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Watch now: Discover how search engines and AI platforms understand local businesses, and learn proven strategies to optimize your Google Business Profile, reviews, local content, and entity signals for greater local search visibility.
Local search is entering the AI era
When consumers search for a nearby restaurant, healthcare provider, hotel, attraction, or retailer, they expect immediate, trustworthy recommendations. Historically, those searches were dominated by Google’s local pack and Google Maps. In today’s organic search landscape, local discovery is expanding across AI-powered experiences like Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
These AI platforms don’t simply return a list of nearby businesses. They synthesize information from trusted sources to recommend businesses, summarize reviews, answer questions, and help users make decisions.
That shift makes local SEO more important than ever in the modern search landscape.
The same signals that have traditionally influenced local rankings also help AI systems understand who you are, where you operate, and whether your business deserves to be recommended. These core local ranking signals include:
- Accurate business information across all sources (NAP consistency: business name, address, phone number)
- Review quality, recency and engagement activity
- Website authority and unique localized content
- Local citations across multiple authoritative sources
- Structured data (LocalBusiness schema)
- Optimized and active Google Business Profile
As part of our Search Everywhere Optimization webinar series, our SEO team explored how businesses, multi-location brands, and destination marketing organizations can strengthen their local presence across both traditional search engines and emerging AI search experiences.
Explore our full Search Everywhere Optimization webinar series on YouTube!
Webinar takeaways: How to optimize Google Business Profile and local search for AI visibility
- Complete every section of your Google Business Profile. Businesses with complete, accurate profiles are easier for both search engines and AI models to understand. Fill out every available field, including categories, services, products, descriptions, business hours, amenities, attributes, and contact information.
- Choose your business categories carefully. Primary and secondary categories help Google understand what your business does and which searches you should appear for. Select the most relevant categories rather than simply the broadest ones.
- Maintain absolute NAP consistency across the web. Your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and operating hours should remain consistent across your website, Google Business Profile, online directories, and social platforms.
- Invest in review generation and management. Reviews remain one of the strongest local ranking signals while also influencing how AI systems summarize your business. Develop a consistent strategy for requesting reviews and respond thoughtfully to both positive and negative feedback.
- Publish fresh content to Google Business Profile regularly. Google Posts help keep your profile active while promoting events, offers, blog content, and business updates. Consistent posting also sends freshness signals that support local visibility.
- Use Google Business Profile Q&A proactively. Don’t wait for customers to ask questions. Add frequently asked questions and helpful answers to improve the customer experience while giving search engines additional context about your business. Use the insights you uncover through monitoring consumer sentiment and brand conversations on Reddit to inform your Q&A content strategy.
- Upload high-quality photos and videos consistently. Visual content increases engagement while helping customers better understand your business before they visit. Regularly updating photos and videos also demonstrates that your business is active and current.
- Implement LocalBusiness schema. Structured data acts like a digital identity card for search engines, helping connect your website, Google Business Profile, and business entity into a unified understanding of your organization.
- Strengthen your entity across the web. AI search is shifting from keywords to entities. Connect your website, Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, and social profiles through consistent branding and structured data to help search engines confidently identify and recommend your business.
- Invest in citation management to strengthen your local entity. Consistent business information across directories helps search engines and AI platforms confidently understand your business. Citation management tools like BrightLocal are ideal for small to mid-sized businesses looking to audit and manage listings, while enterprise organizations with large location footprints can leverage platforms like Yext to maintain accurate business information across hundreds of directories at scale.
- Optimize every location individually. Multi-location businesses should treat each location as its own digital asset with unique landing pages, localized content, location-specific reviews, photos, and fully optimized Google Business Profiles.
- Help local partners strengthen their visibility. Destination marketing organizations can improve regional search visibility by empowering hotels, restaurants, attractions, retailers, and other local businesses with Google Business Profile best practices, review management strategies, and local SEO education.
Find out where your brand is winning and where you’re invisible. Request your free SEO and AI visibility scorecard today!
Local SEO is becoming entity SEO
If there was one theme that carried throughout the webinar, it’s that local SEO is no longer just about ranking in Google’s Map Pack. We’ve moved into the era of entity SEO.
Entity optimization (or entity SEO) is the practice of helping search engines and AI models understand your business as a unique, trustworthy entity—not just a collection of keywords. By creating consistent, machine-readable connections between your website, Google Business Profile, reviews, local citations, and social profiles, you make it easier for search engines and LLMs to confidently identify, understand, and recommend your business.
For a deeper dive into entity optimization, check out this entity SEO guide by Search Engine Journal.
Search engines and AI platforms are increasingly focused on understanding businesses as real-world entities. They evaluate signals from your Google Business Profile, website, structured data, reviews, social profiles, local citations, and countless other sources to determine whether your business is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy enough to recommend.
The stronger and more consistent those signals become, the easier it is for AI systems to confidently surface your business when users ask for local recommendations.
For multi-location brands, this means investing in every location—not just your corporate location or website. For destination marketing organizations (DMOs), it means recognizing that partner businesses collectively shape how a destination is understood across search and AI platforms.
In the era of Search Everywhere Optimization, local search is no longer limited to Google Maps. It’s about building a trusted digital entity that can be discovered, understood, and recommended wherever consumers search.
Ready to improve your local search visibility?
Whether you’re managing a single location, hundreds of storefronts, or promoting an entire destination, our SEO team helps organizations strengthen their visibility across Google Search, Google Maps, and today’s leading AI-powered search platforms.
Contact Envisionit to develop a search everywhere optimization strategy that improves local rankings, strengthens your Google Business Profile, and positions your brand to be discovered wherever customers are searching.
About Envisionit’s Search Everywhere Optimization webinar series
Brand visibility today is no longer won on a single platform. It’s earned across an interconnected network of search experiences, where your brand must be found, trusted, and chosen. At Envisionit, we call this evolution search everywhere optimization: the practice of optimizing brand visibility, authority, and discovery across every platform where both people and LLMs search for information. Traditional search engines still command roughly 80% of all searches, according to SparkToro, but the platforms surrounding them are growing fast.
To help marketers adapt to this new era of AI search discovery, our SEO team is hosting a free five-part search everywhere optimization webinar series, covering the platforms where your audience is actually searching today:
- June 2 – Content strategies for AI search [Watch webinar]
- June 9 – YouTube as a search engine [Watch webinar]
- June 16 – Reddit’s influence on SEO [Watch webinar]
- June 23 – TikTok and Instagram discoverability [Watch webinar]
- June 30 – Local search and Google Business Profile
