Local search is no longer just about maps and directories.
What began as a game of citation consistency has grown into a dynamic, intent-driven ecosystem shaped by real-time data, customer intelligence, and AI-powered personalization.
Today, AI is redefining how people discover, evaluate, and interact with local businesses – reshaping the rules of visibility, experience, and conversions across every channel.
This article:
These shifts in local search have occurred in three interconnected phases, each building on the last, shaping the current landscape.
This phase focused on ensuring data accuracy and consistency across channels, with citation management services emerging to help brands maintain correct local listings at scale.
Last year, I wrote about Local 2.0, which was about discovery, relevancy, authority, experience, engagement, and conversions.
In 2024, local search emphasized engaging conversations across all touchpoints, moving beyond simple listings management to prioritize customer experience and relevance.
I shared why businesses should focus on:
I emphasized the importance of a rock-solid platform, topical, and entity-rich content, and optimized digital assets, among other strategic priorities.
This year, I see local search through the lens of AI.
While the overall framework remains the same, AI is playing a pivotal role in modernizing customer discovery in local search.
At the heart of Local 3.0 is AI’s ability to understand and match user intent with unprecedented depth and context.
AI-driven search is becoming more personalized and context-aware.
Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communication at Wix, shared:
The impact you’ve likely seen:
AI has transformed micro-moments by:
Over the past year, we’ve observed how AI fundamentally changed the entire local search journey across all channels for both location-based businesses and large brands.
The essential ingredients for discovery are consistency, accuracy, and real-time discovery.
With the rise of large language models (LLMs), the accuracy of business information within these models has become a foundational necessity.
Data accuracy and real-time discovery of the most relevant and authoritative content are vital, especially given the high cost of computing resources.
The role of images and videos in local search is evolving with technologies like Google MUM and similar models from OpenAI.
These enable LLMs to understand connections across media types using embeddings and vectors, making topical relevance not just limited to text.
This allows brands to engage users at different stages of the journey:
Recommended strategies
Brands should:
Dig deeper: Why entity search is your competitive advantage
Local SEO expert Will Scott highlights this when talking about consistency:
Traffic to websites from organic search is expected to decline due to the increasing prevalence of AI-influenced searches, including AI Overviews on Google.
User expectations have shifted due to AI-powered search experiences.
Focusing solely on download times and metrics like Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) is no longer enough.
Hyper-local and hyper-personalized content is now essential to boosting engagement and conversions.
Website traffic from organic search is expected to decline as AI-influenced experiences, like Google’s AI Overviews, become more common.
At the same time, user expectations have evolved.
To drive engagement and conversions, brands must now deliver hyper-local, hyper-personalized content tailored to each user’s context and intent.
Customer loyalty will be crucial as AI assistants become more agentic (using agents to retrieve information).
Businesses that understand and nurture their customer relationships, primarily through loyalty programs, will be rewarded, as user preferences will become part of the AI’s training data.
For example, if a customer has a loyalty membership with an airline or hotel, the AI will prioritize that preferred airline in travel queries.
AI-generated images are no longer performing well in search, says Joy Hawkins.
Google introduced a quality filter earlier this year that significantly reduced the visibility of AI-created visuals, Joy Hawkins highlights.
The ranking gains and image traffic were reversed when Google rolled this out.
If you added AI photos to your website, check your image traffic in Search Console for 2025.
If you see a drop, you might want to consider pulling back on that strategy.
Strategies to deploy
Key focus areas include:
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
MktoForms2.loadForm(“https://app-sj02.marketo.com”, “727-ZQE-044”, 16298, function(form) {
// form.onSubmit(function(){
// });
// form.onSuccess(function (values, followUpUrl) {
// });
});
Relevance and user intent have always been central to local search.
With some LLM tools now capable of “remembering” past searches, they can personalize answers to an unprecedented degree.
AI transforms the customer journey by enabling real-time intent matching, where highly topical, entity-rich content with strong topical authority and expertise performs best.
Strategies to deploy
Consider:
Dig deeper: How to safeguard your content strategy in an AI-driven search landscape
Speed and CWVs directly impact conversion rates.
When visitors land on your site, many are already primed to take action, so it’s critical to deliver a seamless, high-performing experience with minimal friction.
We also want to leverage AI to perform AB testing, CRO, and user experience testing. In 2025, local is about experience.
Strategies to deploy:
Many factors influence local search results. Real-time, actionable insights based on current engagement are crucial.
Key metrics include:
Local SEO metrics
Dig deeper: 13 digital marketing trends you should plan for in 2025
We are entering a new era of discovery where traditional search results are being replaced by conversational AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.
Instead of browsing links, users now expect direct answers, comparisons, and recommendations.
Part revolution and part evolution, AI-powered search, predicted years ago, rapidly transforms the user journey.
Soon, users will express their intentions, and AI will handle all the research, returning only the most relevant answer, rather than a list of links.
Websites will serve more as data repositories for AI consumption than traditional sales tools.
Local search results may increasingly become part of AI Overviews or AI-generated search results, as Google introduces AI modes within search.
Brands must prioritize data accuracy and a consistent, hyper-personalized experience across all channels.
This shift has profound implications: marketers must optimize for an answer-first world, and builders can create AI-native customer experiences where the next buyer may be an AI agent.
Local 3.0 is no longer just about features; it’s about rethinking discovery, experience, and purchasing in an AI-first landscape.
I’d like to thank the many contributors to this article – Will Scott, Crystal Carter, and Joy Hawkins – for their valuable insights. I’m also grateful to the my team for their support with data and visuals, especially Tushar Prabhu, Elmer Boutin, and Brett Dugan. Your efforts helped bring this piece together – thank you.
Local search is no longer just about maps and directories.
What began as a game of citation consistency has grown into a dynamic, intent-driven ecosystem shaped by real-time data, customer intelligence, and AI-powered personalization.
Today, AI is redefining how people discover, evaluate, and interact with local businesses – reshaping the rules of visibility, experience, and conversions across every channel.
This article:
These shifts in local search have occurred in three interconnected phases, each building on the last, shaping the current landscape.
This phase focused on ensuring data accuracy and consistency across channels, with citation management services emerging to help brands maintain correct local listings at scale.
Last year, I wrote about Local 2.0, which was about discovery, relevancy, authority, experience, engagement, and conversions.
In 2024, local search emphasized engaging conversations across all touchpoints, moving beyond simple listings management to prioritize customer experience and relevance.
I shared why businesses should focus on:
I emphasized the importance of a rock-solid platform, topical, and entity-rich content, and optimized digital assets, among other strategic priorities.
This year, I see local search through the lens of AI.
While the overall framework remains the same, AI is playing a pivotal role in modernizing customer discovery in local search.
At the heart of Local 3.0 is AI’s ability to understand and match user intent with unprecedented depth and context.
AI-driven search is becoming more personalized and context-aware.
Crystal Carter, head of SEO Communication at Wix, shared:
The impact you’ve likely seen:
AI has transformed micro-moments by:
Over the past year, we’ve observed how AI fundamentally changed the entire local search journey across all channels for both location-based businesses and large brands.
The essential ingredients for discovery are consistency, accuracy, and real-time discovery.
With the rise of large language models (LLMs), the accuracy of business information within these models has become a foundational necessity.
Data accuracy and real-time discovery of the most relevant and authoritative content are vital, especially given the high cost of computing resources.
The role of images and videos in local search is evolving with technologies like Google MUM and similar models from OpenAI.
These enable LLMs to understand connections across media types using embeddings and vectors, making topical relevance not just limited to text.
This allows brands to engage users at different stages of the journey:
Recommended strategies
Brands should:
Dig deeper: Why entity search is your competitive advantage
Local SEO expert Will Scott highlights this when talking about consistency:
Traffic to websites from organic search is expected to decline due to the increasing prevalence of AI-influenced searches, including AI Overviews on Google.
User expectations have shifted due to AI-powered search experiences.
Focusing solely on download times and metrics like Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) is no longer enough.
Hyper-local and hyper-personalized content is now essential to boosting engagement and conversions.
Website traffic from organic search is expected to decline as AI-influenced experiences, like Google’s AI Overviews, become more common.
At the same time, user expectations have evolved.
To drive engagement and conversions, brands must now deliver hyper-local, hyper-personalized content tailored to each user’s context and intent.
Customer loyalty will be crucial as AI assistants become more agentic (using agents to retrieve information).
Businesses that understand and nurture their customer relationships, primarily through loyalty programs, will be rewarded, as user preferences will become part of the AI’s training data.
For example, if a customer has a loyalty membership with an airline or hotel, the AI will prioritize that preferred airline in travel queries.
AI-generated images are no longer performing well in search, says Joy Hawkins.
Google introduced a quality filter earlier this year that significantly reduced the visibility of AI-created visuals, Joy Hawkins highlights.
The ranking gains and image traffic were reversed when Google rolled this out.
If you added AI photos to your website, check your image traffic in Search Console for 2025.
If you see a drop, you might want to consider pulling back on that strategy.
Strategies to deploy
Key focus areas include:
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
MktoForms2.loadForm(“https://app-sj02.marketo.com”, “727-ZQE-044”, 16298, function(form) {
// form.onSubmit(function(){
// });
// form.onSuccess(function (values, followUpUrl) {
// });
});
Relevance and user intent have always been central to local search.
With some LLM tools now capable of “remembering” past searches, they can personalize answers to an unprecedented degree.
AI transforms the customer journey by enabling real-time intent matching, where highly topical, entity-rich content with strong topical authority and expertise performs best.
Strategies to deploy
Consider:
Dig deeper: How to safeguard your content strategy in an AI-driven search landscape
Speed and CWVs directly impact conversion rates.
When visitors land on your site, many are already primed to take action, so it’s critical to deliver a seamless, high-performing experience with minimal friction.
We also want to leverage AI to perform AB testing, CRO, and user experience testing. In 2025, local is about experience.
Strategies to deploy:
Many factors influence local search results. Real-time, actionable insights based on current engagement are crucial.
Key metrics include:
Local SEO metrics
Dig deeper: 13 digital marketing trends you should plan for in 2025
We are entering a new era of discovery where traditional search results are being replaced by conversational AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.
Instead of browsing links, users now expect direct answers, comparisons, and recommendations.
Part revolution and part evolution, AI-powered search, predicted years ago, rapidly transforms the user journey.
Soon, users will express their intentions, and AI will handle all the research, returning only the most relevant answer, rather than a list of links.
Websites will serve more as data repositories for AI consumption than traditional sales tools.
Local search results may increasingly become part of AI Overviews or AI-generated search results, as Google introduces AI modes within search.
Brands must prioritize data accuracy and a consistent, hyper-personalized experience across all channels.
This shift has profound implications: marketers must optimize for an answer-first world, and builders can create AI-native customer experiences where the next buyer may be an AI agent.
Local 3.0 is no longer just about features; it’s about rethinking discovery, experience, and purchasing in an AI-first landscape.
I’d like to thank the many contributors to this article – Will Scott, Crystal Carter, and Joy Hawkins – for their valuable insights. I’m also grateful to the my team for their support with data and visuals, especially Tushar Prabhu, Elmer Boutin, and Brett Dugan. Your efforts helped bring this piece together – thank you.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making
The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution
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