AI has not eaten local search, and the panic is pointed at the wrong thing

A director asked us this summer whether there was any point still paying for search work, on the grounds that AI has taken over and nobody clicks anything now. It is a reasonable question. It usually arrives with a statistic attached, and the statistic is where it starts to come apart.

The most quoted one is real, and it is worth reading properly. Pew Research Center tracked the actual browsing of over 900 American adults through March 2025 and published the result that July. On visits to a results page carrying an AI summary, people clicked a traditional search result 8% of the time. Without a summary, 15%. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on 1% of visits.

That is a genuine finding about a genuine problem. It is also a finding about how people research things, and it has been carried straight across to a question it was never asked: what happens when somebody in Knutsford needs a kitchen fitter.

The numbers on local search do not agree with each other

Depending on which rank-tracking study you read, AI Overviews appeared on somewhere between a seventh and two-fifths of local searches over the past year. Both figures are published, both are defended, and they are answering different questions.

"Best coffee shops in Manchester" and "kitchen showroom Knutsford" are both local searches. Only one of them is a question, and it is the questions that get summarised. The other is somebody who has already decided what they want and is choosing who to ring. Google still puts a map and three businesses at the top of that one, and the reason is not sentiment. It is that a summary is a poor answer to a query whose real answer is a phone number.

So the honest position on the click-loss figures is that they are true, alarming, and mostly about a kind of search your business was never getting customers from.

8% vs 15%: Clicks on a result with and without an AI summary — Pew Research Center, July 2025
1%: Visits where someone clicked a link inside the summary

What did change is worth taking seriously

Here is the part the reassuring version of this article leaves out.

BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey this year found the share of consumers who had used an AI tool to find a local business in the past twelve months had gone from 6% to 45%. That is not a rounding error, and it makes AI a bigger discovery channel for local businesses than several directories people still pay to be listed in.

So something did move. People are asking ChatGPT for a plumber. The question worth arguing about is what you are supposed to do differently, and this is where the answers being sold get expensive.

There is no separate AI channel to optimise

When one of those tools recommends three kitchen fitters in Cheshire, it is not consulting a private index that a specialist can get you into. It is reading the open web and, in most cases, Google's own local results underneath. What it finds about you is your Google Business Profile, your reviews, the pages on your site that say plainly what you do and which towns you do it in, and whether your name, address and phone number say the same thing in every place they appear.

That list is the same list it was in 2019.

Nobody has an AI visibility strategy that is not just local search done properly. The ones being sold are the old checklist with a new invoice attached.

We have watched clients be offered "GEO" packages this year at several times the price of the search work they were already declining to buy. The deliverables, when you read them, are a schema audit, an FAQ page and some content. Two of those three are worth doing. They were worth doing before, and they cost what they cost before.

What actually moved the needle, with a real number

A Cheshire kitchen showroom we work with went into last year effectively invisible for the terms that bring people through a showroom door. No trick was involved in fixing it. We modelled the keywords against margin so the effort went where the money was, built a landing page for each Cheshire town rather than one page listing them, cleared the technical faults holding the site back, and measured every month.

Their core local kitchen term moved 22 places in a single month. Terms they had never appeared for at all are now inside the top 20. Around 170,000 monthly searches were mapped and prioritised before any of it started.

None of that was AI work, and none of it would be done differently today. The same profile, pages and reviews that earned those positions are what an AI tool reads when it is asked who fits kitchens in Cheshire.

The dull checklist, in order

01Claim your Google Business Profile and fill in every field, including the ones that feel pointless
02Get reviews continuously, by asking every customer rather than the happy ones
03Write a page per town you actually serve, with something on it worth reading
04Make sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear
05Measure monthly, so you can tell a real drop from a bad week

If you are doing all five and your visibility is still falling, that is a real problem and worth investigating properly. In our experience it is nearly always the second or third item, not an algorithm.

What we would tell you not to bother with

Do not rewrite your website to be readable by machines. It already is. The prose that a language model summarises well is the prose a customer understands, which is a rare case of the incentives lining up.

Do not buy a tool that reports your "AI visibility score". The measurement is unstable between runs and there is no action attached to the number.

And if somebody has told you that search is finished and you should move the budget to paid ads, ask them what they sell. A year of businesses worrying about AI has been a year of not asking customers for reviews, and the firms that quietly kept asking have taken the ground.

We run search and digital marketing for the businesses we build sites for, which is why this is written from the reporting rather than from the industry commentary. If you want somebody to look at where you actually rank in your own town, get in touch, or read what the work involves on search and digital marketing and IT consultancy in Knutsford.