The State of Local SEO in 2026

SEO is dying! Well, not exactly, but there are some major shifts that happened in 2025 that should actually change how you approach your marketing for 2026.

Key Local SEO Trends for 2026

Local SEO trends in 2026 focus on adapting to AI-powered local packs, declining organic click-to-call rates, and the expansion of Local Services Ads (LSAs). Success requires a “data-first” strategy: prioritizing unique “human” content over AI-generated text, diversifying visibility across social platforms like YouTube or Reddit, and adopting a multi-location approach to offset shrinking organic visibility.

Clicks From Google Business Profiles are Dropping.

We have been noticing this trend all year. If you have a business profile that ranks really well, even if you don’t see a drop in ranking, your calls from the business profile are going down over time. To help highlight this, I asked Dale over at Jepto to compile some data. He looked at 179 profiles across 34 different law firms in the USA and showed their clicks from their Google Business profiles over the last 2 years.

The pattern is clear. The clicks-to-call are declining over the last 2 years. Why? Keep reading.

Something else is clear here, this decline doesn’t apply to website clicks on business profiles. Why? Website icons show up on local business profiles on desktop. So this trend tells us that the traffic decline is more specific to mobile, where phone icons show up and clicks-to-call are the primary action.

Organic traffic is dropping.

This is another huge trend in 2025. Lots of businesses who have spent a ton of time publishing articles or blogs saw a huge decline in traffic. Most of this traffic is on the informational side but still has SEO value. These articles can often be used to strengthen the value of the pages on the site that actually drive leads.

That begs the question, where is the traffic going?

Is ChatGPT stealing the traffic?

This is what I hear a lot of business owners saying, but I’m not seeing it in the data for any of our clients. While traffic from AI is certainly up, it’s still a minor fraction of what Google is bringing in. Last year, I looked at one of our biggest multi-location clients and concluded that Chat GPT’s traffic was 0.1% of Google. This year? It is up to 2% of their traffic from Google. That growth is pretty high but it’s still a very small piece of the traffic to their site, and still only 22% of the traffic that Bing sends 🙂

Is Google’s AI taking the traffic?

100% this is part of the problem.

Google’s AI Overviews has crushed blog/article traffic. Seer has published some great data showing how when AI Overviews are present, traffic to sites declines.

In addition to that, Google is rolling out AI-powered local packs. I’m currently only seeing these on mobile and in the USA.

Less Call Buttons

Remember how I said earlier that the biggest loss trend is on calls? That metric every business wants? Well, call buttons are becoming less and less frequent on mobile and there are 2 formats that are rolling out rapidly.

First is that Google is rolling out AI-powered local packs. These things are terrifying. Let me share some stats we have noticed about them.

They are only on mobile currently, and I’ve only seen them in the USA. They are showing up on about 7% of the keywords we are tracking in our ranking reports with Places Scout.

Why they are problematic is that:

1. 1.  They only feature 1-2 businesses (vs 3)
   2. They don’t have call buttons
   3. They feature different businesses than the ones that were in the 3-pack

The overall trend here is that businesses are getting less visibility. When Places Scout analyzed our recent ranking reports, it found that AI local packs featured 5,943 unique businesses whereas, regular 3-packs featured 18,330.

AI local packs are only surfacing about 32% as many businesses as traditional 3-packs.

In the 322 markets we looked at, 88% had fewer unique businesses in the AI local packs than traditional local packs.

The second reason why there are less clicks on call buttons is because Google has replaced them with images for several industries. For example, here is how a local pack for a handyman looked like in October vs November 2025.

We tracked this two years ago with Jepto when Google rolled this out in the dentist industry and noticed a sizable decline in clicks to call buttons.

More 3-Pack Ads

Let’s talk about another huge trend for 2025. Back at the beginning of 2025, local pack ads were only visible on 1% of the reports we were running on mobile devices.

Fast forward to December 2025, and now almost 22% of our reports are showing them. This is a massive increase.

More LSAs

The same trend is true for Local Services Ads. At the beginning of 2025, they were showing on roughly 11% of the queries we were tracking. In November, this number rose to 31%.

So What Should You Do to Keep Up With the Local SEO in 2026?

Well here is what I would suggest focusing your marketing on for 2026 given all these changes:

1. 1. Change your content strategy to focus on writing content that your competitors haven’t written. We have completely shifted our strategy for content in the last year. If you are simply copying what the top ranking businesses are doing, you are not as likely to succeed.
   2. More locations. If you have a single Google business profile that is ranking well, you will likely see less traffic from that listing in 2026. One way to combat this is to plan to open more locations for your business.
   3. Run Google ads – and use all types of them. Yes, I realize this isn’t what anyone wants to hear, however, Google is definitely going pay-to-play based on all this data I’ve been analyzing. The silver lining is that our clients who are running ads are getting a better ROI than previously since the ads have better placement and contain features (like call buttons) that the organic listings are losing.
   4. Shift your expertise to social media. If you’re like me, and want to be known as an expert in your field and love providing informational content, you should consider doing this on YouTube or Reddit. While this is a very time consuming project, it should pay off long-term and is one of the best long-term strategies as the internet becomes dominated by AI.
   5. Monitor AI. While ChatGPT isn’t a huge traffic source for small businesses right now, it might be in a year from now. The internet has proven to be pretty unpredictable this year so I would suggest every business track how much traffic they are getting from AI. If you’re not sure how to do this, Seer has a really great template you can use.