In 2026, local brand visibility doesn’t end with Google Maps. More and more often, a user asks a question in ChatGPT or Gemini, or gets a ready-made answer in AI Overviews - and only then clicks through to a specific business. That changes the rules of the game. In classic SEO, the main battle was for position. In GEO, what matters is whether your brand appears in generative answers as a credible recommendation [1][2][3].
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AI Overviews are changing how users get answers in Google. From a local SEO perspective, that means one thing: instead of competing only for a click in the organic results or the local map pack, you need to make sure your brand becomes a source that Google cites in its summaries. For reputation-driven businesses such as Rating Captain, the most important signals are trust and consistency: accurate business data, a strong Google Business Profile, and genuine Google reviews.
In the SEO community, a fresh observation has drawn attention: AI Overviews in Google Search can now cite specific, individual reviews from Google Business Profile listings. That means when a user submits a query such as reviews for a doctor, the AI overview may show direct quotes from customer feedback within the search results page. These are not AI-generated texts but existing user reviews that Google’s AI highlights within the overview feature.
AI overviews are already available in Google Search and continue to transform how a user interacts with search results. Instead of the classic overlay, Google is now experimenting with a new design – a bottom tray that appears at the bottom of the search results page. This ai experiment in Search Labs may change the balance between organic search, ai overviews in search, and other ai features in search.
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