The advice going round is that AI is eating search and contractors should panic. We checked six searches on 9 September 2026 to see what had actually changed. Five of them had an AI Overview sitting on top, answering the question completely. The sixth did not, and the sixth is the one that hires you.
That split is worth ten minutes, because it decides where your marketing money should go for the next year.
What we checked
Six searches, run through a rank tracker on desktop. The three homeowner searches were run from San Jose. The three marketing searches were run nationally, because that is where the advice contractors read gets written.
| Search | AI Overview? | Where a contractor appears |
|---|---|---|
| plumber near me | No | Map pack, position 3 |
| how much does it cost to replace a water heater | Yes | Organic 9 and 11 |
| how to rank higher on google maps | Yes | n/a |
| how long does seo take | Yes | n/a |
| how to get google review link | Yes | n/a |
| how to report a fake google review | Yes | n/a |
Six is a small sample and we are not claiming a percentage. What it shows is a pattern clear enough to check for your own trade, and there is a two-minute version of that check at the end.
The search that hires you has no AI Overview
“Plumber near me”, searched from San Jose, returns no AI Overview at all. What it returns instead:
Two paid ads. Then the map pack, four listings deep, at positions three through six. Then the first organic result, which is Yelp. A plumber’s own website does not appear until position nine.
Nothing about that has changed in two years. The map pack still sits above every organic result, it still carries the phone number and the review count, and it is still the thing a person taps when water is coming through the ceiling. Google has not put a summary in front of it, and it is hard to see why they would. Nobody wants a paragraph explaining plumbing. They want a phone number.
This is the single most reassuring finding in the set, and it is the reason we have not changed our advice about where a contractor’s first dollar goes. If you are not in those three slots, that is still the problem to solve, and it is still solved the same way: categories, reviews, proximity. Google’s own guidance on local ranking still names relevance, distance and prominence, and none of those three is an AI feature.
The search that researches you is already gone
Now the same homeowner, a week earlier, before the emergency. “How much does it cost to replace a water heater”, also from San Jose.
An AI Overview holds position one. Below it: Home Depot, then People Also Ask, then Reddit, then a Facebook group thread, then a video carousel, then a water heater manufacturer, then a cost-estimator site. A local plumbing company appears at position nine. A second one at position eleven.
So a plumber who wrote a careful page about what a water heater replacement costs in San Jose is now the ninth thing on that page, underneath a summary that already answered the question, a national retailer and two social threads.
That page is not worthless. Somebody comparing three quotes will still scroll. But if you built it expecting traffic, the traffic is being taken at the top, and no amount of on-page work moves you above an AI Overview, because it is not a result you can outrank.
The same thing happened to the advice you read
The three marketing searches were the ones we found most uncomfortable, because we were about to write posts targeting them.
“How to rank higher on google maps” returns an AI Overview containing the entire checklist, then Reddit, a video carousel, Google’s own support page, and six agency listicles counting to ten or eleven. “How long does SEO take” returns an AI Overview with a month-by-month timeline, then Reddit, then Search Engine Land, Squarespace, Shopify and Forbes. “How to get google review link” and “how to report a fake google review” both return an AI Overview with the exact click path, followed by three Google support pages each.
We had four blog posts scheduled against keywords in that group. We have cancelled all four. Writing a tenth “11 steps to rank on Google Maps” article, to sit underneath a summary that already lists the eleven steps and three Google support pages that own the topic, is work with no plausible outcome.
We are telling you that because it is the same decision you face. If your plan for this year was a series of helpful explainer posts, check whether the explaining has already been done above the results.
What this actually changes
Three things, and one of them is doing nothing.
Keep spending on the map pack. It is untouched. This is the part where doing nothing differently is the right answer, and it is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a new problem to sell against. Our profile optimization checklist has not needed a single edit because of AI Overviews.
Stop writing cost guides as traffic plays. Write them as sales collateral instead. A page explaining exactly what you charge and why is still worth having when a customer asks, and it still closes people who are comparing you against two other quotes. Just do not build it expecting Google to send strangers to it.
Put the effort into what a summary cannot answer. An AI Overview can tell somebody the average cost of a water heater in America. It cannot tell them what your crew did on Willow Glen last Tuesday, what your permit turnaround with the city actually looks like, or why the cheap quote they got excludes the expansion tank. Specific, local, checkable and yours. That material also happens to be what earns reviews and photos, which feed the map pack, which is the part that still works.
Where this is thin, and how to check it yourself
Six searches on one day is a snapshot, not a study. Three limits worth knowing before you act on it.
AI Overviews are volatile. They appear and disappear for the same query, and Google has been adjusting when they trigger all year. Google’s own documentation on AI features in Search is explicit that there is no separate ranking system behind them and no way to opt into them. A search with no summary today can have one next month.
Results are personalised and local. We ran the homeowner searches from San Jose. Yours will differ, and that is the point of checking rather than trusting our table.
We checked whether an AI Overview appeared, not what it did to clicks. Nobody outside Google can measure that properly from the outside, and we are not going to publish a click-through figure we cannot stand behind. What we can tell you is that our own site’s pattern is consistent with it: impressions climbing month after month, clicks close to flat.
The two-minute version for your trade: open a private browser window, search the thing a customer would type before hiring you, then search the thing they would type while hiring you. Note which one has a summary above the results. Do it for your top three services. That is the whole method, and it costs you nothing.
If you would rather see it laid out for your trade and your cities alongside the demand numbers, that is part of what our free marketing audit covers, and the same approach sits underneath our contractor SEO work. We also published the full Bay Area search demand data separately, which is the other half of deciding what to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do AI Overviews affect the Google map pack?
In the searches we checked, no. “Plumber near me” from San Jose returned no AI Overview at all, and the map pack held positions three through six directly under the ads. The map pack and the AI Overview are different features and they did not compete in our sample.
Should contractors stop writing blog posts?
Not all of them. Stop writing generic explainers that a summary already answers, like cost averages and step-by-step guides. Keep writing anything specific, local and checkable that only you could write, because that is what an overview cannot reproduce.
Can I stop my content appearing in an AI Overview?
Partly. Google’s robots meta tag documentation covers controls like nosnippet and max-snippet, which limit how much of your page can be shown. They apply to normal search snippets as well, so using them costs you the preview text in ordinary results too. For a contractor who needs the phone to ring, that trade is almost never worth it.
Why did my impressions go up while my clicks stayed flat?
That pattern is consistent with your pages appearing under a summary that answers the question. It can also mean you are ranking on pages six to ten, where nobody clicks anything. Check your average position before assuming which one you have, because the fixes are completely different.
Is local SEO still worth it in 2026?
For a contractor, on this evidence, yes. The searches that turn into booked jobs are the ones AI Overviews have not taken. The searches that lost traffic are the informational ones, which were never the ones that made your phone ring.
The short version
Google is answering the questions people ask about your trade. It is not answering the question of who should come and fix the problem.
So stop measuring your marketing by how many people read your explanation, and start measuring it by whether you are in the three slots that appear when somebody has a leak. That was good advice before AI Overviews. It survived them.