Search "best physiotherapist near me" on a phone and there is a fair chance you will read three or four generated sentences before you see a single business name. The map pack is still there. It is just further down. That is the whole story of AI Overviews for local search, and most of what has been written about it either declares local SEO dead or pretends nothing has changed. Neither is much use when a client asks why the calls dipped last month.
What an AI Overview actually looks like for a local query
An AI Overview is a block of generated prose at the top of the results page with a set of source links attached. On desktop the citations usually sit as small cards to the right or as inline chips under each claim. On mobile they collapse into a row of favicons you have to tap to expand.
For local intent the overview takes one of three shapes, and they behave very differently:
- Explanatory - the query asked a question ("how much does a boiler service cost") and the overview answers it without naming any business. Your listing is untouched, but the click never happens.
- Named list - the overview mentions specific businesses, usually three to five, drawn from pages that already rank. This is the one worth caring about.
- Hybrid - a short definition, a "things to consider" list, then a handoff to Maps. Common in service categories where Google is not confident enough to rank businesses in prose.
Two things make this hard to audit properly. Overviews are generated per session, so two people searching the same phrase in the same city can get different text and different citations. And Google shows them selectively, so an overview that fires on Monday may not fire on Thursday for the same words.
Where the map pack sits now
The pack has not been replaced. It has been pushed down the page on the subset of queries where an overview appears. On a phone that can mean the first local listing now sits below the fold, sometimes well below it, where before it was the first thing visible.
What that does to your numbers is more interesting than what it does to your position. In GBP performance data you will often see profile impressions holding steady while the actions taken on those impressions soften. People are still being shown the listing. Fewer of them get far enough down the page to press call.
The opposite also happens. When an overview names a business and the reader then searches that business by name, you get a bump in branded discovery that looks like very little in aggregate but arrives as high-intent traffic. If you only report total views, you miss both effects.
The reporting consequence is simple: stop presenting impressions as the headline number. Present the ratio of actions to views, per location, month on month. That is the metric that actually moves when the layout above you changes.
Which local queries trigger an overview
The pattern is reasonably consistent once you have looked at a few hundred queries inside one vertical.
| Query type | Example | Overview likelihood |
|---|---|---|
| Research and comparison | "gas boiler vs heat pump running costs" | High, rarely names businesses |
| Cost and process questions | "how long does a root canal take" | High |
| Category plus city | "dentists in Leeds" | Mixed, often a short summary above the pack |
| Urgent near-me intent | "emergency dentist open now near me" | Low, the pack usually stays on top |
| Navigational and branded | "Smile Dental Leeds opening hours" | Very low |
Regulated categories behave differently again. Medical, legal and financial queries get more conservative handling: Google is slower to generate prose about them and more likely to fall back to conventional results. If your clients sit in those categories, expect the layout you see today to change in either direction.
The queries that matter most commercially - someone in pain, in a car, at nine at night - are still the least likely to get an overview. Urgency and proximity push Google back towards the map. It is the research phase further up the funnel where the overview absorbs the click.
What Google pulls into the answer
Overviews are grounded in retrieved pages rather than recalled from training. Whatever gets cited got there because it was retrievable and relevant at that moment.
- Pages that already rank - the strongest correlation by far. Overviews rarely cite something buried on page four. If you are not in the conventional results for a query, you are unlikely to be in the summary of it.
- Third-party lists and directories - "best X in Y" roundups from local press, industry bodies and comparison sites get cited constantly in named-list overviews, often more than any individual business site.
- Community threads - Reddit, publicly indexed local groups, specialist forums. Google has leaned hard into these for opinion-shaped questions.
- Your Google Business Profile - hours, attributes, service lists and the review corpus feed the factual assertions and, occasionally, paraphrased sentiment.
- Your own service and FAQ pages - when they answer the exact question in plain language near the top, rather than after eight paragraphs of preamble.
Review text is the underrated input. When an overview says something like "customers frequently mention the short wait times", that phrasing came from somewhere. Reviews that describe the specific thing you want to be known for do more work than reviews that say "great service".
Practical response for local businesses
None of this is exotic. It is the same work, reprioritised.
- Answer the research question yourself. If the overview is absorbing "how much does X cost in [city]", publish the page that answers it properly, with a real range and the factors that move it. You may lose the click and gain the citation, and citations are how you end up in a named list.
- Write GBP fields in specifics. Service names that match what people actually say, attributes filled in properly, and a description written as a description rather than as sales copy.
- Use the Q&A section. Post the five questions the front desk answers every day, and answer them. It is indexed, it is yours, and it is question-shaped.
- Ask for specific reviews. "What did you have done and how did it go" produces far more usable text than "how did we do".
- Get onto the lists. Local press roundups, chamber directories, professional association listings. Unglamorous, and still the most productive hour you can spend on named-list overviews.
On measurement: if you handle more than a handful of locations, put GBP performance insights and Search Console side by side for the same period. Ampli5 Pulse pulls both into one view per location, which saves time, but it also makes the pattern legible - impressions and clicks moving one way in Search Console while calls and direction requests move another is the signature of a layout change above the fold. It will not tell you where you rank for a keyword, and no tool can reliably tell you whether an overview fired for a given user. What you can measure is what happened downstream, per location, over time.