A customer light still type "plumber Toronto" into Google. Increasingly, though, they're asking something closer to "find an emergency plumber serving Etobicoke tonight" or "which physiotherapy clinic near Yonge and Eglinton offers evening appointments." The questions have gotten longer, more specific, and more conversational, and both Google and tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are now built to handle exactly that kind of question.
This doesn't mean local SEO is going away. It means the standard for how clearly a business has to describe itself just went up and focusing on tha you need to create a local SEO Strategy for your business.
TL;DR
- AI Overviews now appear on a large share of Google searches, and they cut organic clicks sharply when they do. Pew Research found users click a traditional result about half as often when an AI summary shows up.
- Ranking in Google Maps and getting recommended by an AI system are related but not the same thing. You need both.
- Google's own local ranking factors, relevance, distance, and prominence, still hold. They just now feed AI answers too.
- Thin neighbourhood pages that swap one place name for another don't help anymore. Real local detail does.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the practice of making a site easy for AI systems to read and cite, starts with the same technical basics as SEO: a crawlable site AI bots can actually reach.
What Local SEO Actually Means Now#
Local SEO is the work of making a business visible for searches tied to a specific place: Toronto, the GTA, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, a specific neighbourhood, or the ever-present "near me." That part hasn't changed.What has changed is where that visibility now needs to show up. A well-run local SEO strategy in 2026 has to work across the Google Local Pack and Maps, standard organic results, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Bing and Copilot, and increasingly, the research people do inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity before they ever open a map. Google Business Profile optimization, citations, reviews, and local landing pages are still the foundation. They're just supporting a wider set of surfaces than they used to.
What's Changed: AI Overviews and the Rise of GEO#
For years, ranking first on Google was the whole game. That's no longer the full picture. Google's AI Overviews now answer a large and growing share of searches directly on the results page, and when they appear, organic clicks drop.Pew Research Center tracked real browsing behaviour from 900 U.S. adults and found people click a traditional search result about half as often when an AI summary is present, and click a link inside the AI summary itself in only about 1% of cases (Pew Research Center). Separate tracking from SparkToro shows the share of searches ending in any click at all has been sliding steadily, even as AI Mode usage climbs into the billions of monthly queries (Search Engine Land).
This is the part of the industry now getting called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), depending on who you ask. They're close enough to the same idea that the distinction rarely matters in practice: structure your content so an AI system can find it, trust it, and quote it.
Here's the useful part, straight from Google: there's no separate submission process to get into an AI Overview, and no special schema required. Google's own developer guidance says the foundational SEO best practices still apply, and a page needs to be indexed, crawlable, and eligible to appear in regular search with a snippet before it can ever show up as a supporting link in an AI answer (Google Search Central). GEO isn't a separate discipline you bolt on. It's what happens when your ordinary SEO is done well enough that an AI system finds it useful to cite.
Are Local Pack Rankings and AI Visibility the Same Thing?#
Not quite, and the distinction matters. A business that ranks well in the Local Pack has already built useful signals. That doesn't guarantee the same business gets mentioned in an AI-generated answer.| Local Pack signal | What it takes for AI visibility |
| Business categories | Clearly written, specific services and expertise |
| Searcher proximity | Explicitly stated service areas and neighbourhood relevance |
| Profile completeness | Website information that's detailed enough to extract cleanly |
| Reviews and ratings | Reputation and recurring, specific customer detail |
| Local citations | Consistent confirmation across third-party sources |
| GBP activity | Current, accurate business information |
| Organic rankings | Content that fully answers the question, not just part of it |
The Local Ranking Factors That Haven't Changed#
Google says local results still come down to three things: relevance, distance, and prominence (Google Business Profile Help). None of that changed with AI search. It just matters in more places now.Relevance is how closely you match what someone's looking for. A plumbing company that handles drain cleaning, water heater repair, and emergency calls needs to actually say so, on separate pages if possible. "We handle all plumbing needs" gives Google and an AI system almost nothing to work with.
Distance is exactly what it sounds like, and you can't optimize your way around it. Listing every Toronto neighbourhood on your homepage won't make you relevant everywhere. Being honest and specific about where you actually work does more good.
Prominence is how established you appear, built through genuine reviews, mentions from real local publications, industry associations, and backlinks that make sense. This is the slow, unglamorous part of local SEO, and it's still the part that separates businesses that show up consistently from ones that show up once and disappear.
Toronto Neighbourhood Pages, Done Properly#
Neighbourhood pages work. Thin ones don't. If your plan is thirty nearly identical pages where "North York" gets swapped for "Scarborough" and "Etobicoke," that reads as doorway content to Google and gives an AI system nothing worth citing either.A neighbourhood page earns its keep when it says something a generic city-wide page couldn't: which services you actually run in that area, whether any limits apply, real examples of work you've done nearby, parking or transit notes, and testimonials tied to that specific location. A renovation company targeting North York gains more from describing local permit quirks and property styles than from repeating "North York renovation company" five times. A physiotherapy clinic near Yonge and Eglinton is better off explaining transit access, appointment availability, and whether direct billing is offered than from adding one more page that says the same three sentences with a different postal code swapped in.
Make Your Business Legible to AI Systems#
This is where most of the real GEO work happens, and it starts with basics that are easy to overlook.Your site should make the essentials easy to find without digging: business name, address or service area, phone number, hours, services offered, staff credentials, and clear contact or booking paths. Each major service deserves its own page rather than a shared paragraph. That gives search engines and AI systems a specific source to pull from when someone asks a specific question, and it's exactly the structure our SEO & Local Search services are built around when we audit a site.
Structured data helps here too, when it's used honestly. Relevant schema types for a local business typically include LocalBusiness (or a more specific subtype), Organization, Service, Person, Article, BreadcrumbList, and FAQPage where it genuinely applies. Schema should describe what's actually on the page. Inventing ratings, locations, or services you don't offer will get flagged rather than rewarded.
One more thing worth checking, because we see it more often than you'd expect: a misconfigured robots.txt file quietly blocking ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini's crawlers from reaching your site entirely. If your business has never shown up in an AI answer, this is one of the first things to rule out. Here's how to check whether your robots.txt is blocking AI crawlers without you knowing.
Reviews Are a Trust Signal for People and AI Systems Alike#
Reviews have always mattered for rankings. What's newer is that AI systems now summarize reviews before a customer ever reaches your site, so how you respond matters nearly as much as the star rating. A specific reply to a specific complaint tells both the customer and the AI system reading it that problems get handled, not brushed off.A review that says "fixed our leak same day, Etobicoke" does more work than a generic five stars with no detail. Ask customers to describe what actually happened, where, rather than just asking for "a good review." The specifics are what make a review useful to anyone reading it later, human or otherwise.
How to Measure This (Rankings Alone Won't Tell You)#
Rankings are still useful. They're not the whole story anymore. A proper reporting setup should also track calls and direction requests from your Google Business Profile, form submissions and bookings by landing page, search queries carrying neighbourhood modifiers, and, where you can get visibility into it, referral traffic and brand mentions from AI platforms. Google Search Console, GA4, GBP performance data, and call tracking cover most of this.Treat AI citations as a supplementary signal, not the main scoreboard. The outcomes that actually matter are still qualified inquiries, booked jobs, and revenue.
A Practical 90-Day Plan#
Days 1 - 30, get the basics accurate. Audit your Google Business Profile, fix inconsistent business information, confirm your categories and service areas, check that your site is actually crawlable and indexed, and get call, form, and booking tracking working.Days 31 - 60, build relevance. Improve your core service pages, add real neighbourhood detail rather than swapped keywords, publish direct answers to the questions customers actually ask, add structured data where it applies, and set up a review request process that doesn't cross into incentivized territory.
Days 61 - 90, build prominence. Clean up your directory listings, pursue legitimate local coverage, publish a Toronto-specific case study, and start testing your own important questions in Google and in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to see what comes back.
Frequently Asked Questions#
Will AI Overviews replace Google Maps?Unlikely. Maps and the Local Pack still do the job when someone needs directions, hours, or a quick list of nearby options. AI answers are changing how people research and compare before they get there, not replacing the map itself.
Can a business appear in an AI Overview without ranking first? Possibly, since AI answers can pull from more than just the top result. But a page still has to be indexed, crawlable, and genuinely useful enough for Google's systems to retrieve it in the first place.
Do neighbourhood pages still work for local SEO? Yes, when each one adds real information about that specific area. Pages that only swap a place name add little and can work against you.
Does adding schema guarantee an AI citation? No. It helps machines parse your page correctly, but relevance, accuracy, technical accessibility, and trust still do the heavy lifting.
How long does local SEO take to show results in Toronto?
It depends on your competition, current site condition, and review history. Technical fixes can move quickly. Competitive Local Pack and organic visibility usually takes a few months of consistent work.
The Point Isn't to Game an AI Model#
It's to become a source worth citing, whether the reader is a person or a system answering on their behalf. That means a complete Google Business Profile, service pages that actually say something, honest reviews, consistent citations, real neighbourhood detail, and a site that AI crawlers can actually reach.If you want a clear picture of where your profile, site, and local content currently stand, book a free SEO audit and we'll show you what's costing you visibility, before you spend anything.
About the author
Siddharth Sharma leads organic search at PPC Guru, a Toronto-based Digital Marketing agency, where he focuses on technical SEO, local search, and content strategy for GTA service businesses. His work centers on building visibility that compounds over time, across Google Search, Google Maps, and increasingly, AI-powered discovery tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.