In February, we wrote that local rankings were holding steady while calls and website clicks quietly disappeared. By April, our data pointed to something much more dramatic, enough that we declared “local SEO” was dying on stage at BrightonSEO.
We were wrong about the scale.
Q1 data was revised retrospectively. After testing the corrected numbers against a full second quarter, we found a clearer, more specific story than either version suggested.
Why Q1 looked like a crisis
Sterling Sky and Jepto’s analysis of 179 Google Business Profiles found that AI-powered local packs often show just two businesses instead of three, frequently without a click-to-call button, and surface only 32% as many unique businesses as the traditional Map Pack. Most rank trackers couldn’t see any of it.
Joy Hawkins, Claudia Tomina, and Matt McGee were independently reporting the same pattern: rankings held steady while performance declined.
Our initial reading of the Q1 data, presented at BrightonSEO in April, looked even more severe. Actions and impressions appeared to have fallen by roughly half across our U.S. portfolio. The drop was dramatic enough that we advised some agency customers to invest in paid search.
It didn’t hold up.
The corrected Q1 number, and what Q2 adds
Rechecking Q1 revealed a much less dramatic picture. Year over year:
- U.S. website clicks and calls each fell 15.8%, while direction requests rose 31.3%.
- Desktop Search impressions increased 12.3%.
- Mobile Search impressions fell 20.6%.
- Desktop Maps impressions declined 17.9%.
We don’t put much weight on the mobile Maps figure alone. A small number of large advertisers can significantly shift that metric.
Q2 data tests that corrected the baseline.
U.S. calls and website clicks are still falling, down 11.9% and 12.5%, and direction requests are still growing, up 21.1%, all three decelerating against Q1’s sharper moves.
The standout change is desktop Maps: down 17.9% in Q1, up 3.2% in Q2, a genuine reversal, specific to the US. Mobile Maps impressions are up 30.4%, desktop search is up 13.9%, and mobile search is down 20.1%, enough on its own to erase the other gains.
Our read is that U.S. customers are increasingly completing the entire journey within Google Maps rather than starting on a search results page. The reversal in desktop Maps impressions suggests that the shift is no longer limited to mobile.
Two ranking systems and reviews as the connective tissue
Traditional Maps rankings still rely on proximity, relevance, engagement, and prominence. The signals behind AI Mode and Gemini differ: web context, entity matching, brand authority, and review sentiment are layered on top of the Google Business Profile.
One system determines whether you appear on the map. The other determines whether Google’s AI trusts what it knows about your business enough to answer a customer’s question directly, without a click.
Reviews are becoming the raw material for that second system. Google now prompts reviewers with structured tags such as atmosphere, price, and cleanliness, rather than relying solely on free text, and also encourages customers to review businesses they’ve visited.
It’s building cleaner data so its AI can answer questions without sending users to a website first — a plausible explanation for direction requests rising while calls and website clicks decline.
The EU and UK aren’t a slower version of the US
The picture outside the U.S. is different. In the EU, desktop Maps impressions fell faster in Q2, dropping from -16.5% in Q1 to -34.7%, even as direction requests continued to grow, slowing from +21.7% to +13.1%.
The U.K.’s smaller dataset showed the opposite reversal. Mobile Maps impressions swung from +22.4% in Q1 to -70.8% in Q2, while direction requests and website clicks continued to rise.
Neither market appears to be simply trailing the U.S. They’re following different paths.
Rank tracking alone won’t tell you this
SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index found AI platforms recommend far fewer locations than Google’s 3-pack: 1.2% on ChatGPT, 7.4% on Perplexity, and 35.9% on Google. A key reason is profile accuracy, which averages 68% on ChatGPT and Perplexity versus 100% on Gemini, which pulls directly from Google Maps data. Search Engine Land covered the report in detail.
Reviews matter here, too. Locations recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3 stars, while those recommended by Perplexity average 4.2, suggesting review quality is becoming a gate for AI recommendations, not just a ranking signal.
What this means for your reporting
If your reporting still leads with call volume, you’re measuring only part of the customer journey. Direction requests deserve equal weight. Businesses with the most complete, accurate Google Business Profile data capture more of the remaining clicks, calls, and directions.
For multi-location brands, agencies, and SMBs focused on the bottom of the funnel, local SEO has grown up. It’s starting to look a lot more like SEO.
More detail on GMBapi’s Q2 Local SEO trend data is available here.
