AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Local Search: What Changed in 2025–2026

What Are Google AI Overviews, and How Have They Changed Since 2025?

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summary panels that appear above traditional search results, pulling from multiple sources to answer a query directly on the results page. They have gone from occasional to routine in about a year: AI Overviews triggered on approximately 48% of tracked queries as of February 2026, up from roughly 31% in February 2025, a 58% increase (BrightEdge, 2026). Google built out the format around that growth, expanding AI Mode, a fully conversational search experience, and adding “preferred sources” that let users flag trusted publishers, whose links are then twice as likely to get clicked inside an AI response; a “highly cited” label now also appears on web articles across regular search results, not only inside AI Mode, rewarding original reporting that other outlets reference (Search Engine Land, 2026).

• Presence still varies month to month; one nine-month tracking study found AI Overview traffic peaked at 16% to 17% of organic sessions in February and March 2026 before falling back to single digits (Search Engine Land, 2026).

How Do AI Overviews Affect Click-Through Rates for Local Businesses?

Click-through rates roughly halve when an AI Overview appears, which changes how a business should measure search performance and read its own analytics. Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches from a panel of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found that users clicked a traditional search result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it did not, nearly double; of the clicks that did happen, only 1% went to a source actually cited inside the AI summary itself (Pew Research Center, 2025).

• Zero-click searches, meaning the user never clicks any result, reached 68.01% of U.S. Google searches in the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, per Similarweb clickstream data analyzed by SparkToro (Search Engine Land, 2026).
• Users were more likely to end their search session entirely after seeing an AI summary: 26% of those visits ended the session, compared with 16% when no summary appeared (Pew Research Center, 2025).

How Often Do AI Overviews Appear in Local Search Results Specifically?

Local search behaves differently than search overall, and the gap is wide enough to change where a small business puts its efforts. AI Overviews now appear on 68% of local searches, compared with 39% that still surface a traditional local pack, and the split shifts further by query type (Whitespark, via Search Engine Journal, 2026).

• Informational near-me queries, such as “how long does an eye exam take near me,” triggered an AI Overview 92% of the time.
• Hybrid-intent local queries, such as pricing questions tied to a city name, triggered an AI Overview 97% of the time.
• Simple transactional searches, such as “tacos San Francisco,” are the exception, still favoring the traditional local pack over an AI Overview (Whitespark, via Search Engine Journal, 2026).

What Happened to FAQ Rich Results in Google Search?

Google discontinued FAQ rich results, the expandable question-and-answer snippets that used to appear directly in search listings. FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026, with Search Console API support ending in August 2026, and Google gave no public explanation beyond a deprecation notice in its developer documentation (Search Engine Journal, 2026). This is the final phase of a pullback that started in 2023, when Google first limited FAQ rich results to government and health sites, before cutting the feature for everyone in 2026.

How Has ChatGPT Changed the Way People Find Local Businesses?

ChatGPT’s user base grew fast enough over 2025 and 2026 that it now represents a meaningful discovery channel alongside Google, even though its role in local search specifically is still forming. ChatGPT reached approximately 900 million weekly active users worldwide by February 2026, more than double the 400 million reported a year earlier, and about 34% of U.S. adults reported having used it as of June 2025, nearly double the 18% who had tried it in July 2023, with adoption highest among adults ages 18 to 29 at 58% (Backlinko, 2026, citing Pew Research Center).

• AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 138% year over year in May 2026 and converted 54% better than non-AI traffic, based on Adobe Analytics tracking of more than 1 trillion U.S. retail site visits (Digital Commerce 360, citing Adobe Analytics, 2026). Adobe’s data covers retail purchase journeys rather than local service search, but it shows the same shift: AI referral traffic is no longer a rounding error.
• Independent analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT responses found that 44.2% of citations pull from the first 30% of a page, meaning ChatGPT tends to answer, and cite, from the top of a well-structured page (Kevin Indig’s analysis, via Search Engine Journal, 2026).

What Should Local Businesses Change for AI Overviews Optimization?

BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey examined AI search visibility as a distinct category for the first time and found the same fundamentals still matter, weighted differently than in traditional local pack rankings (BrightLocal, 2026).

Based on this data, here are a few priorities local businesses should change for AI overview optimizations:

• Keep name, address, and phone number (NAP) identical across your Google Business Profile, directories, and website; large language models draw on local citations, reviews, and social channels to answer local queries, and citation consistency is becoming more important, not less (BrightLocal, 2026).
• Treat reviews as an AI Overviews optimization input as well as a trust signal for human readers; reviews carry the second-highest weight in the 2026 AI visibility factor breakdown.
• Structure page content around the direct questions customers ask, since 92% to 97% of informational and hybrid-intent local queries already surface an AI Overview rather than a local pack (Whitespark, via Search Engine Journal, 2026).

Does FAQ Schema Still Matter if Google Removed FAQ Rich Results?

Yes. Removing FAQ rich results changed what appears visually in Google’s results, not whether FAQPage schema is useful. Google’s own FAQ structured data documentation confirms the markup remains valid and “won’t cause problems” for a site, even though it no longer produces a visible rich result (Search Engine Journal, 2026).

FAQPage schema still gives AI systems a clean, structured question-and-answer format that supports extraction into AI Overviews and chat-based answers even without the on-page rich snippet, so the practical shift is one of purpose: FAQ schema in 2026 serves AI Overviews optimization and AI citation, not a decorative snippet on the results page.

What Content Formats Get Cited Most by AI Overviews and ChatGPT?

Format and freshness both influence whether a page gets cited, independent of the business’s size or ad budget. Ahrefs analyzed 17 million AI citations and found AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher on average than content that ranks well through traditional means, and structure counts too (Ahrefs, via Search Engine Journal, 2026).

• Structured comparison tables in HTML outperformed other formats for AI citation in a nine-month tracking study of more than 51,000 citation events; pricing details and structured comparisons were cited more consistently than general narrative sections (Search Engine Land, 2026).
• Only 23% of AI citations came from a brand’s own website; 77% came from external sources, with Reddit accounting for 21% of citations and YouTube 18.8%, per Omniscient Digital’s analysis of more than 23,000 citations (Search Engine Journal, 2026).

Search behavior changed twice over in 18 months: once when AI Overviews became a daily presence in Google results, and again when ChatGPT crossed 900 million weekly users. A Napa business built for one search era is now competing in a different one. WSI Next Gen Marketing's Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) services build AI Overviews optimization into the same structured content, citation, and schema work covered in this hub, layered on top of the foundational search engine optimization (SEO) work every local business still needs. Schedule a consultation to see where your business currently stands in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT results.