AI Overviews now appear in 68% of local business-type queries. The local pack you have spent a decade trying to top shows up in 39%. That 29-point gap, from a Whitespark study in Search Engine Journal, separates where local businesses optimise from where the answer appears. One agency across 15+ client markets reports clients ranking well in the local pack and invisible in AI answers.
Roughly 42% of UK searches now carry an AI-generated summary, concentrated in advice and informational queries. Transactional searches are less affected, so this depends on what your customers type.
An AI Overview is the block Google writes above the results, pulling sentences from a handful of sites it trusts and linking to them.
This guide to how to appear in Google AI Overviews is eight steps. Most cost nothing but time, several can be briefed to a web person. One honest limit: non-branded informational click-through is down roughly 20% where these boxes appear. The goal is being named, not 2023 click volume.
The first job isn’t fixing anything. It’s finding which of your searches produce a box.
Step 1: Work Out Which of Your Searches Actually Trigger an AI Overview
The trigger rate isn’t one number. It swings with how the customer phrases the question, and most owners test the wrong phrasing.
“Tacos San Francisco” mostly returns the old local pack. “How long does an eye exam take near me” returns an AI Overview 92% of the time. “Average cost of dental implants in Phoenix”, cost plus location, hits 97%.
Your trade has the same shapes: “how much does a boiler service cost in Leeds”, “how long does a damp survey take near me”. UK queries already returning boxes include “mortgage advice near me” and “rabbit insurance cost”.
The twenty-minute job:
- Write down the ten questions customers ask you on the phone before they book.
- Phrase them as the customer says them, not as a marketer would. People Also Ask and AnswerThePublic show the wording real people use if you run dry.
- Add your town to each one.
- Search each on a phone in an incognito window and tick the ones that return an AI answer box.
Expect variation by trade. Legal queries trigger AI Overviews almost regardless of geography, home services vary, restaurants and retail still lean on the local pack. A takeaway gets less out of this than a solicitor.
Best for: trades whose customers research cost or timescale before ringing. Skip if: none of your ten questions produced a box, then re-check in six months.
Step 2: Check Whether You Already Appear, in About Five Minutes
There is now an official, free way to see this, and almost nobody outside agencies has opened it.
Start without logging into anything. Search the Step 1 queries that produced a box again, in an incognito window on a phone, because AI Overviews differ on mobile. Expand the box and note which sites are linked. That is the competitor set that matters now, and it is often not the businesses ranking beneath you.
Then the Search Console method, which you can do yourself or forward to whoever manages your site:
- Open the Performance report.
- Set Search type to Web.
- Add a Search Appearance filter for AI Overviews.
- Export to CSV.
Google has also rolled out a dedicated Generative AI performance report covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative features.
The report shows impressions only. An impression means the number of times a page of yours appeared inside one of those boxes, not a visit. No clicks, no queries broken out. It answers “did we show up”, not “what did they search” or “did they ring”.
Independent consultant Brodie Clark has tested what it does and doesn’t surface.
Screenshot today’s figure and diarise the same check for three months’ time. If you have no Search Console access, ask your web person for it this week. Read-only is fine.
Step 3: Answer the Question in the First Few Lines of the Page
44.2% of AI citations come from the first 30% of a page, from Kevin Indig’s analysis of 1.2 million responses. An answer sitting in paragraph six may as well not be there.
Take the question a page is about, make it the heading in the customer’s words, and answer it fully in the two or three sentences underneath, before the family-run-business copy. So instead of “We are proud to offer a comprehensive range of heating services”, the page opens with “How much does a boiler service cost in Leeds?” and gives the range and what moves it. Put that on the service page, not a blog post.
Adam Heitzman of HigherVisibility explains why: AI systems aren’t skimming your site the way a human does, they want fact density. A 200-word page repeating a service list gives them nothing, the diagnosis for most trade websites. Fact density means numbers, timescales, materials, areas covered and what changes the price.
Google also runs query fan-out: rather than matching your page to one phrase, it explores related sub-questions and assembles one answer, so pages carrying several specific facts get pulled into more of them. Indig found cited passages skew towards definitive, entity-rich statements, which a labelled table or FAQ block delivers.
Change one thing this month: move the answer above the sales pitch on your three busiest service pages.
Step 4: Publish Honest Price Ranges Instead of Contact Us for a Quote
“If I publish prices, I’ll get undercut and time-wasters will ring me.” Reasonable objection, wrong risk. Price, cost and buy queries trigger AI Overviews more than 80% of the time. Silence doesn’t keep you out of that conversation, it means the answer gets built out of somebody else’s page.
The competitor who answers the cost question gets the citation, the visit and the call. Cost-plus-location queries hit the 97% trigger rate from Step 1, the highest-triggering searches in your market.
The fix resolves the objection rather than ignoring it. Publish realistic ranges plus the variables that move the price, not a fixed rate card. A flat roof replacement gets a range and the four things that change it: size, access, deck condition, and whether scaffolding is needed. Those variables are the fact density Step 3 described, so the format is more citable anyway.
A range also filters out people who were never going to book at your prices. That’s a saving, not a loss.
- “Contact us for a quote”: anyone rings, Google has nothing to quote you on, and your evenings go on dead-end calls.
- A range plus four variables: people who have accepted the range ring, Google has something liftable, and the dead-end calls mostly stop.
Step 5: Make Your Business Details Identical Everywhere They Appear
A local service business ranked perfectly well in ordinary results but was missing from AI Overviews for “[service] in [city]” queries. Its content was fine. The cause was mundane, and it’s probably on your own listings now.
Its name, address and phone number (NAP) didn’t match from one directory to the next. Once NAP was standardised and Organization plus Person schema added, it started appearing in local AI answers for queries it already ranked for.
A checklist anyone in the office can run:
- List the top twenty places your business appears: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell and your trade directories.
- Confirm the name, address, phone, categories and description are worded identically on each.
- Fix the mismatches.
- Repeat quarterly.
The UK traps are predictable: “Ltd” on some listings and not others, an old mobile number on a directory nobody has logged into since 2019, a unit number on half the listings and missing from the rest.
Mismatched details lower an AI system’s confidence that these are all the same business. This is also the groundwork under your ordinary local SEO rankings, so it isn’t a separate AI project.
The cheapest fix in the guide, and the likeliest to be quietly blocking you. Do it before you spend anything on content.
Step 6: Get the Technical Markup Done Without Doing It Yourself
This is the one step you don’t have to understand, only commission. A short email covers it.
Schema markup is a small block of code behind your website stating your name, address, phone, opening hours, service area and reviews in a format machines read without guessing. Nothing visible changes.
The brief, copy and paste:
- Add Organization or LocalBusiness markup with the same name, address and phone from Step 5.
- Add Person markup for the named owner or lead tradesperson.
- Mark up the FAQ answers from Step 3.
- Confirm it passes Google’s Rich Results Test.
On WordPress, Squarespace or Wix it’s often a settings screen, not a build job, so a quote in the hundreds of pounds deserves a question. The Person part matters: a named person with real credentials beats anonymous copy.
Rich results attract roughly 58% of clicks against 41% for standard listings, but an Ahrefs test found schema alone did not measurably move AI citation rates. Treat it as hygiene, not a lever that produces citations.
Send the brief, pay for the hour, and judge it on whether your details are consistent and machine-readable, not on citations next week. It’s part of the AI search visibility work we do for clients who’d rather not brief it themselves.
Step 7: Build Your Presence Where Google Actually Looks for Proof
Omniscient Digital analysed more than 23,000 citations and found owned website content accounts for only around 23% of citations in branded AI queries. The other 77% comes from directories, reviews, forums and social. Your website is a quarter of the picture.
Reddit is the most-cited source across AI Overviews at 21% of citations, YouTube close behind at 18.8%. Nobody needs to build a Reddit presence. Answer genuine questions in your local subreddit or trade forum under your own name without pitching, and keep reviews flowing on Google and whichever directories your trade uses, Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Traders or Rated People.
Video is underrated. A two-minute phone video of a common job, titled and described with the service and the town, does more than most owners expect. No production budget needed.
Then publish something only you have: what you charged across last year’s jobs by type, or the commonest causes of callouts in your area. If a fact exists nowhere else, anything quoting it has to quote you.
Best for: trades with steady job volume and customers who post reviews. Skip if: you haven’t got a review routine yet. Reviews come first and cost nothing but the asking.
Step 8: Give It Three Months, Then Re-Check and Refresh
Most owners abandon this at week three because nothing has visibly changed. Nothing was going to have changed by week three.
There are no guarantees, but documented case studies show movement in roughly three to four months: one going from 72 to 336 AI mentions in four months, another a 221% increase in AI citations after an audit. Search Engine Journal frames this as a 12 to 18 month early-mover window, so the work compounds for whoever moves first.
One of our own clients went from 6 to 165 AI Overviews appearances, published with the figures on our case studies page. One client, one set of numbers, there to show what’s possible, not to promise the same.
Ahrefs’ analysis of 17 million citations found AI-cited content is on average 25.7% fresher than traditionally-ranked content. Diarise a quarterly hour: redo the Step 2 check against your screenshot, update prices and dates on the Step 3 and 4 pages, and re-run the Step 5 listing check.
A citation is not a click. Judge this at the three-month re-check, not the three-week one, and on whether Google is naming your business rather than on traffic alone.
Common Questions About Appearing in AI Overviews
These follow Step 3’s format: question as the heading, answer in the first sentence.
How do I check whether my business is appearing in Google AI Overviews?
Open Google Search Console, go to the Performance report, set Search type to Web, add a Search Appearance filter for AI Overviews, then export. It shows impressions only, not clicks or queries, so treat it as a presence check. Step 2 has the full method.
Does adding schema markup guarantee I’ll be cited?
No. Rich results do get more clicks in general, roughly 58% against 41% for standard listings, but an Ahrefs test found schema markup alone did not move AI citation rates. It’s machine-readability hygiene alongside consistent business details and fact-dense content, not a silver bullet.
Won’t publishing my prices just help competitors undercut me?
The bigger risk runs the other way. Price and cost queries trigger AI Overviews more than 80% of the time, so the competitor who answers the cost question gets the citation and the call instead of you. Publish realistic ranges plus the variables that move them, not a rate card.
How long before a small local business sees its first citation?
There’s no universal answer, but documented case studies show measurable movement in roughly three to four months. One reported going from 72 to 336 AI mentions in four months. Search Engine Journal frames the current period as a 12 to 18 month early-mover window.
What is query fan-out, and do I need to understand it?
Query fan-out is Google exploring several related sub-questions behind the scenes and assembling one answer out of them. It’s why specific, fact-dense pages get pulled in more often than keyword-matched copy. No, you don’t need to understand it. You only need to write specifically.
If you would rather not run all eight steps yourself, AI search visibility is the work we do. Tell us what you do and where, and we’ll give you a straight answer on whether we can help. If we can’t, we’ll say so.