AI Overviews Are Eating the Map Pack — 5 Moves to Stay Visible

By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX)

The map pack — that three-business box that used to be the whole game for local businesses — is not what it was. Google’s AI Overviews are now on top of it, and on many queries the traditional pack is buried under a summary that only mentions one or two businesses by name. If your listing was the one being mentioned, congratulations. If it was not, your phone got quieter and you probably do not know exactly why.

I am not going to sugarcoat this. This is the biggest shift in local search since Google Maps launched. And it is not slowing down.

What actually changed

Two things happened at the same time:

1. AI Overviews expanded. As of early 2026, tracking shows AI Overviews on close to half of tracked queries — up from around 31% a year earlier. On mobile it is even higher.
2. Google’s spam crackdown got aggressive. Keyword stuffing in business names (“Best Longview Plumber Emergency 24 Hour”), fake categories, review scams — all getting suspended, some without warning.

The combined effect: the top of the local search page went from “three businesses with a map” to “an AI summary with one or two business names embedded, and then the map pack.” The old top spot got smaller. The new top spot exists, but you cannot buy your way into it. You earn it with signals Google’s AI trusts.

You cannot outrank the summary. You can only be the business the summary names.

Move 1: Clean up Google Business Profile, hard

Half of the local businesses I audit have profiles that were set up in 2019 and never touched since. Categories are wrong. Services are named “Consultation” and “General Repair.” Photos are from a phone that was retired two Christmases ago.

Fix that in one weekend:

• Your business name is exactly what is on the sign. No keywords. No city name unless the city is in the legal name.
• Every service you offer gets its own entry in the Services section, with a real 1–3 sentence description.
• Primary category matches your #1 revenue driver. Secondary categories cover the rest.
• Fresh photos, monthly. Assistant AI and Google alike weight recency.

Move 2: Reviews, but honest ones

You already knew reviews matter. Here is what changed in 2026: Google banned incentivized reviews, staff-name mentions, on-site kiosks that collect them, and any review that came from the business’s own device. The Gemini enforcement they turned on can spot this at scale.

What still works: text-message the customer a few hours after service with a plain link, no incentive, no script. That is still allowed and still effective.

Move 3: Service pages that answer real questions

Every service you sell needs a real page on your website. Not one giant “Services” page — individual pages. Each one answers what customers actually ask: how long, how much, what is included, what to expect, what could go wrong, what happens next.

The AI Overview picks its named businesses from pages that read like answers. If your “AC repair” page is three paragraphs of “Choose us because we’re the best,” you are not going to be named. If it says “most residential AC repairs in Gregg County take between 45 minutes and 3 hours, and cost between $180 and $650 depending on parts,” you might be.

Move 4: Schema markup, done right

Schema is a small piece of code in the page that tells search engines — and AI — the facts about your business in a way they cannot misread. For a local business, three schemas do most of the work:

You do not need to hand-write this. A decent SEO plugin (Rank Math or Yoast on WordPress) generates most of it automatically once you fill in the fields. The key is filling in the fields honestly, not aspirationally.

Move 5: Citation consistency

“Citation” is a fancy SEO word for “places on the internet that list your business.” Yelp, Facebook, Angi, BBB, Nextdoor, chamber of commerce sites, industry directories. The rule is boring: your name, address, and phone are identical on all of them. Not almost identical — identical. “Suite 4” and “#4” count as different. “Street” and “St.” count as different.

AI systems cross-reference these when deciding who is real. A business with 20 consistent citations gets the benefit of the doubt. A business with 8 inconsistent ones does not.

What does not work anymore

Save yourself the money:

• Buying reviews. Detected. Removed. Sometimes profile-nuking.
• Keyword-stuffed business names. Suspended.
• Fake service area cities. Suspended.
• Doorway pages (“Longview Plumber, Kilgore Plumber, Marshall Plumber” — same content, different city). Ignored at best, penalized at worst.
• Blog posts written by AI with 900 words of nothing. Google’s helpful content system eats them.

The uncomfortable truth

Some businesses in East Texas are going to lose visibility permanently because they built their whole local strategy on tricks that no longer work. Some are going to gain visibility because their competitors’ shortcuts got them suspended. The gap between doing this well and doing this badly is now the difference between a phone that rings and a phone that does not.