Local SEO in 2026, AI Visibility Tracking & Google Review Bugs | E40 The Whitespark Local Update

You have prepared your links.

So I will ask you to kick off with number one, please.

Sure thing.

So the first article that I wanted to talk about or bring up, and this is in the local flavor, is Sterling Sky's state of local SEO report.

And the core thesis of SEO isn't dying.

It's just customer behavior.

Consumer behavior is just kind of shifting.

And big players like Google are forcing that shift a little bit.

So the article talks about how we're seeing drops and, you know, click the calls from Google business profiles, what's going on in terms of increased traffic or increased adoption for things like chat GPT, etc.

how much attribution is even there, you know, when people are using these LLMs like ChatGPT, what Google's doing to kind of further this in terms of, we all know the AI overviews, they're popping up on nearly all searches now.

They've started rolling those into The local results even more and more now.

So we're seeing that.

And the flavor, the style of what gets shown in these AI overviews, especially for local and what used to be the traditional map pack, it's just different.

Same with the changing of the UI.

Sometimes they're showing the call button less.

So if they're showing less CTAs, then obviously there's going to be less clicks there.

And it's not necessarily that you're falling or you're ranking worse or performing worse or you've done anything wrong.

It's just Google has changed what they're displaying.

And if they went from three businesses to two, that's going to affect a lot of people.

What else was there? More ads, different ads.

Yeah.

That is always going to throw a wrench in people's plans if you're not participating in that arena.

And it's unfortunate to say that it's kind of becoming more of a pay to play.

If there's more paid real estate than there is organic real estate, then that just means if you really, really want to show up in that spot and have as much visibility, you have to try and figure out some type of profitable way that you could get into the paid real estate there.

And so there's, you know, a lot of different things going on for business owners, especially in local in terms of AI and Google just integrating AI into pretty much all their products.