AI Mode cites Google Maps, not your Charleston site

If you spent this year rewriting service pages so a robot would quote them, I have bad news about roughly half that work.

Ben Fisher at Steady Demand ran 7,990 local service searches through Google's two AI surfaces last month and classified all 86,645 citations that came back. Fifty metros, ten verticals, and the verticals are the important part: plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians, dentists, personal injury lawyers. Not a SaaS dataset. That is my client list.

What he found is that AI Overviews and AI Mode both sit on top of Google Search, both look like the same product to a homeowner, and they behave in nearly opposite directions. Fisher posts this research on X at @TheSocialDude, and the full study is on the Steady Demand site.

The split, in two numbers

Take a local intent query. "Best plumber near me." The kind that ends in a phone call.

• AI Overviews cited the business's own website 73.5% of the time.
• AI Mode sent 79.8% of its citations to Google's own Maps and local pack links, and only 19.7% to the business's website.

Same query. Same company. Two different front doors, and only one of them is yours.

There is a second gap underneath that one. AI Overviews only showed up at all on 21.8% of local intent queries. It mostly steps aside and lets the old map pack handle "best plumber near me." AI Mode produced an answer on 100% of the queries Fisher sent it. Every one, every metro, every vertical.

Flip to an informational query and the whole thing reverses. Ask "how much does a plumber cost" and AI Overviews appears 75.8% of the time, while AI Mode's self citation drops from 79.8% to 22.7% and its citations to real business sites climb to 47.5%.

So AI Mode is perfectly capable of citing your website. It just refuses to for exactly the searches that ring your phone.

What that actually means for a Mount Pleasant contractor

You are not running one AI campaign. You are running two, and most Charleston service businesses I talk to are only paying for one.

When somebody in Mount Pleasant opens AI Mode and asks for a plumber, the record being read is your Google Business Profile. Not your homepage. Not the service page you paid somebody to write. Your categories, your hours, your photos, your Q&A. Eight times out of ten, that profile is functionally your website for that search.

When somebody asks what a repipe costs in Charleston, the surface is AI Overviews and the record being read is your actual site.

That reframes a conversation I have constantly. An owner asks whether a redesign will help them show up in AI. For "near me" searches, on this data, the honest answer is no. A redesign will not move AI Mode's local citations, because AI Mode is largely not looking at the site for those queries. Fix the profile instead. And if you are chasing informational demand, the redesign matters a lot, because that is where AI Overviews reads you.

The finding nobody wants to hear

Fisher also compared the businesses that got cited against the ones that got skipped, on five reputation signals. Star rating: 4.77 versus 4.75. Review count: 1,129 versus 1,266. Review sentiment: identical at 0.71. Domain age, identical. Backlinks actually skewed slightly higher for AI Mode's citations, which cuts against the tidy story that AI Overviews rewards quality.

Flat, flat, flat.

At this point a lot of owners are thinking: so reviews do not matter anymore. No. Read it correctly. Every business in that cited set had already cleared roughly 4.75 stars and a thousand plus reviews. Reputation is a gate you walk through, not a dial you turn. Going from 180 reviews to 240 is unlikely to flip you from uncited to cited, which is a very different claim from reviews being useless. Recency and volume still move the map pack, which is the argument I made about fresh reviews back in the spring, and the map pack is still where most of your calls come from.

What did separate cited pages from ignored ones was on page execution, and only on the AI Overviews side. Fisher crawled 25,898 cited pages. Schema markup, 64.0% of AI Overviews citations versus 58.7% for AI Mode. Mobile viewport, 87.2% versus 81.9%. Concrete statistics in the body copy, 59.5% versus 54.2%. And the one I would act on first: a phone number visible in the page body, 68.9% versus 58.4% on local queries.

About five points each. No single gap is dramatic, and that is the point. Six independent measurements all leaning the same way is the finding. It is also a quieter version of what the Ahrefs data said about whether schema markup actually helps: structured data correlates with getting cited, which is not the same as causing it.

Where this data is not Charleston

Fifty largest US metros. Charleston sits around 74th by metro population, so we are not in the sample, and Fisher did not publish a metro by metro split anyway. Treat the percentages as the shape of the thing, not as our numbers.

Fisher names three more limits himself, and they are worth repeating. Single snapshot, collected over a few days in August. The page crawl was plain HTML with no JavaScript rendering, so sites that inject schema client side got undercounted. And the data came through DataForSEO rather than a logged in session, so these are generic results, not what a real Mount Pleasant homeowner sees on her own phone.

(That last one matters more than people admit. It is the same reason the identical query gives you a different answer every time you ask it, which is the other Fisher study I wrote up two weeks ago.)

Do this before Friday

• Audit the profile like it is your homepage. Primary category, secondary categories, hours, service area, photos from this year, Q&A answered by you. For eight in ten local AI Mode answers, it is your homepage.
• Check the website field on your Google Business Profile. Fisher cross checked 6,006 business site citations and 4.5% pointed at the wrong domain entirely. Old sites nobody retired, franchise naming quirks. Two minutes to verify.
• Put your phone number in the page body. Visible text, not just a click to call button in the header. It tracked with citation on local queries.
• Write the cost page. "What does a water heater replacement cost in Charleston" is informational, so AI Overviews shows up three quarters of the time and reads your site to answer it. Real numbers in text, not baked into an image.

Splitting those two jobs is most of what we do for Charleston SEO clients now, and for the trades it is the whole Charleston plumbing SEO playbook: the profile earns the emergency call, the site earns the research call. More on the emergency half in how Charleston plumbers win the 2 a.m. leak search.

The businesses that win here will not be the ones with the best reviews. They will be the ones who worked out that this is two games while everybody else was still playing one.