AI Overviews And Local SEO: What Multi-Location Brands Must Do (Spoiler: Nobody Knows)

Webinars were scheduled. Carousels were designed. Courses were priced at $1,997.

There was just one problem: nobody has any actual data on what works. Not the gurus. Not the tools. Not the agencies who just added “AI Overview Optimization” to their service page last Tuesday.

But that has never stopped anyone from selling you the solution.

The Current State of Local AI Overviews: A Beautiful Mystery Wrapped in Bullshit

Here is what we know for sure about AI Overviews and multi-location SEO:

• They show up sometimes
• They push everything else down
• Google says they are helpful
• The local pack still exists, technically

That is the entire list of confirmed facts.

Everything else you have read is speculation dressed up as strategy. The same people who told you to optimize for featured snippets—which disappeared the moment you finally convinced your client to pay for that work—are now telling you to optimize for AI Overviews.

The playbook is identical. The honesty is still missing.

Multi-Location Brands Are Playing a Game Nobody Explained

If you run SEO for a multi-location brand, you are now expected to:

• Optimize each location page for traditional local pack rankings
• Optimize each location page for AI Overview inclusion
• Maintain separate content strategies for both
• Track performance in systems that cannot actually measure AI Overview visibility
• Report on results you cannot verify
• Do all of this without Google providing any guidelines whatsoever

Oh, and your boss wants to know why traffic is down.

The truth nobody wants to say out loud: SEO that works for multi-location brands in the AI Overview era looks exactly like SEO that worked before, except now you get to watch an AI summary take the click you earned.

What the “Experts” Are Recommending (And Why It Is Mostly Performance Art)

The official advice circulating through SEO circles right now sounds like this:

“Create concise, authoritative content that directly answers user questions. Structure your location pages with clear headings. Use schema markup. Focus on EEAT signals. Build topical authority.”

Congratulations. You just received the same advice that has been recycled since 2015, now with “AI Overview” slapped on top like a clearance sticker.

Nobody is saying this because they have tested it. They are saying it because it sounds responsible and cannot be proven wrong. It is the SEO equivalent of telling someone to “just be yourself” on a first date.

Meanwhile, actual thought leaders who have never ranked a multi-location site in their lives are hosting panels about AI Overview strategy at conferences.

The panel is $800. The insights are free on Google’s support page. The cognitive dissonance is complimentary.

The Tools Are Lying (Or They Just Do Not Know Either)

SEO tools have rushed to add “AI Overview tracking” to their dashboards.

Some of them probably work. Most of them are theater.

They will show you a percentage. They will show you a graph. They will show you which keywords “trigger” AI Overviews. What they will not show you is whether your specific location page is actually featured inside that AI Overview, how often it appears, or what happens to your traffic when it does.

Because tracking that at scale across hundreds of locations is nearly impossible right now.

But the tool companies cannot say that. They just raised their Series B. The deck promised AI features. So they shipped something and called it AI Overview tracking.

You are paying $600/month for a best guess with a confidence interval.

If that sounds harsh, go ask your tool’s support team how they are verifying AI Overview inclusion for multi-location queries. Watch them forward your ticket to Product.

What Multi-Location Brands Should Actually Do (The Part Where Honesty Ruins the Word Count)

Here is the strategy nobody wants to tell you because it does not require a workshop:

Keep doing what already works for local SEO. Watch what happens. Adjust if you can measure a difference.

That is it.

You do not need a new content framework. You do not need an AI Overview audit. You do not need to restructure your entire location page template because someone wrote a LinkedIn post with seven rocket emojis.

You need:

• Accurate NAP data across all locations
• Properly optimized Google Business Profiles
• Location pages that are not just templates with the city name swapped
• Reviews that are real
• Content that actually helps someone decide whether to visit your location

This is not exciting. This will not get you invited to speak at a conference. This will not launch a course.

But it is the only honest answer available right now.

The Part Where We Talk About What Google Is Not Telling You

Google has been remarkably quiet about how multi-location brands should approach AI Overviews.

No official guidance. No case studies. No best practices document.

This is not an accident.

Google does not know yet either. They are still figuring out whether AI Overviews help or hurt the local search experience. They are A/B testing on your traffic. They are watching what users do when the AI Overview shows up versus when it does not.

You are not optimizing for a stable system. You are optimizing for a live experiment that changes every time someone in Mountain View has a new idea during lunch.

The gurus will not tell you this because uncertainty does not sell.

But uncertainty is the only truth available.

The Data That Does Not Exist (And the Reports Pretending It Does)

Every quarter, someone publishes a study about AI Overviews.

They analyzed one million searches. They tracked AI Overview appearance rates. They correlated EEAT signals with inclusion likelihood. They built a model.

Then you read the methodology and realize they did not track multi-location queries specifically. Or they did, but only for twenty brands. Or they extrapolated from desktop data and applied it to mobile.

The annual reports are impressive. The conclusions are speculative. The actionable insights are the same things you were already doing.

We are in the early days of AI Overviews for local search. Anyone claiming they have cracked the code is either lying or about to be wrong in three weeks when Google changes something.

What About the Local Pack? (It Is Still There, Technically)

The local pack has not disappeared. It has just been demoted.

When an AI Overview shows up, the local pack gets pushed down. Users have to scroll past the AI-generated summary, past the sponsored results, past the “People also ask” section, and then—maybe—they see your local listing.

This is fine, according to Google, because the AI Overview is helpful.

Whether it is actually helpful is irrelevant. It is there. It is taking space. Your click-through rate is adjusting accordingly.

And there is nothing you can do about it except optimize for inclusion inside the AI Overview itself—a process nobody can reliably explain yet.

The impressions are up. The traffic is not. Welcome to 2025.

The Recommendations Nobody Wants to Hear

If you are waiting for a clear, step-by-step AI Overview optimization playbook for multi-location brands, you are going to be waiting a while.

In the meantime:

Stop chasing every new feature Google launches. Half of them will be deprecated before you finish optimizing for them. Focus on the fundamentals that survive algorithm updates.

Do not restructure your entire content strategy based on a blog post. Especially if that blog post is written by someone who has never managed a multi-location SEO campaign.

Track what you can actually measure. If your tools cannot verify AI Overview inclusion, do not build a strategy around metrics you are guessing at.

Test on a small scale first. If you want to try something new, test it on ten locations before rolling it out to three hundred. You will learn faster and break less.

Ignore the webinars. They are not going to tell you anything you cannot figure out yourself by spending an hour searching your own keywords and taking notes.

The Only Honest Prediction Available

AI Overviews are going to keep changing. Google will tweak the algorithm. The appearance rate will fluctuate. The layout will shift. The sources will rotate.

Multi-location brands will continue to be caught in the middle—too big to ignore AI Overviews, too distributed to optimize every location page individually for an unstable feature.

The agencies will keep selling AI Overview audits. The tools will keep adding dashboards. The experts will keep speaking at conferences.

And the actual data will remain just out of reach, hidden behind Google’s black box and the performance theater of an industry that cannot admit when it does not know something.

This is not pessimism. This is pattern recognition.

We have been here before. Featured snippets. Knowledge panels. Local pack changes. Every time, the playbook was the same: someone sells you the solution before the problem is even fully defined.

Do not fall for it again.