There's a lot of noise right now about AI changing everything in search. Some of it is real. Most of it is overblown. For a small business in Victoria, Nanaimo, or Campbell River, here's the honest version of what's actually happening — and what it means for you.
The past year or two has produced a steady stream of alarming headlines: AI is killing SEO. Google is dying. Nobody clicks anymore. Business owners I talk to across Vancouver Island have started asking whether any of this SEO work actually matters if AI is just going to answer every question directly.
It's a fair question. Let me answer it properly.
What's actually happening in search right now
Google now shows AI-generated summaries at the top of many search results — what they call AI Overviews. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools are also fielding questions that people used to type into Google. The behaviour shift is real: some users are getting answers without ever clicking a link.
But here's the thing that gets glossed over in the panic: local intent searches are behaving very differently from informational ones. When someone in Courtenay types "furnace repair near me" or asks their phone to find a physiotherapist in Nanaimo, they are not looking for a written summary. They want a name, a phone number, and directions. AI Overviews and chatbots still need to surface a specific business to answer that query — and to do that, they pull from the same sources Google always has — which means the same fundamentals that drove local rankings before still apply.
Where AI answers actually come from
This is the part most people don't realize. When an AI tool recommends a local business, it isn't making up the answer from thin air. It's pulling from your Google Business Profile, your website, review platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and structured data signals you've built up over time. The same trust signals that have always mattered for local search are now feeding the AI layer on top of it.
What that means in practice:
- An incomplete or stale Google Business Profile is now a liability in two places — traditional search and AI answers — not just one.
- Inconsistent business information across the web confuses AI systems the same way it confuses Google's regular algorithm. If your address reads three different ways across directories, you're a less reliable answer for an AI to surface.
- Reviews from real customers carry even more weight now. AI tools use review signals as a proxy for legitimacy — a business with 40 genuine reviews from Nanaimo customers is a more confident recommendation than one with none.
- Clear, specific website content that names the communities you serve still matters. If your site mentions Duncan, Chemainus, and Ladysmith specifically, an AI system processing a query from someone in the Cowichan Valley can map you to that search. Generic content that never names a place cannot be surfaced for a place-based query.
The zero-click problem — and why it's smaller than you think for local
Zero-click search is a real phenomenon: someone asks a question, gets an AI-generated answer on the page, and never visits a website. This genuinely affects informational content — blog posts answering generic questions, "what is" queries, how-to guides. Traffic to that kind of content has declined.
For local service businesses, the picture is different. Nobody books a plumber by reading an AI summary. Nobody chooses a restaurant for Saturday dinner because a chatbot described the menu. The click — or the call — still has to happen. And when it does, the businesses showing up are the ones with solid local SEO foundations.
If anything, AI search has made the quality of the businesses it surfaces more important, not less. It has a stronger incentive to recommend businesses that are genuinely trustworthy and locally established — because a bad recommendation damages the AI tool's credibility with the user. Your reviews, your consistent NAP data, your complete GBP — these are signals that say "this business is real and reliable." They matter now more than they did two years ago.
What to actually do about it
The answer isn't complicated, which is why I'm a little suspicious of anyone selling you a special "AI SEO" service. Here's what the evidence actually points to:
- Keep your Google Business Profile current. Add recent photos, answer questions, post updates. An active profile signals an active business — to Google and to the AI layer above it.
- Get your citations in order. Your name, address, and phone number should read identically across every directory that lists you. Inconsistencies are trust problems in any search environment.
- Earn reviews consistently. Not in a burst, not from friends — a steady flow from real customers who actually used your service. This is the clearest signal of a legitimate, active local business.
- Make your website specific about where you work. A trades business serving the whole Cowichan Valley should say so clearly, with real content about each community — not just a bullet list of town names at the bottom of a page.
- Fix the structural issues on your website. Technical problems that prevent Google from crawling your site properly will also prevent AI systems from understanding it. A local SEO audit is still the clearest way to find out what's actually holding you back.
The Vancouver Island angle
One thing I've noticed specifically in this market: Island businesses are actually reasonably well-positioned for the AI search era, because local search on the Island has always rewarded genuine community presence over generic optimization tricks. The businesses that rank here — in Victoria, in Nanaimo, up through Courtenay — tend to be businesses with real roots in their communities: actual reviews from local people, accurate listings, websites that name the places they serve.
That's exactly what AI search rewards. So if you've been doing the right things, the shift probably won't hurt you — it may even help by filtering out some of the more aggressive optimization tactics that worked in traditional search but don't translate to AI systems.
If you haven't been doing the right things — or you're not sure whether you have — that's still a gap worth closing. The fundamentals of local SEO haven't changed because AI arrived. They've become the entry ticket.
Written by Michael Perks — Island Rank Canada, Duncan, BC. I do plain-English local SEO audits for small businesses across Vancouver Island. If you're not sure how your site looks to AI search tools, that's a good question for an audit to answer.