The news
SOCi and Google are co-hosting a webinar on AI-driven local search visibility, covering how Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Ask Maps are changing which businesses get surfaced in local discovery. The core argument: traditional rankings are no longer the whole visibility equation, and AI systems are now making recommendation decisions based on signals well beyond keyword matching.
Our take
This piece is sponsor content, so take the urgency framing with a grain of salt. But the underlying dynamic is real, and GTM teams — even B2B ones who think "local search" doesn't apply to them — should pay attention.
Here's the pattern playing out: companies have invested years in SEO and search presence built around how Google's crawler worked in 2019. Google AI Overviews and Gemini don't work the same way. They synthesize. They surface businesses that have complete, consistent, semantically rich profiles — not just the ones with the most backlinks.
For B2B teams, this has a specific implication that almost nobody is acting on yet: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your location-level content — these aren't just local SEO hygiene tasks anymore. They're signals that AI systems use to decide whether your brand gets mentioned at all in a summarized answer. If your profile is incomplete or your review responses are templated garbage, you're training the model to overlook you.
The companies that will own AI-driven search visibility over the next two years aren't the ones running the most ads. They're the ones whose structured data is clean, whose profiles are complete, and whose review ecosystems are actively managed. That's an operational problem, not a creative one — and most marketing teams have handed it off to someone who's treating it like a checkbox.
So now what?
- Audit your Google Business Profile completeness today — photos, hours, service descriptions, Q&A. Treat it like a landing page, not a listing.
- Pull your last 90 days of reviews and look at response quality. If they're templated, rewrite them with actual context about your business.
- Ask your SEO team or agency how they're thinking about AI Overview inclusion specifically — not just rankings. If they don't have an answer, that's the answer.
The teams that figure out AI search hygiene in the next six months will have a structural advantage that's very hard to close later.