What % of people are using AI overviews when searching for local businesses?
A year ago, almost nobody was asking us this question. Now it comes up in nearly every strategy call we have. Business owners want to know if AI Overviews are actually changing how people find a plumber, a dentist, or a coffee shop down the street, or if this is just another SEO buzzword getting thrown around. Short answer: it’s real, it’s moving fast, and the numbers back it up.
We’re a small digital marketing agency based right here in Columbus, and we’ve watched this shift happen in real time with our own clients. What used to be a predictable game of ranking in the local map pack has turned into something messier and more interesting. So let’s walk through what the data actually shows, and what it means if you run a local business.
The Short Answer: Where the Numbers Actually Land
Depending on which study you look at, AI Overviews now show up on anywhere from 40% to 68% of searches with local intent. That’s a wide range, and it’s wide for a reason we’ll get into shortly. On the consumer side, the shift is even clearer. Roughly 45% of consumers say they’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to find a local business recommendation in the past year, up from just 6% a year earlier. Going from 6% to 45% in twelve months is not a gradual trend. It’s a cliff.
Meanwhile, general AI Overview adoption across all Google searches, local or not, sits at roughly half of all queries in the US. Around 65% of consumers say they click on AI-generated overviews when they appear. So even if a search doesn’t trigger an AI Overview every time, the odds that your customer has seen one recently, and trusts it, are already pretty high.
There’s also a mobile piece to this that doesn’t get talked about enough. A large majority of searches that trigger an AI Overview happen on a phone, not a desktop. That matters a lot for local businesses specifically, because mobile is exactly where “near me” style searching lives. Someone standing outside deciding where to eat, or sitting in their car looking for a mechanic, is doing that search on a device that is increasingly likely to hand them an AI-written answer first.
Why the Numbers Bounce Around So Much
Here’s the part most articles skip. Not all “local searches” behave the same way, and that’s why you’ll see wildly different percentages depending on the source. A quick, transactional search like “tacos near me” almost always pulls up a traditional map pack instead of an AI Overview. But a search with more nuance, like “how much does a dental implant cost in Phoenix,” triggers an AI Overview the vast majority of the time.
We put together a quick table to make this easier to digest:
| Type of Local Search | Approximate AI Overview Rate |
|---|---|
| Simple, transactional (“tacos near me”) | ~15% |
| General local search overall | 40–68% |
| Informational, local-adjacent (“how long is an eye exam”) | ~92% |
| Hybrid cost/comparison queries | ~97% |
The takeaway is that your industry matters. If people search for you by name or location alone, you’re probably still living in map pack territory. If people search for you while they’re still asking questions, comparing options, or trying to understand pricing, you’re already competing inside an AI Overview whether you’ve optimized for it or not.
A Columbus-Sized Example
I want to be honest with you about something. When we first started noticing this shift with a client’s HVAC business last year, we almost missed it. Their map pack rankings looked fine. Their calls were fine. But their website traffic from informational pages, the “how often should I replace my furnace filter” type content, had quietly dropped by close to a quarter.
It turned out Google was answering those questions directly in an AI Overview, and our client wasn’t the source it was pulling from. That’s the uncomfortable reality of this shift. You can be doing everything “right” by old local SEO standards and still become invisible for a big chunk of the searches that used to send you traffic. It’s not that people stopped searching. They just stopped needing to click.
How AI Overviews Actually Decide Who Gets Featured
This is where being a smaller agency actually works in our favor, and in yours too, if you’re a smaller local business. AI Overviews tend to pull from sources that are specific, current, and genuinely useful, not from whoever spent the most on ads. Detailed, well-structured content that actually answers a real question tends to get pulled in over generic pages stuffed with keywords.
Google Business Profile data plays a bigger role than most business owners realize as well. When an AI Overview does appear for a local-intent query, it frequently leans on GBP information, meaning your hours, services, photos, and review responses are doing more SEO work than ever before. If you’ve been treating your Google Business Profile as a “set it and forget it” listing, that habit is costing you visibility right now. We wrote more about the tools involved in this shift in What Ai Should I be Using for Blog Posts, which touches on how AI is reshaping content creation more broadly, not just search results.
What You Can Actually Do About It
You don’t need a massive budget to compete here, and that’s the part we want local business owners to sit with. A few things genuinely move the needle. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current, down to specific service categories and fresh photos. Build content around the actual questions your customers ask you on the phone or in person, not just around your service keywords. Respond to reviews with real detail instead of a generic thank you, because AI models weigh authentic customer language surprisingly heavily.
Structured data on your website, sometimes called schema markup, also helps AI systems understand exactly what you do and where you operate. It sounds technical, but it’s really just labeling your content clearly for a machine to read. Pages that answer FAQs directly, in plain language, tend to get pulled into AI Overviews far more often than pages that bury the answer in marketing copy.
One thing we tell every client, big or small, is to stop thinking about “ranking” as the only goal. Being cited by name inside an AI Overview is quickly becoming just as valuable, sometimes more valuable, than sitting at the top of a traditional results page. Brands that get cited this way tend to see noticeably stronger click-through rates on the traffic they do receive, because the person searching has already decided you’re a credible option before they even land on your site. That’s a different kind of trust to earn, and it starts with the same fundamentals: clear information, real expertise, and content that actually answers the question someone typed in.
For a deeper look at how these AI systems intersect with everyday content strategy, including AI overviews for local search, we’d genuinely recommend spending some time researching before you overhaul your whole content plan. It’s not about throwing everything out. It’s about adjusting where your effort goes.
The Bottom Line
The percentage of people encountering AI Overviews during a local search isn’t a fringe statistic anymore. It’s somewhere between 40% and 68%, depending on how specific and informational the search is, and it’s still climbing. Consumer trust in these summaries is climbing right alongside it. If your business only shows up in the traditional map pack and nowhere else, you’re missing a meaningful and growing slice of your potential customers.
We’ve seen this shift up close with our own clients here in Columbus, and honestly, it’s been kind of exciting to work through. Being a smaller agency means we get to move quickly and test new approaches without layers of approval slowing us down. If you’re wondering whether your business is showing up where your customers are actually looking, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we like having.
