Search for “how much does a dental implant cost in Perth” or “best solicitor for strata disputes near me” and the first thing you see is no longer a list of websites. It is a paragraph written by Google’s AI, with a handful of small links tucked into it. If your business isn’t one of those links, the person searching may never scroll far enough to find you.
This is not a niche problem. A Whitespark study reported by Search Engine Journal found AI Overviews now appear on 68% of local searches, more often than the map pack (39%). For “how much” and “how long” questions, they show up on more than 90%. Those are exactly the searches a clinic, a law firm or a tradesperson wants to win.
Why the AI skips most small business websites
Google’s AI is looking for pages it can quote. It wants a clear fact it can lift into a sentence: a price range, a timeframe, a yes-or-no answer, a step-by-step. Most small business websites don’t give it one. They give it a hero banner that says “Quality service you can trust”, a paragraph about being family-owned, and a contact form.
There is nothing wrong with any of that for a human reader. But there is nothing in it for an AI to cite, so it pulls its answer from somewhere else, usually a directory, a forum thread or a competitor who bothered to write the answer down.
Freshness matters too. Ahrefs looked at 17 million AI citations and found the cited pages were, on average, about 26% newer than the pages ranking in the normal results. A service page you last touched in 2022 is at a disadvantage before the AI has even read it.
Five things to fix on your website
1. Answer the cost question, even roughly
“Pricing depends on your needs, contact us for a quote” is the sentence AI Overviews ignore most. You don’t need a fixed price list. A realistic range with the factors that move it (“Most residential conveyancing in NSW falls between $X and $Y; the main variables are…”) is enough to be quoted, and it filters out the enquiries you didn’t want anyway.
2. Give each service its own fact-dense page
One “Services” page with six paragraphs cannot compete with a dedicated page per service. Each page should state plainly what the service is, who it’s for, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens first, and the questions people actually ask before booking. Tables and short FAQ sections are easier for the AI to read than long prose.
3. Add FAQ schema
Schema is a small block of code that tells Google “this is a question, and this is the answer”. It doesn’t change how the page looks. It does make it far easier for the AI to pull a clean answer from your page instead of guessing. FAQ and LocalBusiness schema are the two that matter most for a local service business.
4. Make your business details identical everywhere
Your name, address, phone number and service categories should match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Yelp and any industry directories. Small differences (“Suite 4” on one, “Unit 4” on another) make the AI less confident you are one real business, and less likely to cite you.
5. Update the pages you already have
Before writing anything new, go through your existing service pages and refresh them: current prices, current team, current photos, this year’s date. It is the cheapest change on this list and, given the freshness data above, one of the most effective.
What doesn’t help
Stuffing the words “AI” or “near me” into headings. Publishing ten thin blog posts a month. Paying for a “GEO optimisation package” that is a relabelled SEO audit. The AI isn’t looking for tricks; it is looking for the clearest, most current, most specific answer to the question. Write that, put it on the right page, and mark it up properly.
Where to start
Pick the one service that brings in the most revenue. Open its page. Ask whether a stranger could learn what it costs, how long it takes and what to expect, without phoning you. If the answer is no, that page is where the work starts.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on it, our SEO and website optimisation work covers exactly this, and we’re happy to tell you on a call whether your site needs a rewrite or just a tidy-up.