AI and local SEO: what AI Overviews and chat assistants change for a local business

A homeowner in Marrickville types “how much does it cost to fix a burst pipe” into Google and gets an AI Overview before any result. Another asks a chat assistant for “a good emergency plumber in the Inner West” and gets three names. Neither saw a map pack first. This is the part of local search that changed in the last two years, and most advice about it is either panic or hype. What follows is what we see on the suburb sites we run ourselves in Australian cities: what the assistants quote, what they ignore, and the handful of changes that matter.

What has actually changed

Two things. First, Google shows AI Overviews on many informational local questions: cost, what to do, whether something is an emergency, whether a licence is needed. The Overview is written from pages Google already ranks and links to them. Second, chat assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot) answer “find me a…” questions with names, drawn from the open web, directories, review sites and the businesses’ own pages.

What has not changed: the search that is just a trade and a suburb (“plumber Marrickville”) still returns the map pack and the organic list; “near me” still comes from the Google Business Profile; and the customer still has to call or text somebody. Google’s own documentation on AI features says the same signals and the same best practices apply, with no special markup or setup for AI.

What the assistants quote

Reading the Overviews and the chat answers for the searches our sites rank for, the pattern is consistent. They quote:

• A direct answer, early. The price range, the first step, the yes-or-no, in the first lines of the page, not after four paragraphs of “welcome to our website”.
• Specifics. A cost in dollars for that city; the council or water provider; a job described step by step. Vague pages are summarised past.
• Structured answers. FAQ sections with real questions, numbered steps, short tables. FAQPage and Service markup make them easier to lift.
• Evidence from elsewhere. Reviews, a complete profile, mentions on other sites. The assistant naming a business is making a claim, and it prefers businesses it can corroborate.

They do not quote stock phrases, “about us” stories, or pages that mention a suburb without saying anything about it.

The seven changes that matter

1. Put the answer in the first lines

Every service and suburb page opens with the answer to the question in its title: what it costs here, what to do first, how long it takes. The rest of the page supports the answer. This is the single change that moves a page from “ranked” to “quoted”, and it also helps the human who was going to skim anyway.

2. Show real prices

AI answers to “how much” questions come from pages that state a number. A set price or a from-price per job, with what changes it, is both the most quoted content and the best-converting. “Call for a quote” gives the assistant nothing and gives the customer a reason to keep reading someone else’s page.

3. Write FAQs people actually ask, and mark them up

The questions customers ask before they book: after-hours, parking, strata, whether a licence is required, what to do while they wait. Written as questions, answered in two or three sentences, with FAQPage structured data. Our own suburb pages carry six to eight each, and they are the sections most often lifted into Overviews.

4. Keep Service and LocalBusiness data accurate

Service on each service page, LocalBusiness with the service areas you cover (not a street address you do not have), the same name and phone as the profile. Assistants cross-check; inconsistency makes you the business they leave out.

5. Make the Google Business Profile complete

Categories, service areas, hours, photos, a link to the matching page. For “find me a…” questions the profile is often the first source an assistant checks, and a half-finished one is a half-finished answer about you.

6. Earn reviews and mentions

Reviews are the evidence assistants use to say “well reviewed”; mentions on other sites (directories, suppliers, local news, associations) are the evidence that you exist and are known. The local SEO ranking factors article covers how prominence is built; it is the same work, and it now pays twice.

7. Write for a person, however you draft

Google’s guidance on helpful content is about whether the page is useful and reliable, not about how it was produced. Drafting with AI tools is fine; publishing generic AI text about a suburb is not, because it contains nothing that could only be true there, and both Google and the assistants can tell. Every suburb page we publish has local detail a resident would recognise, and prices and FAQs that are the business’s own.

What to stop worrying about

Special “AI SEO” markup (there is none), submitting your site to assistants (there is nowhere to submit it), and the idea that the map pack is gone (it is not). The businesses that get named by assistants are the ones that were already doing local SEO properly: real pages, real prices, real reviews, consistent listings. The work is the same; the pay-off is wider.

Where to start

Open your most important service page and read the first three lines. If they do not answer the question in the title with a price or a step, that is the first fix. The free audit does this for every page you have, in writing, within two business days, and shows which of your pages already appear in AI Overviews and which could.