AI Overviews and Local Search: What Changes for Contractors

Type a question into Google today and the first thing on the page is often not a link. It is a paragraph written by Google’s AI, an AI Overview, with a few source links beside it. Contractors are right to ask what that does to the clicks their websites used to get.

The honest answer has two parts. For some searches you will get fewer clicks. For the searches that actually hire a contractor, Google’s own advice points to the two things that always mattered: your Business Profile, and a page that answers the homeowner’s real question.

What an AI Overview is, in Google’s words

Google’s Search Help describes AI Overviews as “an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper.” They appear “when our systems determine that generative AI can be especially helpful,” and the same page warns that “AI responses may include mistakes.” Searchers cannot switch them off (“Features cannot be turned off”), though a Web filter after a search shows only text links.

Google’s guide for site owners, AI features and your website, adds two details. AI Overviews and AI Mode, a separate mode Google calls “particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed,” may use a “query fan-out” technique, “issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources,” to build an answer. And AI Overviews “are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don’t trigger.”

What the research found about clicks

An independent look at the effect comes from the Pew Research Center. It analyzed the browsing of 900 U.S. adults who agreed to have it tracked during March 2025: 68,879 unique Google searches, of which 12,593 produced an AI summary. What it found:

• About 18% of the searches produced an AI summary.
• On search pages with a summary, people clicked a traditional result link on 8% of visits. On pages without one, they did so on 15%.
• People clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits to pages that had one.
• People ended their browsing session after 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% of pages with only traditional results.

For a contractor, the more useful finding is which searches got a summary. Just 8% of one- or two-word searches did, against 53% of searches of ten words or more. Of searches that began with question words such as “who,” “what,” “when” or “why,” 60% got one, and so did 36% of searches written as full sentences.

Two cautions. Pew looked at everything people searched for, not service searches in particular, so it does not say how often a short search for a trade and a town draws a summary. And Google reads the click question differently: its guide says that “when people click from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site).” That is Google’s own claim about its own product; weigh it as such.

Two kinds of searches, two different effects

Split the searches that reach a contractor’s site into two piles.

Research searches. “How long does a water heater last,” “why is my AC blowing warm air,” “what does a new roof cost.” They are long and often phrased as questions, the kind Pew found most likely to bring a summary. If your site drew visitors with a general how-to article, expect some of those readers to get their answer on Google’s page and never visit. Ask how many jobs that traffic ever booked: someone asking why a furnace clicks may only want to know whether to worry.

Hiring searches. “Furnace repair,” “fence company near me,” “emergency plumber” and a town. Short, local, and typed by someone who wants a business, not an explanation. That person is choosing between companies, and what they choose from is your Business Profile listing, your reviews and the page they land on when they tap through.

So the useful question is not whether AI takes your traffic. It is which traffic, and whether that traffic ever turned into jobs.

What Google says to do, and what not to bother with

Google’s guidance is short: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. The rest is ordinary search practice. Google’s own list includes allowing crawling, “making your content easily findable through internal links on your website,” “making sure that important content is available in textual form,” supporting the text with high-quality images and videos, making sure structured data matches the visible text, and “checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date.”

Google’s newer guide to generative AI search (last updated July 10, 2026) says more about the Business Profile: “Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.” It also lists what you do not need:

• “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search,” because “Google Search itself doesn’t use them.”
• “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”
• “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.” The guide still calls it a good idea as part of ordinary search work; Local Business Structured Data covers what it can and cannot do.

And one warning worth printing out: “Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use ‘internal’ Google metrics.” If someone is selling you a special AI file or AI markup for Google, show them that guide.

The page a summary cannot replace

The same guide asks for “non-commodity content.” Its example of the commodity kind is “something like ‘7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers’,” content “often based on common knowledge, which could originate from anyone.” Non-commodity content “provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary.”

A summary can repeat common knowledge. It cannot know what only you know:

• What a typical job of yours costs, and what moves the price up or down.
• The towns you actually serve, and how soon you can get there this month.
• Your license number, your insurance and your warranty terms.
• Photos of your own finished work.
• The questions customers really ask on the first call, answered the way you answer them.

Put those on your service pages, in text rather than only in images, and the homeowner who taps through from a summary or the map has something to act on. The Website Pages a Contractor Needs covers which pages to build, and Should a Contractor Blog? covers when an article earns its keep. For the listing itself, Google Business Profile for Contractors walks through the setup.

How to see what is happening to your site

You do not have to guess. Google says sites that appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode “are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console,” in the Performance report under the “Web” search type. Since August 31, 2026, Search Console has also had a Generative AI performance report for all websites. It shows impressions only, which Google defines as “how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search,” grouped by page, country, date and device. It does not show clicks, and Google says the report usually does not appear until a site has had enough of those impressions.

Read the two together. If a how-to page shows plenty of AI impressions while its clicks in the Performance report fall, the summary is probably answering for you. If your service pages hold their clicks, the hiring searches are fine. Search Console for Contractors explains the Performance report if you have not opened it before.

Should you opt out?

Search Console now has a “Search generative AI control” under Settings. If you exclude your site, “links to your site and your site’s content won’t appear in Search generative AI features,” which covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. Google says the control “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search,” so your normal listings stay. It also says “Content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours.”

For most contractors, then, opting out likely means the summary cites a competitor or a directory instead of you. It is a choice that suits a publisher whose product is the article. A contractor’s article is there to win a job, and a link in the summary is one more way to be seen.

A checklist for this month

1. Open Search Console and look for the Generative AI performance report. Note which of your pages appear in it.
2. Compare this year’s clicks with last year’s for your how-to pages and your service pages separately.
3. Check that every service page states your price range or what moves it, your service area, and your license and insurance, in plain text.
4. Bring your Business Profile up to date: hours, service area, categories, and a recent photo of real work.
5. Turn down anyone selling AI files or special markup for Google. Google says its search does not use them.

If the first question your customers ask is the price, and you want your pages to answer it on the spot, NapkinPrice™ puts an instant price range from your own pricing rules on your website, so the homeowner who taps through from a summary or the map sees a price range instead of only a contact form.