AI Overviews Are Eating Your Google Clicks. Here’s What Long Island Businesses Can Do About It.
Maria owns a bakery in a busy downtown strip and used to track exactly how many people found her through a Google search for “birthday cakes near me.” Lately that number has been dropping, even though her Google ranking hasn’t moved. What changed isn’t her position on the page, it’s the page itself: Google now often answers the question directly at the top, before any website link even appears, and a lot of searchers never scroll past it.
That’s an AI Overview, and it’s reshaping how local businesses get found, whether they’ve noticed it yet or not.
What’s actually happening
Google’s AI Overviews summarize an answer using multiple sources and place it above the traditional list of blue links. For a lot of everyday questions, “best bakery near me,” “how much does a fence installation cost,” “what’s the average price for a haircut on Long Island,” the searcher gets their answer without clicking through to any single website. Fewer clicks means fewer visits, even for businesses that still rank well in the traditional sense.
This isn’t a glitch to wait out. It’s the new shape of search, and it rewards a different kind of visibility than ranking position alone used to.
The goal isn’t to fight it, it’s to get cited by it
Trying to out-rank an AI Overview is the wrong fight. The better goal is becoming one of the sources it pulls from and credits. Businesses that get cited inside the summary still get seen, sometimes more prominently than a traditional top result, because the citation shows up as a trusted source right in the answer.
What makes content more likely to get cited
Answer the question directly, near the top. Content that buries the actual answer under paragraphs of preamble is easy for an AI summary to skip past. Content that states the answer plainly in the first sentence or two, then explains further below, is easier to extract and cite.
Use clear headers that match how people actually ask. A header like “How much does a fence installation cost on Long Island?” is more citeable than a vague header like “Our Pricing Philosophy,” because it mirrors the question someone is actually asking.
Back claims with specifics. Vague marketing language doesn’t get cited. Specific, concrete details, actual price ranges, actual timeframes, actual numbers, do.
Keep the Google Business Profile complete and current. AI Overviews for local queries lean heavily on Business Profile data alongside web content, so an incomplete or stale profile limits how often a business shows up in the summary at all.
What this means day to day
The businesses adapting well aren’t chasing a trick to beat the algorithm. They’re writing content that answers real questions plainly and keeping their local listings accurate, the same fundamentals that have always mattered, just weighted differently now that the answer itself is what gets surfaced first.
Soundview Marketing Group helps Long Island businesses build content and profiles that are built to get cited, not just ranked, as search keeps changing.