Every year, Google I/O offers a glimpse into where Google is heading next. This year’s event was no exception, with a wave of AI announcements and product updates that could reshape how people discover information online.
For local SEOs, one announcement stood out: Google’s new AI-powered Search experience, which the company describes as its biggest shift in search in 25 years.
Alongside it came updated guidance on how websites can succeed in AI-driven search results, giving marketers some long-awaited clarity on what matters, what doesn’t, and where to focus their efforts.
As search continues to evolve, it’s natural to wonder what these changes mean for local businesses and the marketers who support them.
To help separate signal from noise, we asked leading SEO experts to share their perspectives on the updates, what they mean for local search, and the practical steps businesses should take next.
“Google’s announcements at I/O reinforce a trend we’ve been watching for some time: local search is becoming less about matching keywords and more about understanding context, intent, and reputation.
The newly announced Intelligent Search Box is a great example of this shift. By combining text, images, video, and conversational follow-up questions, Google is moving beyond simple keyword matching and towards understanding real-world needs and experiences.
For local businesses, the biggest change is that we’re moving from a search engine that understands ratings to one that interprets sentiment.
A 4.8-star rating tells Google people like a business. But now AI-powered search is increasingly able to understand why they like it. A customer photo might show dogs relaxing inside the cafe. A video could reveal a calm atmosphere that’s perfect for remote working. Reviews may highlight that people happily travel across town to visit. And forum discussions might be full of conversational recommendations for its oat milk lattes. By combining these different signals, Google’s AI can build a far richer understanding of a business than ratings alone.
The implication for local marketers is clear: success will depend less on optimizing a single profile and more on building a strong, consistent reputation wherever customers are sharing their experiences. Brands should be paying closer attention to reviews, forums, communities, and social discussions, not just as marketing channels, but as valuable sources of customer insight. Understanding what customers are saying, identifying recurring themes, and acting on that feedback will become increasingly important as AI systems use these signals to understand and describe local businesses.”
Myles Anderson, BrightLocal
“Google made two big moves in May. Taken together, they tell you most of what a local business needs to know about where search is heading.
The first came out quietly: a fairly short developer guide on how to optimize for AI search. The message underneath it is clear. The foundations of SEO have not changed and still matter.
What changes is how you execute on them, how you extend and adapt those same fundamentals for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
It also clears away some of the noise. You do not need special text files like llms.txt to show up (they do no harm and are simple enough to add, but they are not the point). You do not need to chop your content into tiny chunks for the AI to read, which is more AEO myth than real value.
What actually matters is what always has. Write genuinely useful content. Keep your site clean and well-structured. Build real depth on what you do, where you do it, and how good you are at it.
The guide also points, lightly, at what is coming. There is a short section on AI agents that act on behalf of a user, such as booking a table or comparing products, and on emerging standards like the Universal Commerce Protocol that will enable them to do more. Google treats this as early and optional. I would give it more weight than that. If an agent cannot read and understand your prices in detail, see your availability, and book into your calendar, it cannot complete the job for the customer and will move on to a site that can. That is where the highest-intent demand is moving.
Step back from the guide and the wider story at Google I/O was AI everywhere. A wave of announcements, new product names, and overlapping agentic tools aimed at every kind of user. AI for everything, everywhere, for everyone. Big on ambition, lighter on coherence, with a lot of overlap between the different solutions.
The announcement that matters most for search sat inside all of that: a redesigned search box that Google calls its biggest change to the box in 25 years.
The box now expands as you type, so you can ask longer, more conversational questions. You can search with text, images, files, video, and even your open Chrome tabs. The suggestions go beyond autocomplete, and you can move straight from a standard search into a fuller AI conversation. There are even standing agents that keep watching on your behalf, for example, alerting you when a band you follow announces a nearby show.
This is Google making search behave more like the AI assistant people have been drifting to elsewhere, so they have less reason to leave for ChatGPT and the rest. For users, it is a real improvement: less guessing the right keywords, more describing what you actually want. For businesses, it reshapes the kind of queries you need to show up in, and it likely means fewer but higher-intent visits rather than lots of low-intent clicks.
One small sign of how new all this still is: Google Search says you can ignore llms.txt, while Google’s own Chrome tools started checking for it the same month. The two halves of Google are not quite speaking with one voice yet.
So what do you take from it? The businesses that win in AI search will be the ones that got the fundamentals right and executed them really well. Useful, in-depth content. A clean, well-structured site. An accurate, active Google Business Profile and a steady flow of reviews. Get those right, then start preparing for the genuinely new part: making sure an AI agent can find your prices and availability and actually complete a booking for a customer. “
Celeste Gonzalez, Lastmile Retail
“The expansion of personal intelligence is the factor that will completely affect local once it is fully rolled out in regular search results. While it is now rolling out globally in AI Mode, it’s the start of a real shakeup.
Hopefully, this will push more local businesses to become more holistic in their content strategies to be more ICP (ideal customer profile) focused and consider EEAT. Some are calling it evidence optimization, but I think it’s EEAT reincarnated to basically say make sure you are proving who you are and what you offer (products, services, amenities, USPs).”
David Mihm, Near Media
“My general take on Google IO is that it’s a propaganda play whose primary purpose is to convince Wall Street that Google is still the market leader in AI search, and that AI won’t meaningfully disrupt that position (absent antitrust regulation, two positions I wholeheartedly agree with, FWIW). So, specifically related to the changes announced, I think there will be minimal short-term impact on local search.
At some point in the mid-term future (~next year), I could see the Local Pack evolving into something closer to the AI Overview/summarized carousel, but you can be sure that Google will do a LOT of testing on that before rolling it out more broadly. They won’t release something that’s SO appealing to users that it flattens or reverses their ad revenue trajectory.
Much bigger short-term impacts on local search are UX and SERP feature changes, which have more to do with monetization than AI. Google’s ad revenues continue to rise (13% growth in the most recent quarter), and I think we’ll continue to see SERP design decisions made that draw more clicks to ads. Ads are getting more and more eye candy (and the post-September-2025 collapsible ad packs look more and more like collapsible non-paid packs). AI Overviews may play a role in this, not so much by drawing in searchers or “stealing traffic” but by increasing the visual segmentation of local and organic results, and moving them further down the page.
And the bigger impact on local search won’t necessarily come from a feature release, but a user behavior change—as longer-tail queries become more common, clear connections with the products/services you offer, the location(s) they’re available, and your differentiators vs. your competition will be important to rank for those more precise queries. Local AI Overviews are starting to recommend specific businesses (whether in GBP carousel format or not), and brand searches should become an AI search visibility KPI as answer volatility and format variation make AI “rankings” problematic.
Google’s updated AI search optimization guidance is somewhat refreshing (keep on keepin’ on with good SEO fundamentals), though I’d take their “mythbusting” of page chunking and schema.org in particular with a grain of salt. Perhaps those are myths as they relate to Gemini, but Bing published a near-simultaneous piece where they explicitly highlight the role of chunking, and historically have encouraged schema to assist their own LLMs’ understanding of content and relationships. And we don’t really know how Anthropic, OpenAI, and others incorporate those two optimizations. If Google does start to bleed substantial market share—a long shot—it’ll be important to incorporate a wider optimization lens.”
The search landscape is changing, but that doesn’t mean you need to throw out the local SEO playbook. Google’s latest updates reinforce the importance of building a strong online presence, earning trust, and making it easy for both people and AI-powered search experiences to understand your business. The tactics may evolve, but the goal remains the same: helping customers find you when it matters most.
