How Google answers local small-business questions in 2026

Local business websites, national brands, and YouTube each supplied about a fifth of all sources. YouTube was the most cited single domain: it appeared in 153 AI Overviews.

Ranking is not the same as being cited. Only 40% of AI Overview sources came from a domain that also held a top-10 organic position for the same question.

These are questions, not searches for a provider, and small companies answer them on their own sites. For "how much does root canal cost", all 10 results were dental practices. For "how long does a roof last", 6 of 10 were local roofing and remodeling companies. A forum thread from Reddit or Quora ranked in the top 10 for 61.5% of questions.

The first page of Google showed a median of 8 organic results. The questions named no city, and a map pack appeared on only 1.4% of them.

The mean was 1,468 words. The 79 top-ranking articles on local business websites had a median of 1,163 words.

132 of the 168 articles declared a publish date. The median was October 30, 2024, about 23 months before we pulled the results. Only 22.7% were first published in the last 12 months.

Customers ask Google questions before they call anyone, and Google now answers almost all of them with an AI Overview. The data shows two ways in: rank in the top 10 with a page that answers the question, or be one of the roughly 9 sources the AI Overview links to. Local business websites already appear in both places, most often with blog posts and articles.

Our free SEO playbooks list the questions customers ask in each of these industries, with a first-week checklist and blog post ideas. If you would rather not write the posts yourself, Aranx researches, writes, and publishes them to your site. See pricing.

Sample. 208 questions, 8 for each of 26 local industries that have an Aranx playbook. We left out the online store, general small business, and nonprofit playbooks. The questions come from DataForSEO Labs keyword suggestions for 3 or 4 seed topics per industry, such as "water heater" for plumbers. We kept suggestions that start with a question word, have at least 50 US searches a month, and have informational intent. We removed career questions (salary, school, license), brand questions, and off-topic matches such as the disease shingles. Phrasings with the same monthly search history count as one question. We then took the 8 with the most searches, with at most 3 per seed where the industry had enough. Together they get 2,386,910 US searches a month.

Data source and dates. Keyword data: DataForSEO Labs, pulled October 30, 2026. Results: DataForSEO SERP API, live Google desktop results in English for the United States, with asynchronous AI Overviews loaded, pulled October 30, 2026 between 17:14 and 17:24 UTC. We used public search results only, and no customer data.

Site types. We labeled all 1,862 domains by hand from the domain, the site name Google showed, and the home page. Government and university sites were labeled by their domain ending. "Local business" means an independent or regional business that serves one area: practices, contractors, dealerships, law and CPA firms, credit unions, and local churches. National chains, franchises, and manufacturers count as national brands. As a check, we loaded the home page of each of the 907 local business domains. 701 of the 749 that loaded showed a phone link, a street address, or local business schema; 158 blocked automated requests.

Articles. A page counts as an article when it declares Article or BlogPosting schema, has an og:type of article, or sits under a path such as /blog/. Word counts cover the main text after navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars are removed. Publish dates come from the page's schema or meta tags.