Google AI Mode and AI Overviews for local businesses

Two features, not one

AI Overviews is the AI-written summary Google shows above the normal results for many searches. Google AI Mode is a separate, fuller conversational mode a searcher opts into. Both are generated from Google's own index and Search Systems, not from a general-purpose chat model, and both can name specific local businesses the way a normal local-pack result would, but in prose instead of a map card.

This product records both through DataForSEO's SERP API rather than a live browser session: a real, dated Google result for the category and city asked about. Not every query returns an AI Overview — Google shows one only when it judges the query fits — so a “no result” here can mean the feature simply didn't trigger for that search, not that nothing was found.

What actually changes for a business owner

The inputs Google already ranks on — Google Business Profile completeness, reviews, citations, the site itself — are still what these features draw from; there is no separate “AI Overview optimization” with its own rules. What's new is the outcome: a searcher can now get a complete-feeling answer without clicking any result at all, which changes how much a top ranking is worth even when it's unchanged.

The one Google-specific mechanism worth knowing by name is Google-Extended, a robots.txt token that controls whether Google may use a page's content for Gemini and AI features, separate from Googlebot, which controls ordinary Search inclusion. Blocking Google-Extended does not remove a business from Google Search; blocking Googlebot does. “Is your robots.txt blocking AI search engines?” has the exact lines.

The measured effect on clicks

Two independent, dated numbers give a sense of scale, not a business-specific prediction: Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview is present, across 300,000 keywords, and Pew Research found only 8% of Google visits that showed an AI summary included a click on a traditional result, against 15% of visits without one. Both are linked from this site's own sourced statistics rather than repeated from memory here.