If you have read anything about search this year, you have seen the scary numbers. Zero-click searches now make up roughly two-thirds of all Google queries. Some publishers report losing 40 to 70 percent of their organic traffic in a single year. Read those headlines as a local plumber, electrician, roofer, or dentist and it is easy to conclude the website you paid for is already obsolete.
It is not. But the rules have shifted, and the businesses that understand exactly how are going to take share from the ones that panic or freeze.
Here is the part the headlines skip: almost all of those alarming numbers come from informational and publisher content, the "how to," "what is," and "best of" articles where an AI summary genuinely can answer the question on the page. A high-intent local search behaves very differently. When someone needs a service right now, they are not looking for a paragraph. They are looking for a business to call.
The Zero-Click Numbers Everyone Is Quoting
Zero-click searches, where the user gets their answer on Google without clicking anywhere, have climbed past 60 percent of all queries. When an AI Overview appears, clicks to the open web drop significantly. Those numbers are real.
But they are averages across every kind of search: weather, trivia, news, how-to articles. They tell you almost nothing about what happens when a homeowner types "emergency AC repair near me" at 9 p.m. in July.
Why Local Service Searches Are Different
Google still treats high-intent local searches as their own category. Multiple 2026 tracking studies show AI Overviews appear on direct "near me" service queries less than 10 percent of the time, compared to 70-plus percent on informational content. Google knows that for "plumber near me," people want a map result and a phone number, not an essay.
The local map pack still captures the largest share of clicks on a local results page. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your proximity to the searcher still do most of the heavy lifting for searches that actually book jobs. The searches most likely to turn into revenue are the ones least disrupted by AI so far.
The Catch: When AI Does Answer, It Names Fewer Businesses
When an AI Overview or AI Mode generates a local answer, it does not show ten options. It names a few, sometimes fewer than the traditional map pack, with more confidence. Getting named in that short list is the new version of ranking number one.
That answer is built from your Google Business Profile, your website, and your reviews. Google cross-references what your site says against what your Business Profile says to confirm you actually do what you claim. When those sources are complete, consistent, and current, the model names you. When they conflict or look stale, it names someone else.
This is the same dynamic that applies to getting recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, now playing out inside Google's own results.
What To Actually Do
None of this requires a rebuild. It requires tightening the signals Google's AI reads about your business, in rough order of impact:
- Make your Google Business Profile the source of truth. Complete every field: categories, services, service area, hours, attributes, photos. Treat it as a living feed, not a one-time setup.
- Keep reviews coming in. A steady stream of new reviews over any rolling 90-day window signals an active, trusted business far better than a large pile of old ones.
- Align your website with your profile. The services, cities, and descriptions on your site should match your Business Profile exactly. Conflicts cause the AI to hedge and name a competitor instead.
- Build real local depth. Specific service-and-city pages give the model clear, structured content to pull from for every market you serve.
- Add the machine-readable layer. Schema markup, clean site structure, and AI-crawler files make your site legible to the systems assembling the answers.
- Restructure your blog and FAQ content. Write for citation: clear questions, direct answers, structured formatting. These are the pages where AI Overviews hit hardest.
How To Know If It Is Working
Clicks alone no longer tell the full story. Watch Search Console impressions to see if you are being shown even without the click, track which queries trigger AI Overviews, and tie every lead back to its source in your CRM. Clean GA4 and conversion tracking is what turns "I think it is working" into "here is exactly what is working."
Where Metallic Media Group Fits
This is the layer we build into every engagement: a complete, consistent Business Profile; a fast website whose services and locations match it exactly; structured local pages for every market you serve; AI-crawler files most agencies have never heard of; and full-funnel tracking so you can see what the AI surfaces are doing to your pipeline.
If your traffic has dipped and you are not sure whether AI is the cause, or whether you are even showing up when a customer asks, that is a conversation worth having now. Most of your competitors are still reading the scary headlines and doing nothing.