AI Is Shaking Things Up, But Local SEO Isn’t Going Anywhere
There’s no doubt about it. The way people search online has changed – not always for the better, but certainly in a manner that is fundamentally different from what we have seen before.
Gone are the days when simply optimizing your Google Business Profile will get you the increased visibility we all are seeking for our businesses. People are now using not just Google text queries but also AI Overviews, voice search, ChatGPT, and countless other AI tools to ask questions more conversationally. Keywords alone will no longer do it.
“What senior living communities near me have good reviews?”
“Who is the best general practitioner near me for nervous patients?”
“Which local retirement community can handle a same-day tour of their grounds?”
The good news from this, though, is that even when AI delivers the answer, it still needs reliable local information to pull from. One thing that AI search cannot do on its own is to locate these local spots in the “real world” and determine which ones are best for the human searcher. We need other humans to make these results meaningful.
Why Does Local SEO Still Matter?
Local SEO is still the best way to help search engines and AI tools understand key elements about a local business:
- What the business is. People who are searching need to still understand that this is the kind of business they are searching for.
- What services a business offers. AI cannot provide this information on its own; especially when services offered can change over time, sometimes in very short time periods.
- Where the business is located. Proximity to the person searching will always factor into their decision-making.
- What areas a business serves. Again, this is additional fluid information that can change for a business as it grows.
- Whether customers trust the business. The best source of whether a business meets the requirements of a particular human’s search is, ultimately, other humans.
With the addition of AI into our regular, daily online lives, it has become clearer that local SEO is no longer just about being able to rank in traditional search results. Local SEO has basically become about making sure AI actually knows who you are and trusts what it finds, not just getting Google to rank you. And, ultimately, AI cannot recommend (through AI Overviews, for example) a business it does not understand.
Google Business Profiles And Reviews Are More Important Than Ever
When combined with reviews, Google Business Profiles are now more important than they have ever been. The use of GBP is not declining. Rather, to rank locally, it is expanding, making it necessary for businesses to include additional measures of trust and authority that will ultimately help them to appear in additional AI-powered search results.
It has become even more important to optimize and maintain your GBP. For a full listing that will keep your business eligible for AI search results, your first step should be to ensure that your GBP contains:
- Your correct business category
- Updated hours of operation
- Services provided
- Recent and engaging photos of the business
- The location or service area of the business
- Active review responses
The reviews on your profile are used by not just people looking for your business, but also by AI, which needs to understand your business. The better the quality of the reviews and the more active the business is in responding to those reviews, the more AI will consider the business to be of high quality.
Bottom line: AI is picky, and it rewards businesses that actually put in the work to look credible.
The language of the review, and the wording of how a business responds to those reviews, can help to reinforce to AI important local and service-related signals.
So, a business needs to recognize that reviews are not just testimonials. Reviews are also valuable trust signals.
Helpful Local Content Gives AI Better Answers
As mentioned before, keywords alone will no longer accomplish your goals. A business basically needs to “step up their game” to provide more. But, more what, exactly?
More useful content. And more specific content that is relevant to the business. Broad content can be entertaining or theoretical. Specific content is who you are as an entity.
Leave the broad content for the philosophy textbooks. Instead, focus on becoming the source of information that makes your business an expert in your field.
Finding and responding to questions from real customers will help with your content mapping. Some questions you may see from customers or clients might be:
- “How much does this service cost in my area?”
- “What should I expect during an initial appointment?”
- “How do I choose the right community to move into?”
- “What are some of the local factors I should consider when making a decision?”
The answers are unique and not broad – they are specific to your business.
AI doesn’t want to just see these being addressed in a monthly or weekly blog post, either. While blogs are fantastic at helping to nail down the specifics of what a business provides, it’s important not to neglect service pages, FAQ sections, and location pages. All of these are important when tying your business to specific localities.
And while making these pages more targeted to your local audience, you also need to always remember the most important element in all of this: Write content for real people first.
While creating the content, though, you can then focus on explaining the business itself, which is what search engines and AI are trying to understand better.
If Your Info Is All Over the Place, AI Will Notice
AI is basically a fact-checker that never sleeps. It’s constantly pulling from dozens of sources and comparing notes. It takes information from many different places and compares them as a way to help determine which of those places get to be featured in their search results. If your business has a weak overall profile across these metrics, or if they don’t match, you can expect AI’s overall confidence of your business to weaken and diminish over time. And that means no mentions in search results for you.
Set a calendar reminder every few months to go through all your listings. You’d be surprised how often something’s drifted out of date without you noticing.
- Google Business Profile
- Your website, including the use of schema throughout
- Bing Places (yes, this is still a thing)
- Apple Business Connect
- Yelp!
- Industry directories
- Whatever social media outlets where you maintain a profile
When all your listings tell the same story, AI stops second-guessing you – and that’s when things start clicking.
Local SEO Is The Foundation For AI Visibility
So, how does local SEO look in the current landscape of an AI world forcing its way into our businesses in new and sometimes frightening ways? While the naysayers will tell you that local SEO is on the way out the door, the truth is that businesses wanting to acquire and maintain visibility within AI would be foolish to drop it at all.
Honestly, AI didn’t change the rules so much as it made the old rules impossible to ignore – sloppy local info was always a problem, now it just kills you faster.
Any business that invests in local SEO will be better positioned to appear not just in traditional search and map results, but also in AI summaries and recommendation-style answers from search engines.
We’re past the point where just ranking was enough. AI has completely changed what ‘showing up’ even means. It’s not just about showing up anymore. You want AI to actually vouch for you, and that takes real, consistent effort.
About the Author
Michael Beck joined Christian Living Communities in 2022 as a Website and SEO Specialist and was promoted to a Website and SEO Analyst soon after. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of North Texas.
Michael became fascinated with the internet since he first logged on some time around 1985. He has more than 30 years of experience in website technology, ranking on search engines, and creating and maintaining a web presence for businesses. He enjoys playing video games, listening to music, and spending time with his labrador, Ruby.
