requires consistency, and consistency is hard when you're also running a business.
This Is Where Nearby Now Comes In
The businesses that are staying visible in Google's AI search — the ones holding their lead volume while others watch it shrink — are doing one thing consistently: they're generating structured, hyper-local content at the point of service. Not later. Not when they have time. Right there, in the driveway, after the job is done.
That's exactly what Nearby Now is built for.
When a technician completes a job, Nearby Now prompts them to check in — geo-tagged, timestamped, service-tagged. That checkin automatically generates a piece of local content: what was done, where it was done, what the customer said about it. It's not a blog post you have to write. It's not a template you have to fill out. It happens as a natural extension of doing the job.
And because it pulls in automated review requests that are tied to that specific checkin — location context baked in — you're not getting "Great job!!" reviews. You're getting reviews that actually say something Google can use.
Over the course of a month, a team doing 20–30 jobs a week can generate hundreds of hyper-local content signals without any extra work on the marketing side. That's the kind of volume and specificity that feeds AI Overviews and keeps local businesses visible.
Not magic. Just consistency at scale.
The Bottom Line
AI Overviews aren't a bug. They're the new reality of Google search, and they're not going back. For local service businesses, the stakes are high: stay visible or slowly become irrelevant to the searchers who need you most.
The good news is that the playbook is clear. Structured content. Recency. Local specificity. These aren't mysterious SEO tactics — they're just a disciplined way of documenting what you already do every day.
The businesses that figure this out in 2026 are going to own their local markets. The ones that don't are going to keep wondering why the phone isn't ringing.
You now know what's happening. The question is what you do about it.