Updates by Brett Woodward
If you’re a local business and you’ve noticed a drop in clicks and calls coming from your Google Business profile, you’re not alone. Some experts are worried that Google is increasingly becoming a pay to play environment in local SEO, as ads and AI features push organic results below the fold.
In a State of Local SEO 2026 report Joy Hawkins, owner of leading local SEO agency Sterling Sky, highlighted trends indicating that local businesses are receiving fewer interactions from Google Business Profiles.
One of the main factors she cites for the decline include an increase in the prominence and frequency of ads showing for local search results. According to Sterling Sky, ads were present in 1% of 3 packs results in 2025, but that has ballooned to 22% in 2026. The percentages of local service ads showing in search results has also been increasing; in January last year that number was 11%, and this January that figure was nearly 40%.
Another factor relates to Google’s use of AI being pumped into more results, which Sterling Sky reports is “only surfacing about 32% as many businesses as traditional 3-packs.”
The report makes a strong claim that it’s harder than ever for local businesses to gain visibility on Google, and that ads may unfortunately need to be a bigger part of their strategies going forward.
Besides investing more budget in ads, many of Sterling Sky’s recommendations for improving online visibility align with our own. Build truly unique and valuable content for your audience. Expand marketing efforts beyond Google search and prioritize social, YouTube, and other means of distributing your message. Know that the bar for effective marketing continues to rise, and that you need to rise with it to stay relevant.
Microsoft has been making more bids for relevancy in the past few months. While Bing and Copilot have a fraction of Google’s search market share, the steps they’ve taken are greatly appreciated by marketers and can be used to shape how we think about visibility in this new era of search.
After years of marketers pleading for data on AI mentions to be added to Google Search Console, Microsoft has done just that with their new AI Performance report inside Bing Webmaster Tools. In this beta report Microsoft provides information on the total number of citations a website received from Copilot Search, how many pages on a website were cited, and the grounding queries that resulted in citations.
While citations are straightforward, it’s important to note that grounding queries are not regular search queries. Grounding queries are the searches the AI decided to run in the background to get a better understanding of the search the user made. For example, if I searched Bing for “best headlamps for backcountry skiing”, Copilot might perform grounding queries like “rechargeable vs battery powered headlamps” or “headlamps for cold weather” in order to gain contextual information to inform its final response to my initial query.
Microsoft also published a marketer’s guide to AI search, a 20+ page document that provides “tangible best practices as a blueprint for success”. It outlines the way in which AI search works as well as tactics marketers can use to help their content be understood and mentioned by Copilot.
While Bing is not Google, these are great resources that marketers can use to shape their thinking on AI search which no doubt are also highly relevant for the more popular of the two search giants.
Updates by Casey Anderson
For some advertisers, testing Google’s AI Max has come with some hesitation. Giving up human control can be risky, especially in terms of branding. Here’s few things we’ve figured out along the way as we’ve moved our clients into AI Max optimized campaigns:
We pride ourselves on the paid media work we’ve done with non-profits over the years. This has meant spending a lot of time building strategy for Google Grant accounts, and we love to hear when Google is doing something new to boost the performance possibilities for these organizations.
In the past, if you tried to mark Shop Visits as a goal in the Grants account, you’d get an error. Now, you can optimize for foot traffic by setting up shop visits as an account-level goal. This will allow your campaigns to optimize for in-person visits.
If you run a non-profit, museum, place of worship, community center, or other location-based organization, digital engagement doesn’t always translate into mission impact. Optimizing for shop visits bridges that gap, tying ad performance directly to foot traffic.
Manus AI, a Meta acquisition from December 2025, is designed to power AI agents that can perform tasks like report building and audience research, effectively acting as an assistant within the ad workflow.
Some advertisers are seeing in-stream prompts and pop-up alerts to activate Manus AI inside Ads Manager, which indicates that deeper integration may lie ahead.
Though there is practicality behind this new partnership for users, this is Meta’s opportunity to provide proof that its investment into AI will have profitable returns for the company. In the meantime, we’ll stay hopeful that this new built-in automation will have a positive impact for advertisers.
Head over to this month’s Analytics Roundup to see Head of Analytics Nico Brooks’ latest on the world of marketing analytics and AI.
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