How AI Overviews Stole the Local Pack’s Voice Search Traffic (And How to Get It Back)

There was a time when ‘voice search’ felt like a gift to local businesses. A homeowner in a panic asks their phone, “who fixes burst pipes near me?” and a trustworthy local plumber appears at the top of the local pack, just three clicks from a booked job.

Optimize your Google Business Profile, earn some reviews, keep your NAP consistent. Done.

However, that same query today often triggers an AI Overview and the local pack doesn’t even appear. Instead, Google generates a summarised answer from across the web, pulling relevant local businesses from review sites, service pages, and informative articles. 

Now, the plumber who spent years optimizing his website for local search enquiries, is invisible.

The frustrating irony is that voice search helped cause this situation. It trained hundreds of millions of users to ask conversational, full-sentence questions. And those conversational, full-sentence questions are exactly the format that AI Overviews have been built to answer.

How Voice Search Handed AI Overviews

When voice search went mainstream, first through Siri, then Google Assistant, then smart speakers, it changed how people phrased their searches. Typed queries tended to stay short and truncated: “plumber London cost.”

Then voice queries arrived and became natural and complete sentences: “how much does it cost to fix a burst pipe in London?”

This shift was widely celebrated by local SEOs because longer queries meant clearer intent. And clearer intent meant easier and more reliable optimization. FAQ pages, conversational landing pages, and question-based content suddenly had real strategic value. If you want to understand how that optimization worked before AI Overviews changed the equation, refer to how voice search is changing local SEO. It covers the full picture.

Google’s AI Overviews are optimized for exactly the conversational, question-based format that voice search popularized. Whitespark’s Q2 2025 study found that AI Overviews appeared for 92% of informational-intent queries and 97% of hybrid-intent queries, the queries driven heavily by voice search behaviour. Voice search didn’t decline. Rather, it fed the machine that displaced the local pack for those queries.

Where Exactly the Traffic Went

Before we write off the local pack entirely, it is worth understanding exactly where the displacement is happening, because the picture is more specific than most coverage suggests.

For simple, transactional local queries like “nail salon near me” or “emergency dentist Manchester,” the local pack still dominates. Whitespark’s research found local packs appeared for over 90% of those results, with AI Overviews appearing in only 15%. The local pack is not dead for bottom-of-funnel intent. The problem is that voice search rarely drives bottom-of-funnel queries. Instead, it drives the research-stage, conversational ones, and that is precisely where AI Overviews have taken over.

Type 1: Transactional voice queries. These are immediate, action-ready requests like “find a locksmith near me open now” or “best rated electrician in Leeds.” The user knows what they want and is ready to act. These queries still trigger the local pack at high rates. Google recognizes purchase intent and initiates the map pack because that is what converts. Notably, a “business is open at time of search” signal now ranks among the top local pack ranking factors, directly relevant to voice queries made on a mobile phone.

Type 2: Informational and hybrid voice queries. These are research-stage questions spoken naturally, such as “how much does a gas safety certificate cost,” “what’s included in a deep clean,” or “is it worth getting a yearly boiler service.” These do not signal an immediate buying intent.

For these situations, AI Overviews appeared 92% of the time for informational queries and 97% for hybrid queries that mix research with local context, while the local pack rarely appears alongside them. And when AI Overviews do appear, the traffic penalty is severe. A Seer Interactive study from September 2025 found organic CTR fell 61%, dropping from an average of 1.76% to 0.61%.

This is where the majority of voice search traffic loss is concentrated, and where local businesses need a fundamentally different strategy for competitive SEO.

How to Win Back the Traffic You Lost to AI Overviews

Winning back your business’s visibility from AI Overviews does not mean you need to abandon GBP optimization. Rather, it means building a parallel strategy aimed at the AI answer layer, the place where informational and hybrid voice queries now land. There are four concrete ways to do that.

Build FAQ content that mirrors how people speak, not how they type.

The fastest path to winning AI Overview citation is by answering the exact questions people will ask via voice. You need to structure service pages and supporting blog posts around a full spoken sentence question-and-answer format. You can target hybrid queries specifically: “how long does X take near me,” “average cost of X in [city],” “what’s included in X service.” Keep your answers between 40 and 60 words long, as that is the range AI Overviews extract most readily. Use your FAQPage schema to make those answers machine-readable.

Expand your citation footprint across structured and unstructured sources. 

The 2026 Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors report found that three of the top five AI search visibility factors are citation-based, covering mentions on expert-curated “best of” lists, unstructured brand mentions in news and blogs, and overall web mention volume. LLMs are now pulling from second and third-tier directories to ground their answers. That makes NAP accuracy across the lesser-known aggregators a genuine priority again, not just a checkbox.

Earn mentions in the sources AI Overviews actually cite.

AI systems don’t just pull answers from thin air. They cite sources they can trust. For local businesses, that means you need to get mentioned in local news outlets, relevant industry blogs, and curated “best of” lists in your area. Of course, a mention in “best plumbers in Manchester” on a credible local site carries more AI visibility weight than a dozen directory listings. So, reach out to local journalists, contribute quotes to regional publications, and target trusted niche directories that cover your trade specifically.

Use schema markup strategically.

Employ LocalBusiness schema, FAQPage schema, and SpeakableSpecification schema, which all increase the probability that your content will get pulled into AI-generated answers. SpeakableSpecification was designed to flag content appropriate for voice assistant responses, though Google’s support remains selective. The safer bet is clean FAQPage and LocalBusiness markup combined with clear, direct prose answers.

Why This Shift Hits Local SEO Badly

Most industries that find they are losing traffic to AI Overviews, still have fallback channels. There are email lists, social followings, and direct brand searches. A national retailer absorbs an organic CTR drop and redirects budget to paid. A publisher pivots to newsletters.

However, local businesses don’t have that cushion. A plumber in Bristol or a locksmith in Glasgow lives and dies by search visibility. They don’t have brand moats or repeat customer bases large enough to offset a 61% drop in click-through rate. And unlike national brands, they can’t throw much budget at AI visibility tools or content operations to fight back quickly.

What makes this situation particularly acute, is the query type where the damage is worst. Informational and hybrid voice queries, the ones AI Overviews dominate, are precisely the queries that warm up a local customer before they book a service. “How much does a boiler service cost” asked today becomes a booked appointment next week. Losing visibility at that stage doesn’t just cost a click, it costs the sales conversion that was coming three days later.

That is why this shift matters more for local SEO, than any other niche. The margin for invisibility is zero.

Conclusion

AI Overviews did not arrive with a view to punish local businesses. They arrived to answer questions faster, and voice search spent a decade teaching people to ask exactly those questions. The unforeseen result became a collision that local SEOs were never warned about.

The good news is that the fix is not complicated. It requires understanding which queries you can still win in the local pack, which ones now live in the AI answer layer, and building a content and citation strategy that covers both. Local businesses that treat AI Overviews as a second visibility channel rather than a direct threat, can recover the poached traffic. But those that keep optimizing for a single channel, will keep losing it.

The query format that voice search created is not going away. The task now, is showing up where those queries land.