How AI Search Changed Everything
AI Overviews Now Answer "Best Near Me". Here Is What They Are Built From.
Google's AI answers are live in the UK, and ChatGPT and Perplexity answer local questions too. What those answers are made of, what has been measured about clicks, and what to do.
7 min readBy Mavlo
Type "best dentist near me" into Google in Leicester and you may now get, above the map, a paragraph written by Google's AI. It names three or four practices, says a sentence about each, and links out. Ask ChatGPT the same question and it does something similar, with different names. This is live in the UK, it is changing month by month, and it is worth understanding before anyone sells you a fix for it.
This piece is about what those answers are made of. Not the theory, the ingredients. Once you know what they pull from, most of the advice writes itself, and a fair amount of what you are already doing for local search turns out to be the same work.
What is actually live in the UK
Google brought AI Overviews to the UK in August 2024. That is the summary that sits at the top of some results pages. In July 2025 it added AI Mode, a separate tab where you type a question in full sentences, get a written answer with links, and can keep asking. By April 2026, AI Mode in the UK could book you a restaurant table through partners such as OpenTable and ResDiary. That last one tells you where this is heading for local businesses: the assistant is being taught to finish the task itself.
Outside Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity will both answer "where should I get my boiler serviced in Oadby" with a list of named businesses. They are not using Google's index. They use their own crawls, licensed data and live web searches, which is why the names differ from one assistant to the next. There is no single list to get onto.
What the answer is built from
Google publishes a page for site owners on how AI Overviews and AI Mode work. The main thing it describes is a technique called query fan-out: for one question, the system runs several related searches across subtopics and data sources, then writes an answer from what comes back and links to the pages it used. For "best dentist near me" that fan-out plausibly includes the local map results, practice websites, review text, and any page that already ranks with a list of Leicester dentists.
The same page is unusually plain about what you should do. It says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features. What it does list is ordinary housekeeping: structured data that matches the visible text on the page, and Business Profile information that is kept up to date.
Google's own line on it
"There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." That is from Google's documentation for site owners. Anyone selling you an AI Overviews package is selling normal local search work with a new label. That is not always a bad thing, but you should know it.
For the local part of the answer, the ingredients are the ones Google has used for years. Its Business Profile help page says local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, where prominence is "based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have". An AI Overview for a local query is, in large part, a paragraph written on top of that map ranking. If your profile is thin, the paragraph has nothing to say about you.
What happens to clicks
The honest answer is: fewer, on the kinds of searches that get a summary. Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits; without one, 15%. Links inside the summary itself were clicked on 1% of visits. And 26% of visits with a summary ended right there, against 16% without. Only 18% of searches in the study produced a summary at all.
Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords and found that where an AI Overview appeared, the top-ranking page's clickthrough rate was 34.5% lower than for similar informational keywords without one. Their follow-up in February 2026 put the gap at 58%.
Two caveats before you panic. Both studies looked at informational searches, the "how do I" and "what is" kind, and Pew's panel was American. Nobody has published a clean measurement of "plumber near me" in the UK. And the click was never the point for a local business; the phone call or the visit is. If an assistant says your name, your hours and your street, and someone walks in, no analytics tool records that. What you can say for sure is that being the name in the paragraph matters more than it did, because fewer people are scrolling past it.
What a small business can actually do
Four things. None of them are new, and all of them are worth more than they were two years ago.
- Be one entity everywhere. Same name, same address, same phone number, same opening hours on your website, your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and every directory you appear in. Assistants build a picture of you by cross-referencing sources. When "Oakfield Dental" on one site is "Oakfield Dental Practice Ltd" on another with a different postcode, the machine has to guess whether that is one practice or two. It may guess wrong, or leave you out.
- Put facts on your own site in a form a machine can read. Not a PDF price list, not opening hours baked into an image. Plain text on the page, plus structured data that says the same thing: the business type, address, hours, phone, services. Google's guidance is specific that the markup must match what a visitor sees. If the schema says you open at 8 and the page says 9, you have taught it to distrust you.
- Get reviews that mention specifics. "Great service" tells an assistant nothing it can use. "Fitted a new combi boiler in Oadby in a day and left the kitchen spotless" gives it a service, a place and a reason to pick you when someone asks for exactly that. You cannot script your customers, but you can ask them to say what you did.
- Be on the pages that already get cited. Run a few local queries and note which sites the assistants link to. They are often not the businesses themselves. They are the pages that list and compare them: directories, local press, "best of" roundups. Being listed on those pages, with your facts correct, is how you appear in the source the answer is written from. This is the local version of what backlinks were always for, and it is most of what being cited by an AI comes down to.
Ask the assistant about yourself
Here is a twenty-minute exercise worth doing this week. Open Google, switch to the AI Mode tab, and type what a customer would type: "good emergency dentist in Leicester city centre", "plumber in Oadby who does boiler repairs", "dog groomer near Clarendon Park". Read the answer. Note which businesses it names, then click the links and note which pages it took those names from. Do the same in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
You are looking for a few things. Are you named? If not, are your competitors, and what do the sources say about them that they do not say about you? And which pages keep turning up as sources across all three assistants? That last list is your to-do list. If a directory or a local roundup is being cited for your category and you are not on it, that is the cheapest thing to fix. If you are named but the hours or the address are wrong, trace the wrong fact back to the page it came from and correct it at the source.
Do this again in three months. The answers change, and knowing how they change for your category is worth more than any general rule.
Nobody has a formula
It is worth being straight about how much is unknown. Google's documentation describes the inputs, not the weights. The click studies are about a different kind of search, and the biggest one is American. ChatGPT and Perplexity publish less still. The people most confident about "ranking in AI" are usually the people selling it.
What holds up is this. Every assistant is writing from sources. The sources for a local query are your profile, your website, your reviews, and the third-party pages that list you. Making all of those accurate, consistent and specific is the same work good local search always asked for. Every Mavlo listing carries structured facts in the format these systems read, but the principle is bigger than any one directory: be findable, be consistent, and be described in enough detail that a machine can tell someone why they should choose you.
The short version
- Google says there are no special requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode. The inputs are Business Profile data, web pages, reviews and structured data.
- Where AI summaries appear, clicks fall. Pew measured 8% of visits against 15%; Ahrefs measured 34.5%, then 58%, lower clickthrough for top pages. Both studied informational searches, not local ones.
- Be one consistent entity, publish machine-readable facts on your own site, collect reviews with specifics, and get listed on the pages assistants already cite.
- Search your own category in AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity. The pages that get cited are your to-do list.
Be the answer, not just a result
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