Google’s AI Overviews now feature on nearly half of all searches, according to research by SEO Belfast, and when a search has local intent those AI Overviews lean almost entirely on Google Business Profile signals to decide which local businesses get named. For the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses, that turns a free listing that many owners haven’t touched in years into the single highest-leverage marketing asset they have.
Google’s AI Overviews appeared on roughly 48% of tracked queries by February 2026, up from 31% a year earlier, according to BrightEdge data. That’s a lot of searches now returning an AI-written summary before a single blue link or map pack listing appears, and those AI-generated SERP features have moved from novelty to default in barely 12 months.
For a UK plumber, dentist or accountancy firm, the more pressing number sits underneath that headline figure. AI Overviews still appear in only around 7% of local searches at the moment, a figure that gives plenty of small business owners a false sense that this is somebody else’s problem. It isn’t.
That 7% is where things stand today, not where they’re heading, and every serious analysis of the trend points the same direction: up.
The click is the real casualty
The bigger shift isn’t which businesses get named. It’s what happens to the click afterwards. Zero-click searches, where a user gets an answer and never visits a website, rose from 56% to 69% of all searches between May 2024 and May 2025, according to data from Similarweb. Separate research from Seer Interactive found organic click-through rates fell 61% on queries where an AI Overview appeared, down to well under 1%.
That matters more on mobile, where many of those AI Overview-triggering searches happen and where the summary itself takes up more screen space, pushing traditional results further down the page. A business that has spent years climbing to position three or four on Google in Manchester or Bristol can lose meaningful traffic without dropping a single rank, simply because fewer people scroll past the AI-generated answer to see it.
GBP is now doing double duty
The single most consistent finding across recent industry research is that AI Overviews for local queries draw overwhelmingly on Google Business Profile data: reviews, photos, opening hours, posts and Q&A. A Google executive has confirmed that ranking well in AI-driven results works much like ranking well in traditional search, and sites cited in AI Overviews see markedly higher click-through rates than those left out.
Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report backs this up from the ranking side. Primary GBP category remains the top local pack factor, followed by proximity and keywords in the business title, exactly as before. But the report has, for the first time, added a dedicated AI Search Visibility category, and three of its top five factors are citation and entity signals rather than traditional ranking inputs. Whitespark’s research also flags that simply being open when a customer searches, not just claiming to be, is now among the top five local pack factors, a detail first raised by local SEO analyst Joy Hawkins and since corroborated by a BrightLocal study showing rankings drop when a listing shows as closed.
The upshot for a business in Leeds, Edinburgh or Belfast is uncomfortable but simple. A profile filled in once, three years ago, with a logo and a handful of early reviews, is providing low-quality raw material to the exact AI systems now deciding who gets named to a prospective customer. Google’s own 2026 figures show GBP-driven actions, calls, directions requests and bookings, up 41% year on year, even as organic traffic from traditional listings declines. Discovery is migrating to the profile itself.
The counter-argument, and why it doesn’t hold
The obvious pushback is that with AI Overviews still appearing in a small minority of local searches, this is a problem for 2028, not 2026. Some 63% of businesses report that AI Overviews have already had a positive effect on their visibility or traffic, according to industry data, which suggests the upside is real for those paying attention rather than a purely defensive story.
That timing argument misreads the mechanism. Citation in an AI Overview depends on signals, review recency, photo freshness, structured data, consistent business details across the web, that take months to build, not days. A business starting from a stale profile when AI-driven local search adoption reaches a tipping point will be competing against rivals who spent the intervening period compounding exactly those signals. Waiting to see what happens is itself a competitive decision, just one made by default rather than intent.
Google still commands around 90% of global search share, and nothing in the AI Overviews data suggests that’s under threat. What’s changed is what sits behind the search box. For UK local businesses, the practical task hasn’t reinvented itself: complete profile, fresh photos, prompt review responses, accurate hours, structured markup. What’s changed is the cost of getting it wrong, and how quickly that cost is compounding.
Feature Image by FreePik
