Local SEO Best Practices
The thread begins on April 22nd, when Search Engine Journal flagged a webinar aimed squarely at multi-location brands trying to navigate Google's AI Overviews in local search. That's a specific and telling framing. Not "how to do local SEO" in the broad sense, but the particular headache of maintaining visibility across multiple cities when AI-generated summaries increasingly sit above traditional results — collapsing what used to be a ranked list into a single synthesised answer that may or may not include your business at all. For a brand with twenty locations, that's not an inconvenience; it's an existential visibility problem. Then, two weeks later on May 6th, the lens pulled back. A second webinar arrived aimed at small business owners asking a more fundamental question: whether they're even showing up in local search in the first place. The progression is instructive — from the sophisticated multi-location problem down to the baseline audit question that many smaller operators haven't yet answered.
If confirmed as a genuine shift in practitioner concern rather than simply webinar scheduling, this signals that AI Overviews are now creating a two-tier anxiety in local SEO. Larger brands are scrambling to understand how generative summaries aggregate their locations — whether one well-optimised flagship drowns out the others, or whether each location needs its own distinct content strategy to earn independent mention. Smaller businesses, meanwhile, face the older problem made newly urgent: if you haven't sorted your Google Business Profile, your citations, and your local signals, the AI has nothing credible to summarise about you. The second-order effect is that the gap between businesses doing local SEO seriously and those doing it casually may widen faster than it did under traditional ranking systems, because a bad local presence now risks complete invisibility rather than just a lower ranking.
Watch for Google publishing any formal guidance on how AI Overviews select and surface local business information — that would confirm whether the practitioner anxiety here reflects a real structural change or simply the industry's habit of worrying productively about everything Google does.
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