Local Agencies Move Client Visibility To The Map As AI Answers Cite the Profile

For most of the past two decades, a local contractor who reached the top of Google's results could count on the phone ringing. The page above that position has since filled in with AI summaries, paid placements, and a map. Searchers now click a traditional link on 8% of visits where an AI summary appears, compared with 15% of visits where none does. Agencies serving small local businesses have moved the work onto Google's own profile listings, and they are automating the upkeep those listings need to stay near the top.

Ken Plain is the owner of SEORaleigh, a local search agency that builds sites for small and medium businesses across the Raleigh, North Carolina market. He takes clients from no ranking at all to the number one position for their most valuable keyword terms, and most of the sites he builds land in the top three or four results on the first page. Plain has been doing this since the early years of Google Maps, which gives him a long record of what each position on the page used to deliver.

"The map is a really important part for any of my clients. It's much easier for me to get them up on the maps out 20, 25 miles than it is to try to get them to number one on Google search. In the older days, number one on standard Google search would get a lot more contact, a lot more people visiting the website. That doesn't seem to be happening anymore," Plain says. The listing he prioritizes has taken on a second function since he started building around it. Google Business Profile cards have pushed google.com to the second most-cited domain inside AI Mode answers since April, with the largest gains in home services and other local categories. The work Plain does to win a map position now also determines what an AI system says about the business when someone asks.

Below the map, above the scroll

The map has held its place while other parts of the results page were rebuilt around it, and consumer use of generative AI for local recommendations has grown sharply over the past year. Plain plans around which surfaces appear for a local query and what a client is left with when one of them doesn't. "Near-me's will still bring the map pack up, so that's not going to affect how that comes out," he explains. "But if you don't get a map pack out, you really have to go back to the organic search. There isn't anything else unless you are participating in advertising with Google AdWords."

Plain works every account toward the same narrow target. What a searcher does in the seconds after the map appears is the reason he treats those positions as the entire objective. "If they're coming up one, two, or three, they're in the very top of the fold. And so they're the ones that people look at first," he says. "A lot of people don't scroll down, they just grab one of those or two of them."

The golden loop

Holding those positions across a roster of clients means repeating the same maintenance on every account, from title tags and broken links to new pages, profile posts, and review responses. Plain counts six or eight of these jobs per client, and working through them one at a time limits how many accounts he could take on. Enterprise marketing teams have spent the past year buying single orchestration layers that consolidate the same recurring work.

Plain runs his version as a "golden loop", a cyclical approach that feeds what each pass produces back into the next one. "By using a golden loop, we take all of those small sections of jobs and put them into one loop," he explains. "Then we can set that loop to replay over and over and over, which is much, much better for our clients, because we're constantly monitoring their account now. And we can produce much better content for them than we ever were capable of doing before."

Keyword coverage used to take more of Plain's week than any other task on that list. Selling a wood fence means the page also has to carry the words a buyer would use around it, from "pressure-treated" to "six-foot." Building that list by hand meant reading through the top-ranking pages for every term a client cared about. "Search Atlas OTTO allows us to create content that has those semantic words built into it to make sure that they're correct," Plain notes. "It saves me hours and hours of work, so that's a real big feature for me."

Agents move into operations

The automation Plain runs on search work has an obvious next application inside his clients' own operations. A roofing contractor with a busy morning can't answer every call that comes in, and by Plain's count, 10% to 15% of the callers who reach voicemail hang up without leaving a message. "If I can get an agent for my client that answers the phone and doesn't sound like an AI robot, I can make it much easier for them," he says. "We can train that agent to sell online. All of a sudden now we're adding a salesman for them that they can set up and that they know is going to have all the right answers."

Advertising is the second opening he sees, and the audience-building he describes has been an enterprise line item for years. Houses in a neighborhood built out at the same time need new roofs at roughly the same time, which gives a contractor a specific set of addresses worth advertising to, and Meta's newer ad tools give him a way to reach them. "Before, we didn't really have anything that we could help them with," Plain notes. "Now with AI, we could figure out what homeowners have an older roof, and show those ads only to those particular homeowners and not to everybody."

None of these tools decide what a business should build with them. A contractor running a crew of six has no time to compare agent platforms, write the material that trains one, or work out which channel deserves which share of the budget. Plain has spent two decades doing that translation work for owners in exactly that position. "For me, what's going to stay the same is they're still going to need someone to navigate that AI for them. I want to be that person that does that," he concludes.