The question I get most often about AI search is some version of “does my business show up in it?” That is the right thing to worry about, but it skips a question that comes first, which is whether an AI answer appears on the searches your customers use at all. For a local business the answer is mostly no. Where it is yes, the answer usually quotes somebody other than you.
The searches that show an AI answer are not the ones that show a map
Whitespark ran 540 queries across Houston, Phoenix, and Denver in six industries. They then sorted the results by what the searcher was trying to do, and sorted that way, the numbers give us something useful.
Searches with obvious local intent are the “plumber near me” kind. On those, an AI Overview appeared 15% of the time, and the map pack appeared 93% of the time. The map pack is the block of three business listings with the map beside it, and it is still what a “near me” search returns.
Informational searches are the ones phrased as questions. On those, an AI Overview appeared 92% of the time and the map pack 6%.
Hybrid searches carry both. On those, an AI Overview appeared 97% of the time, and the map pack 17%.
Averaged across all of it, 68% of queries returned an AI Overview, and 68% is the number that usually gets quoted. The average hides the useful part. Where one of these two features dominates, the other recedes. The searches that turn into a phone call still go to the map. The AI answer has taken over the questions people ask on the way there.
That study was run in May 2025, so I would treat the exact percentages as dated. The split between the query types is what I would still plan around.
Most of the citations point at somebody else’s website
Whitespark also looked closely at one set of hybrid searches. In that sample, 60% of the sources the AI answer linked to were third-party publishers, and 40% were individual businesses. The pages getting quoted are roundups, directories, association listings, and forum threads that other people wrote about businesses like yours.
If the plan was to win the answer with your own site, that is bad news. If you treat it as a question of where your business gets mentioned, it is workable. Getting named on those pages is a job most local businesses have never deliberately worked at.
The page an AI cites often does not rank for the question it answers
Yoyao Hsueh of Digital Surfer previewed a study on August 29. It covers 29,319 queries and 354,955 instances of an AI answer pointing at a website, across AI Overviews, Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini. For each one, he checked whether the page being quoted was in the top 20 Google results for that same search.
Often it was not. For ChatGPT, the page was missing from the top 20 71.9% of the time. For AI Mode, 52.4%. For Gemini, 41.1%. For AI Overviews, 40.2%.
The full study has not been released yet, so what I am passing along is the author’s own preview of his numbers rather than something we can check today.
His second finding is the one to act on. Most of those citations went to sites that did rank somewhere else in the same subject area. An AI engine takes a question, breaks it into smaller ones, searches those, and quotes what it finds along the way. A site that covers a subject properly gets picked up on questions it never targeted. A site with a single page on that subject gets passed over.
An engine given a question searches several narrower ones on its way to an answer, and quotes what it finds on each. A site with forty pages across a subject is eligible on all of those searches; a site with one page is eligible on one of them.
That kind of coverage has a name: topical authority. You map the complete set of questions people ask in your field, answer all of them, and link the answers together so each page supports the ones around it. The idea predates AI answers by years. What has changed is the payoff, since an engine that splits a question into smaller ones is looking for exactly the pages that coverage produces.
It is more work than it sounds. A map we drew for Ottawa real estate ran to 143 entries across four levels, and its neighbourhood branch alone lists 53 places inside the city that buyers search by name. That is one branch of six. We sell that work as Own Your Market, in three tiers, so you can take the map and build from it yourself, or have the pages written, linked, audited, and published.
What this changes about the work
Three things, in the order I would spend money on them.
- Keep funding the profile and the map listings. Nothing in this research says pull back. Local-intent searches still returned a map pack 93% of the time, and that is where the phone call comes from.
- Write for the question that comes before the booking. If you run a lodge, the AI answer is not showing up on “lodge in Talkeetna.” It is showing up on “when is the best week to see the northern lights” and “do I need a guide for that.” A page that answers the second one well is what puts you in front of the person who is about to ask the first.
- Get your business named on other people’s pages. Local best-of roundups, chamber and association listings, industry directories, and press coverage. It is slow work that does not feel like SEO, and third-party pages were 60% of the sources in the sample above.
None of this replaces what is already working. It adds a second place where customers meet your business, and that place behaves differently from the one we know. I think the accounts that do well over the next year will be the ones that keep both.
If you would like to see where your business currently gets cited in AI answers, we can run that check on your account. Reply and ask, and it will go in with your next report.
