Short answer: In one study of local searches, Google showed an AI Overview on 15% of queries where the person wanted a business, and a Local Pack (the map with three listings) on 93%. For question-style searches the numbers flip: AI Overviews on 92%, Local Packs on 6%. So the customer who types “roofing company near me” still lands on a map, and the customer who types “how much does a new roof cost” gets an AI answer.
That split is the useful thing to know if you run a dental office, an HVAC company, a restaurant, a lawn care crew or a shop in Northeast Indiana. It tells you where your Google Business Profile still does the heavy lifting and where your website content has to compete for a place inside an AI answer.
This post pulls together four sources: Whitespark's study of AI Overviews in local search, a contributor article in Entrepreneur on October 23, 2026 that put that study back in front of business owners, a North Alabama field study published October 20, 2026, and Local Falcon's March 2026 report on restaurants in ChatGPT. We mark the limits of each one, because none of them was run in Northeast Indiana.
Key Takeaways
- Whitespark's 540-query study found AI Overviews on an average of 15% of local-intent searches and Local Packs on 93%. For informational searches it was 92% and 6%.
- Across all query types in that study, AI Overviews appeared on an average of 68% of local business queries and Local Packs on 39%. Which one you see depends on how the customer words the search.
- A North Alabama field study saw Google show two local businesses more often (impressions up 107% and 36%) while clicks barely moved (up 16% and down 2%). It is three clients, not an experiment.
- In that study the Business Profiles were viewed 2.0 to 4.5 times as often as the websites were visited, for the two businesses where both were measured.
- ChatGPT is not yet a stand-in for Google for local discovery in the one large study we found, but 45% of consumers in BrightLocal's 2026 survey now use AI tools for local recommendations.
What Did Whitespark Find About AI Overviews in Local Search?
Whitespark is a local SEO software and research company. In its study, researchers collected results by hand in three large US cities (Houston, Phoenix and Denver) across six industries: plumbers, personal injury lawyers, dentists, optometrists, medical clinics and real estate agents. They ran 540 queries, 30 for each city and industry pairing, from outside those cities.
They split the queries into three kinds. A local query names a service and a place, such as “personal injury lawyers in Phoenix.” An informational query asks a question, such as “how much do personal injury lawyers charge in Phoenix.” A hybrid query sits between them, such as “should I get a lawyer after a car accident in Phoenix.”
What Showed Up, by Type of Search (Whitespark Averages)
- Local-intent searches: AI Overview on 15%, Local Pack on 93%.
- Informational searches: AI Overview on 92%, Local Pack on 6%.
- Hybrid searches: AI Overview on 97%, Local Pack on 17%.
- All queries combined: AI Overview on 68% (range 57% to 80% by industry and city), Local Pack on 39%.
Whitespark's own summary is that the two features have an inverse relationship by intent: where Local Packs are most common, AI Overviews are least common, and the other way around. Real estate agents were an outlier, with AI Overviews on as much as 50% of local-intent queries in that industry, which is a reminder that your own category may not match the average.
One honest note on timing. The Whitespark study page does not show a publication date that we could confirm, and it describes an Ahrefs study from 2025 as recent, so it likely predates this fall. It is back in the conversation because Entrepreneur ran a contributor article on October 23, 2026 that cites it and also cites Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, which describes local search as “insulated” from the AI disruption hitting informational publishers. That article is an opinion piece by a local SEO practitioner, so we use it as a pointer to the research and not as evidence on its own.
Whitespark also warns that its data set is limited and that the figures could vary for smaller towns. That caution matters here: Auburn, Kendallville and Angola are not Phoenix. We have not tested these searches in Northeast Indiana for this post.
Which of Your Customers' Searches Get a Map and Which Get an AI Answer?
The practical use of the study is to sort your own customers' searches into the three buckets. Below are examples we wrote to show each type for common Northeast Indiana businesses. They are our illustrations of the pattern, not queries we ran or results we measured.
Sorting Searches Into the Three Buckets (Our Examples)
- Local (expect a map): “dentist in Auburn Indiana,” “lawn care Fort Wayne,” “pizza near me,” “HVAC repair Kendallville.”
- Informational (expect an AI answer): “how much does a furnace replacement cost in Indiana,” “when to aerate a lawn in northeast Indiana,” “how long does a root canal take.”
- Hybrid (expect an AI answer, sometimes with a map): “should I replace my furnace or repair it,” “is a dental crown or a filling better.”
Notice what each bucket needs from you. A local search is decided by your Business Profile: how well it matches the search, how close you are and how well known you are. Google says exactly that. Its help page says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, that complete and accurate information helps Google match you to searches, and that prominence draws on things like how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. It also says plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
An informational or hybrid search is decided differently. The AI answer is assembled from pages around the web, and Whitespark looked at who got cited. In one small set it examined, nine hybrid searches about plumbers in Houston produced AI Overviews that cited 23 sources. About 60% of those citations pointed to third-party publishers such as Indeed, Reddit, Quora, ZipRecruiter, HomeGuide, Thumbtack and Yelp, and about 40% pointed to individual local businesses. That is one tiny sample, and Whitespark presents it as an example of how to check your own market, not as a rule.
What it does suggest is that a plain, honest page answering the question a customer actually asks (what it costs, how long it takes, when to do it) is your way into the AI-answer side. We covered the page-level side of this in The 300-Character GBP Field AI Overviews Read First (2026).
Why Is Google Showing Local Businesses More but Sending the Same Clicks?
On October 20, 2026, the agency Do It With You Marketing published what it calls its Search Everywhere Field Study, drawn from Google data on three of its own clients in North Alabama: a family practice, an independent pharmacy with two stores and an equipment rental company. It is a small, honest look at the same shift Whitespark describes, from the business side of the screen.
Impressions vs. Clicks, July 23 to October 14, 2026 vs. the Same Dates in 2025
- Equipment rental company: impressions 8,148 to 16,873 (up 107%). Clicks 886 to 1,024 (up 16%).
- Family practice: impressions 26,782 to 36,377 (up 36%). Clicks 2,154 to 2,120 (down 2%).
- Pharmacy: not comparable on the same window. On a different comparison, its monthly impressions were up 31% while clicks stayed flat at about 260 a month. On the matching July to October window, its impressions were actually down about 10%.
The study's authors read this as Google showing local businesses for more searches (the practice appeared for 2,260 different searches, up from 970; the rental company for 2,170, up from 1,054) while customers get more of their answer without clicking through. They offer a reason the rental company still gained clicks: its customers need prices, availability and the right machine, things a summary cannot settle. They label that as their interpretation, and so do we.
The national research the study cites points the same way. It reports a Pew Research Center finding from July 22, 2025 that people clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, versus 15% when it did not. It also cites an Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords from April 2025 that found the top ranking page's click rate was 34.5% lower when an AI Overview appeared. Whitespark cites the same Ahrefs figure. We did not re-fetch the Pew report for this post, so treat that number as reported secondhand.
The limits are the study's own, and they are real: three clients in one region, not a controlled experiment, measuring visibility and clicks and not revenue. We include it because it shows what the Whitespark numbers can look like inside a business's Search Console report, and because it will look familiar to anyone who has watched impressions climb while the phone stayed quiet. If you want the wider background, see our post on zero-click search.
Is Your Business Profile Now Your Front Door?
The same study compared how often each client's Business Profile was viewed with how often its website was visited, for May to mid October 2026. Where both were measured, the profile won by a wide margin.
Profile Views vs. Website Visits, May to Mid October 2026
- Pharmacy (main store profile): 8,067 profile views vs. 4,085 website visits across both stores, about 2.0 times.
- Equipment rental company: 14,312 profile views vs. 3,194 website visits, about 4.5 times.
- Family practice: 12,567 profile views, far above its Google search clicks (website visits were not measured).
Across the three clients, the study reports 34,946 profile views and 11,174 actions (calls, direction requests and website clicks) for May to mid October. It notes those figures cover only the pharmacy's main store and that Google exposes just six months of profile data, so there is no year-earlier comparison. Most profile views, 76% to 82%, came from mobile Google Search, with Google Maps supplying about 8% to 9%.
Their second finding is about who finds you. They measured how much of each site's search clicks came from people typing the business's own name: 98% for the pharmacy, 84% for the practice and 37% for the rental company. Their rule of thumb is that above roughly 80%, the website mostly serves people who already know you. The rental company is the opposite: 63% of its search clicks came from people who did not use its name, searching for things like “tool rental near me” and “equipment rental near me,” and it sat on average around position 1 and position 4 for those two searches.
For a Northeast Indiana owner, the lesson is not to abandon your website. It is that the website's job has shifted. It now supplies the facts that feed your profile and the AI answers: what you do, which towns you serve, your hours and the questions customers ask. The profile is where the customer meets you, and the website is what Google reads to decide whether you are the right match. We walked through the profile side in What 1.8M Google Business Profiles Reveal About Local SEO, and the map side in Fort Wayne Local SEO: When Google Maps Is the Destination (2026).
What About ChatGPT and the Other AI Assistants?
Customers are using them. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey reports that use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% last year to 45%, making AI the third most popular source of business recommendations. In the same survey, 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and Google's share as a review source dipped from 83% in 2025 to 71%, though it remains well ahead of other platforms.
Use is not the same as visibility, though. Local Falcon, a local-search software company, published a report on March 3, 2026 analyzing 189,905 ChatGPT search results alongside Google local results for restaurant queries. It found 83% of restaurants completely invisible on ChatGPT, compared with 14% invisible on Google. Put the other way, 86% of restaurants appeared in at least one Google local result and only 17% ever appeared in ChatGPT recommendations.
The caveats are large. The study covers restaurants only, it comes from a company that sells local rank-tracking software, and it measures how often a business appears, not whether a customer chose it. We did not use the other vendor figures it lists as “independent validation,” because we have not checked those sources. What we take from it is modest: for now, appearing in Google's local results is far more common than appearing in a ChatGPT recommendation, and the businesses that do appear in ChatGPT seem to have more reviews and higher ratings. Local Falcon says its data suggests ChatGPT favors businesses rated 4.5 stars and above more heavily than Google does.
We also looked at how often different engines agree with each other in ChatGPT and Gemini Pick Different Local Businesses (2026). The short version: treat AI assistants as an additional place to be found, and do not assume that being strong on Google carries over automatically.
What Should a Northeast Indiana Business Do This Week?
This is our own advice, built on the sources above and on Google's published help pages. It is not a guarantee of any ranking, and nothing here is a trick.
A Six-Step Plan
- Make the profile complete and true. Google says to verify your business and keep information current: address, hours (including special hours), category and details like parking. Make hours, phone and address match your website exactly.
- Reply to every review. Google says helpful replies show you value feedback, and prominence draws on review count and ratings. Our post on the owner confidence gap covers why many profiles go quiet.
- Add real photos. Google lists photos and videos as a way to show customers what you offer. Use your own crew, shop and finished work.
- Give each service and each town its own page. The field study's playbook recommends it, and the rental company that was found by non-name searches is the example. A page titled for one job in one town is easier for Google and for an AI answer to match than a single page that lists everything.
- Write the answer a customer would ask for. What does it cost, how long does it take, what happens first, what do you need from me. Plain answers in your own words are your way into the informational side. Do not copy an AI summary.
- Count calls and directions, not just clicks. Screenshot your Business Profile performance and your Search Console impressions and clicks each month. Google keeps only about six months of profile data, so your own record is the only long-term comparison you will have.
Two things to skip. First, do not add special “AI markup” hoping for a shortcut. The field study quotes Google's “AI Features and Your Website” page (last updated December 10, 2025) as saying no special markup or file is needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that structured data should match the visible text. Structured data is still worth getting right for clarity, but it is not a switch. Second, do not bet everything on one Google feature. Whitespark's own advice is that SERP features come and go and that no local business should tie its fate to any one of them.
The practical mix varies by business. A restaurant leans on photos, hours and menu accuracy. A lawn care or HVAC crew leans on service-area pages and fast review requests when a job closes. A dental or medical office has to be careful with review replies and with what it says about patients, which we covered in our healthcare review guide.
What Do We Still Not Know?
Quite a bit, and it is better to list it than to paper over it.
Open Questions
- What the split looks like in Northeast Indiana. Whitespark tested three big cities. Smaller towns may differ, and Whitespark says so.
- How current the numbers are. We could not confirm when the Whitespark study was run, and Google changes these features often.
- Whether more impressions turn into more customers. The field study measures visibility and clicks, not revenue, and its authors say so.
- How much the AI-answer side matters to a plumber or a dentist. If most of your customers search by name and service, the map side may be nearly all of your business today.
- Whether ChatGPT's local coverage will catch up. The restaurant gap is large now, but it is one category and one vendor's measurement.
- How long the current layout lasts. Whitespark's own warning is that Google is a yo-yo with its search features.
The honest summary is that for customers who already know they want a business, the map still does most of the work, and a complete, current, well-reviewed profile is how you win it. For customers still asking questions, the AI answer is increasingly the first thing they read, and your best response is useful pages in your own words. Both jobs matter, and neither can be bought or shortcut.
Want Help Sorting Your Map Searches From Your AI-Answer Searches?
Button Block helps Northeast Indiana businesses clean up a Google Business Profile, build service and town pages that answer real customer questions, and set up simple monthly tracking of calls, directions and clicks. We do not promise rankings, and we do not sell shortcuts.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do AI Overviews show up when someone searches for a local business?
- Rarely for plain local searches, often for question-style ones. In Whitespark's 540-query study of Houston, Phoenix and Denver, AI Overviews appeared on an average of 15% of local-intent queries, 92% of informational queries and 97% of hybrid queries. The study covered six industries in three large cities, so smaller Northeast Indiana markets may differ.
- Is the Google Local Pack still worth chasing in 2026?
- For searches where someone wants a business, yes. Whitespark found a Local Pack on an average of 93% of local-intent queries. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that complete, accurate Business Profile information helps. Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
- Why are my Google impressions up but my website clicks flat?
- It is a pattern, not necessarily a problem. A North Alabama field study by Do It With You Marketing found one equipment rental company's impressions up 107% and clicks up 16%, and a family practice's impressions up 36% with clicks down 2%, comparing July 23 to October 14, 2026 with the same dates in 2025. The study's authors read it as customers getting more of their answer on Google's own page. That is their interpretation, from three clients, not a proven rule.
- What should I measure instead of website clicks?
- Track Business Profile actions: calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile, alongside Search Console impressions and clicks. In the same field study, the profiles of the clients measured were viewed far more often than their websites were visited. Google keeps only about six months of profile performance data, so save your numbers regularly.
- Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses as often as Google does?
- Not in the one large study we found. Local Falcon, a local-search software company, compared 189,905 ChatGPT search results with Google local results for restaurant queries in a report dated March 3, 2026. It found 83% of restaurants invisible in ChatGPT and 14% invisible in Google. It covers restaurants only and comes from a vendor, so treat it as one data point.
- Do I need special markup to appear in Google's AI features?
- No. Google's "AI Features and Your Website" page, as quoted by the Do It With You Marketing study, says no special markup or file is needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that structured data should match the visible text on the page. Clear service pages and an accurate Business Profile do more than any special trick.
Sources & Further Reading
- Whitespark, “Case Study: The Prevalence of AI Overviews in Local Search”: whitespark.ca (read October 26, 2026; publication date not shown on the page): the 540-query method, the 15%, 92% and 97% AI Overview rates, the 93%, 6% and 17% Local Pack rates, the 68% and 39% averages, the real estate outlier and the Houston plumber citation sample.
- Entrepreneur, “AI Hasn't Cracked Local Search Yet. Here's Why That's an Opportunity for Local Businesses”: entrepreneur.com (Oct. 23, 2026, contributor opinion piece): the pointer to Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report and its “insulated” description of local search.
- Do It With You Marketing, “What three North Alabama businesses taught us about search in the AI era”: doitwithyoumarketing.com (Oct. 20, 2026): the impressions and clicks comparison, the Business Profile views vs. website visits, the name-search share and the quoted Pew, Ahrefs and Google statements. An agency's observation of three of its own clients, not a controlled study.
- Local Falcon, “The AI Visibility Crisis: Why 83% of Restaurants Don't Exist in ChatGPT”: localfalcon.com (March 3, 2026): the 189,905 ChatGPT results, the 83% and 14% invisibility figures and the 4.5-star observation. Vendor research, restaurants only.
- BrightLocal, “Local Consumer Review Survey 2026”: brightlocal.com (read October 26, 2026): 97% of consumers reading reviews, Google's share falling from 83% to 71%, and AI tools for local recommendations rising from 6% to 45%.
- Google, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”: support.google.com (read October 26, 2026): verification, keeping information current, replying to reviews, photos, the statement that you cannot request or pay for a better local ranking, and the relevance, distance and prominence factors.