AI now answers two in three local searches, and almost no local business shows up in it

We have written before about getting found in AI search. This week the numbers arrived, and they are worth putting in front of every local business in Melbourne, because they are more specific and more alarming than the general warnings have been.

Whitespark’s research found AI Overviews now appear on roughly 68% of local searches. And SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index, which audited more than 350,000 business locations, found that 98.8% of local businesses are invisible in AI-generated local recommendations. ChatGPT, in that audit, recommended just 1.2% of local business locations. Among restaurants, 83% did not appear at all. SearchEngineLand summarised the wider picture bluntly: being visible to AI locally is up to 30 times harder than ranking in Google.

The trap: your ranking looks fine while the phone goes quiet

Here is why this is different from the usual “do your SEO” advice. You can rank number one for “physio Fitzroy” and still lose the patient.

Two-thirds of the time now, an AI answer forms above your listing. The customer reads it, gets a recommendation, and acts, often without a single click to anyone’s website. If the AI named someone else, or named nobody local at all, your perfect ranking did nothing. Your ranking report stays green. Your calls quietly dry up. The dashboard you have always watched has stopped measuring the thing that actually brings customers in.

That disconnect is the whole story. It is entirely possible to be doing well on paper and losing, and to not know why.

Local is exactly where this bites hardest

This is not abstract, national, big-brand AI stuff. “Plumber near me”, “best osteo in Brunswick”, “emergency electrician Coburg”, these high-intent local searches are the ones a service business lives or dies on. They are a customer standing on the footpath, ready to call someone in the next five minutes. Those are precisely the searches AI is now answering before your listing gets a look in.

Do this five-minute test today

Forget the theory. Go and check your own exposure, right now.

1. Open a private or logged-out browser window so you see what a stranger sees, not what Google shows you.
2. Search the three phrases your customers actually type. The “near me”, the “best X in [your suburb]”, the urgent one. Note whether an AI answer appears above the results, and whether you are in it.
3. Then ask an assistant directly. Open ChatGPT and ask “who is the best [your service] in [your suburb]?” See if you get named.

That five-minute test tells you more about your real position than any ranking report will. If you are not in those answers, you now know the actual size of the problem.

The good news: the fix is known, the urgency is new

The businesses that do show up share a familiar profile: a complete and consistent Google Business Profile, real reviews, genuinely useful local content, and a fast, readable site. None of that is a secret, and we have laid out the playbook in getting found in AI search and in what Google itself says actually works.

What is new today is not the method, it is the stakes. The gap between showing up in the AI answer and not showing up is now far bigger than any gap between ranking third and ranking first ever was. For a local business, this has quietly become the single highest-leverage thing to get right.

The func.digital take

Stop judging your visibility by the channel that is shrinking. Rankings still matter, but the real question now is simpler and more brutal: when someone asks an AI for a business like yours, in your suburb, does it say your name?

Run the five-minute test. If the answer is no, that is a fixable problem, and finding exactly why you are invisible and what to change first is precisely what a free digital systems audit is for. Get in touch, before your competitor is the one the AI recommends.