The 2026 local search report: AI, trust, and what’s actually working across industries

Local search is changing faster than most enterprise teams can adapt and the data now shows exactly where performance is breaking down. 

Most notably, local listing visibility dropped 13.2% across search in 2025. Phone clicks fell 12.9%. Website clicks fell 7.7%. And yet — direction clicks rose 6.4%, the only major action to grow year-over-year. By Q4, total views were down 6.6% but total clicks finished 0.4% higher. Fewer people were seeing listings. The ones who did were closer to acting.

That’s the story defining the current state of local search: shrinking visibility, sharper intent.

Rio SEO’s 2026 local search report pulled performance data from more than 239,000 U.S. enterprise locations across seven industries from January through December 2025. The findings line up with what local marketers have felt for months: AI hasn’t killed demand. It compresses the journey and rewrites what gets a brand chosen.

In this blog (and report), “AI” refers primarily to Google’s AI Overviews, evolving Local Pack behavior, and the broader shift toward answer-first search experiences. 

Here’s what the data says, and what enterprise marketers should do about it heading into 2026.

A shorter journey, with trust as the deciding factor

The old local search path looked like this: search for a business, check its website, compare, call to confirm, then visit. Five steps. Plenty of room to rank your way into the consideration set.

The new path looks like this: search, decide, visit.

When AI Overviews and the Local Pack answer the question on the results page, the in-between steps disappear. Phone numbers, hours, services — surfaced up front. Reviews, ratings, sentiment — summarized in the snippet. The shopper, diner, patient, or renter doesn’t need to dial in or land on the homepage to feel confident moving forward. They’ve already decided.

That’s why direction clicks were the only metric that grew. They’re the action that survives when everything before the visit gets compressed out.

For enterprise marketers, this changes what visibility is worth. A view that doesn’t lead anywhere isn’t a win. A view that leads straight to the door is. And the deciding factor — the thing that turns surfaced information into a chosen brand — is trust.

What AI is actually rewarding

Google Business Profile isn’t just a listing anymore. It’s the source data feeding AI Overviews, Maps results, and the answers consumers see without ever clicking through. Even when a profile isn’t viewed by a local consumer, it’s still being read — by the systems deciding what to surface, summarize, and recommend.

The signals AI weighs aren’t new, but they’ve been re-weighted:

• Listing accuracy across hours, services, attributes, and photos
• Review velocity, recency, sentiment, and the actual language of the review
• Structured location pages with FAQs, schema, and service-level detail
• Consistency across Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp, and the long tail of directories — including sources that have come back into play under AI, like Reddit and MapQuest

Brand authority alone won’t carry you here. The biggest restaurant name in a market still has to feed AI the structured detail it needs — menu items, photos, dine-in options, real customer language — to be picked up as the answer to “best burger near me on a Tuesday.”

What the data reveals across industries

The top-line numbers hide some sharp contrasts. Retail, healthcare, and restaurants tell the cleanest version of the story.

Retail: Stable visibility, stronger intent

Retail visibility declined modestly, with total views dropping 5.3%, but Maps views barely moved (+0.5%) and direction clicks rose 9.5%, double the prior year’s growth. Phone clicks fell 9.6% and website clicks dropped 5.9%. 

Shoppers are skipping the discovery and the follow-up. They see enough in the listing to commit. For retail brands, that means the listing has to be conversion-ready, not just present. Hours, in-stock services, location-specific offers, photos that match what’s on the floor.

Healthcare: Growth driven by trust

Healthcare was the only vertical to see meaningful growth across key metrics. Total views climbed 7.7%, direction clicks 10.2%, website clicks 6.9%. Q4 clicks per location finished 15.2% higher year over year, a level of resilience no other vertical matched. 

Healthcare consumers are searching with intent, vetting providers before they call, and arriving ready to walk in. The trust signals matter more here than anywhere — board certifications, accepted insurance, specialty detail, patient testimonials surfaced in AI summaries. 

When the underlying data is rich and the trust signals are strong, AI surfaces you and consumers act.

Restaurants: Discovery is shifting elsewhere

Restaurants saw the sharpest declines across the board. Total views fell 31.7%. Maps views fell 40.1%. Food orders dropped 25.7% after growing 31.8% the year before. View declines have now spanned five straight quarters. Direction clicks held nearly flat at -1.0%, so dine-in intent isn’t gone — it’s just that fewer people are starting the journey on Google. 

Third-party platforms, AI recommendations, and changing consumer habits are absorbing the discovery layer. Restaurants that win from here are the ones feeding AI structured menu data, dine-in differentiators, and current photos — and not relying on brand recognition to do the work.

Other verticals: Same pattern, different pace

Financial services, service businesses, hospitality, and multi-family residential follow the same pattern. 

• Visibility tightened
• Calls dropped 
• High-intent actions held up better than anything else

Hospitality saw direct bookings fall 53.5% as travelers shifted to third-party platforms and AI-driven recommendations. Multi-family residential search views actually grew 8.6%, but phone clicks fell nearly 50% — interest rising, action delayed.

5 key takeaways from the data

Pulling back to the cross-industry picture, five clear patterns emerge:

• Visibility is shrinking, but high-intent actions — especially direction clicks — remain resilient.
• AI-driven discovery raises the stakes for accurate, structured, location-level data.
• Calls and website clicks are declining, signaling fewer touchpoints and faster decisions.
• The local journey is shorter but more decisive, rewarding brands that remove friction early and craft strong local experiences across the customer journey.
• Local performance varies sharply by industry. Brand averages hide what location-level benchmarking reveals.

What this means for 2026 planning

Audit listings for AI readiness, not just accuracy. 

Hours and addresses are table stakes. The data AI surfaces — services, attributes, photos, structured menus, accepted payments, appointment types — is what gets you picked up in the answer. Walk through a sample of your locations and ask whether an AI summary built from your GBP would actually represent the brand.

Treat reviews as a trust signal, not a scorecard. 

Velocity, recency, sentiment, and keyword match all factor into how AI evaluates you. A 4.6-star average from 2022 carries less weight than a 4.4 with fresh, specific reviews. Build the review program around continuous generation and substantive responses, not threshold-chasing.

Turn location pages from brochure to answer. 

The ones that perform have FAQs that mirror long-tail queries, schema that makes services machine-readable, and hyper-local content that proves the location is real and current. If a page reads like a template, AI will treat it like one.

Use verified customer feedback as content. 

Survey data, NPS comments, loyalty program feedback — owned content the brand can surface on local pages. It’s one of the cleanest ways to feed AI authoritative material that competitors can’t replicate, and it brings CX and digital teams into the same conversation.

Benchmark at the location level. 

A brand average hides everything that matters. The best-performing locations in your portfolio are doing something the others aren’t, and the worst-performing ones are bleeding visibility you can recover. Get the data location by location and act on the spread.

What this means for the future of local search 

Local search didn’t stop working in 2025. It got more selective. Brands that compete on clarity, consistency, and trust at the location level are the ones AI surfaces and consumers choose. Brands that treat GBP as a static listing are watching their visibility erode while their competitors get picked.

Local search isn’t just about being found anymore. It’s about being chosen.

The on-demand webinar walks through every vertical in the report, including the seasonal patterns, the Q4 rebounds, and the Q&A on call tracking attribution under AI, review management at scale, and how to use customer surveys as local-page content. If you’re planning the year and want the full picture, that’s the place to start.

The full 2026 Local search report breaks down performance across every major vertical, including seasonal trends, Q4 reversals, and what’s driving high-intent actions at the location level.

Watch the 2026 local search report webinar today

Watch the on-demand webinar to see the full dataset and how top-performing brands are adapting.