Search is no longer just about traffic and clicks – it’s about visibility, representation, and exposure to your target audience, no matter what platform they use. In an AI-driven world, a growing share of your customer base is likely to ask an AI assistant for a summary rather than use a traditional search engine. A year ago, I forecast how the future of local search might unfold, and three of those predictions have come to pass in the last 12 months.
How local search has evolved over the last year:
Prediction: AI chat interfaces continue to surge in popularity, offering users an additional entry point beyond traditional search engines.
Outcome: AI chat interfaces did not just become an entry point for users, but they became a primary starting point on some platforms. Google merged the AI Mode experience into the default search surface globally, combining the traditional search experience with an AI-powered ecosystem.
What this means for local businesses: Your business’ public footprint needs to extend far beyond just search engines. Adoption of AI assistants is growing at a rapid pace, and if you’re not part of the conversation that potential customers are having with LLMs, then you’re letting your competition get the edge.
Prediction: LLMs will continue to improve and surface the most relevant recommendations based on prominence, customer sentiment, and contextual clues.
Outcome: LLMs have improved at surfacing relevant recommendations, and will only continue to get better as data licensing deals shape the future of local marketing (OpenAI + Yelp).
What this means for local businesses: Optimizing your business across as many relevant listings as possible is more important than ever. As the battle for AI supremacy continues to unfold between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, the likelihood of future licensing deals could skew how customers find local businesses with AI assistants. As with social media, meet your customers where they are and focus your efforts on the review platforms that matter most in your industry.
Prediction: Brand mentions and user-generated content across the web will become signals, signaling the importance of generating reviews on multiple platforms.
Outcome: Brand mentions became signals, and the prompt-tracking industry has exploded, prompting marketers to report on new metrics such as AI Brand Visibility, Citation Rates, and more.
What this means for local businesses: Over the last 18 months, visibility for brands in AI answers has gone from a hunch to a science, driven by the boom in prompt tracking. You can now baseline where you stand relative to competitors, analyze sentiment of brand mentions, and even identify which sources are most critical in shaping the recommendations from LLMs.
The future of local search may see further changes as the World Wide Web becomes more integrated with AI. Recommendation engines will eventually convert into full-funnel transaction engines. For example, Google rolled out agentic restaurant booking to eight additional markets in April 2026 and followed up by announcing the ability to order food, book hotels, and secure event tickets within Ask Maps in August. Google isn’t the only tech giant bridging the gap between discovery and transactions; Square introduced an integration in July 2026 that lets restaurants accept orders placed directly in ChatGPT and Claude, allowing users and restaurants to avoid potentially expensive aggregator fees that make online ordering cumbersome.
At the end of the day, Local SEO won’t disappear. Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude just provide new interfaces for users to conduct research, and it’s vital to optimize the sources they’ll use most to recommend local businesses.
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