If you’ve watched your website traffic dip over the past year even though your rankings look fine, you’re not imagining it. Google’s AI Overviews are answering questions directly on the results page, and a lot of businesses are losing clicks they used to count on. But if you’re a local business, the picture is better than the headlines suggest — and understanding why is the key to knowing where to actually put your effort in 2026.
The Traffic Drop Is Real — For Informational Content
Roughly 60% of Google searches now end without a click to any website at all, up from about 58% just two years ago. For pages that used to rank well for informational questions, the damage is measurable. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing behavior from 900 participants and found that pages appearing under an AI Overview saw click-through rates fall to around 8%, compared to about 15% for pages without one — a drop of nearly half. Worse, 26% of searches that triggered an AI Overview ended the session entirely, with no further click anywhere.
That’s the part of SEO that’s genuinely under pressure right now: “how does X work,” “what is the best way to Y” — the questions people used to click through a blog post to answer, they now get answered right on the results page.
Why Local SEO in the AI Search Era Holds Up Differently
Local and transactional searches don’t work the same way, and that’s good news if you’re a local business. When someone searches “plumber near me” or “best taco shop in Chula Vista,” an AI-written paragraph can’t fix their leaking pipe or serve them dinner. These searches still require a real business, a map pack, and eventually a phone call or a visit — which is exactly the kind of intent AI Overviews can summarize but can’t fully replace.
The underlying local-search demand hasn’t slowed down either. Eighty percent of U.S. consumers search online for local businesses at least weekly, and 32% do it daily. That volume of “I need something nearby, right now” intent is what keeps local SEO comparatively insulated: the searcher still has to end up somewhere, and that somewhere still has to be found.
There’s a real, measurable payoff to showing up in that map pack, too. Businesses ranking in the local 3-pack capture roughly 40% more conversion actions — calls, direction requests, website clicks — than businesses ranked below it. That’s not a number tied to some future AI shift; that’s what map-pack visibility is worth today, and it’s the foundation local SEO is built on.
The New Wrinkle: AI Is Also Becoming a Local Discovery Channel
This isn’t a “local SEO is untouched by AI” story, though — it’s more accurate to say local SEO is evolving rather than eroding. Generative AI tools are increasingly being used for local recommendations too, and that channel is growing fast. The practical difference is where the underlying data comes from: for local queries, AI systems increasingly lean on Google Business Profile information to answer, which means the same profile that runs your map-pack presence is now also feeding what AI tools say about you. Keeping your Google Business Profile categories, hours, photos, and reviews accurate isn’t just a map-pack task anymore — it’s an AI-visibility task too.
What This Means for Your Business
If your business depends on local customers finding you and taking action — calling, booking, walking in — you’re in a more defensible position than a business that lives on informational blog traffic alone. That doesn’t mean you can ignore AI search. It means the priority order is different: a complete, accurate, well-reviewed Google Business Profile and solid local SEO fundamentals matter more right now than chasing every AI-content trend. Informational content still has a place, but it increasingly has to earn a citation rather than just rank, which is a different skill (we covered exactly how to do that without a PR budget in a related post).
The Bottom Line
The core question of local SEO in the AI search era comes down to this: AI Overviews are cutting clicks 38–58% for informational searches, but local and transactional intent is holding up because it still requires a real business and a real action. For a Chula Vista or South Bay business, that makes local SEO the safer, more defensible investment in 2026 — not because AI search doesn’t matter, but because the map pack and an accurate Google Business Profile are becoming the AI-visibility layer too, not a separate concern from it.
If you want a clear read on where your business actually stands — map-pack visibility, Google Business Profile completeness, and how AI tools currently describe you — that’s exactly what our local SEO services are built to fix.
Related services: Local SEO & Google Business Profile · AI search optimization (AEO) · SEO in San Diego
Keep reading: How to Get Cited by AI Search (No PR Budget Needed)