Google has started showing AI Overviews for local search results, but not all the time. It seems to be random. And when these AI Overviews do show up, they often pull information about local businesses from sources that are not exactly trustworthy.
Here’s the real problem. Instead of linking to a business’s own website, Google is often citing self-promotional listicle articles from random sites across the web. These are basically blog posts where someone lists out businesses (sometimes including their own) and Google treats them as a reliable source.
Local SEO expert Joy Hawkins recently shared a clear example of this on X. In her post, she explained that Google was quoting a single lawyer’s self-promoting listicle for every law firm shown in the results. That one article ended up being used as the main source for the entire list. So instead of linking out to each law firm’s actual website, Google linked to this one listicle again and again.
To check if this was a one-off issue, the example was tested across a few different browsers. After several attempts, the same pattern showed up. Google kept quoting the same kind of self-promotional listicle websites instead of pulling info directly from the businesses themselves.
This raises a bigger question about how reliable AI Overviews really are for local search. If Google is leaning on low-quality, self-promoting content instead of official business sources, it does not do much to make the results feel helpful or trustworthy. For now, this looks more like a miss than a win for Google’s local AI results.
You can follow the full discussion on X.
