AI Search Effect: What Agencies Need to Know for Local Search Clients

AI Search Effect: What Agencies Need to Know for Local Search Clients

Local Search Has Changed: From “Found” to “Chosen”. That shift has only accelerated with the rise of AI-powered search. Generative AI is the topic across industries, like speculation and testing within digital marketing. With its rapid development, rest assured that it builds on a solid foundation of SEO basics, such as clean citations, reputable listings management, and emphasis on local intent, keeping clients at the top of search and answer engine (AE) results. Instead of delivering a list of links, engines like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity now generate instant summaries.

AI search is already reshaping behaviour and brand visibility

Shifting generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and TikTok have reshaped the traditional search funnel. It is perhaps the largest shift in the history of the Internet since its conception. The transition from keyword-driven queries to AI-curated answers is rewriting the rules of digital discovery. As per a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, it was found that one-third of the U.S. population uses AI tools for assisting everyday decisions, from shopping to travel planning. With the use of AI shopping assistants using OpenAI, Amazon, and Visa, it is fast becoming the new front door to commerce. There is still no plan among brands for how they appear in these AI-generated responses.

Real-World Data: The ROI of Getting Listings Right

AI-powered predictive analytics is changing the business approach to marketing campaigns. By using machine learning algorithms and vast datasets, companies can now anticipate customer behaviour, optimize ad spend, and personalized experiences at scale, which ultimately results in ROI improvements of 30% or more.

Agencies are seeing outsized returns:

• A healthcare organization with more than 850 locations saved 132 hours a month and cut expenses by $21k yearly, resulting in a six-figure annual return on investment by automating listings.
• A tourism company optimized with global listing saw a 30 fold increase in social engagement and a 200% increase in Google exposure.

Five practical steps to protect your clients’ visibility and trust

1. Audit Listings for Accuracy and Consistency

Auditing website AI search visibility needs a systematic evaluation of how well content performs across AI-powered search platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. The process leads to identification of technical barriers, content gaps, and structural issues that prevent AI models from discovering, understanding, and citing your content in AI overviews. AI search visibility audits examine semantic structure, site structure, and machine-readable formatting that enables generative search engines to parse and reference the material.

2. Eliminate Duplicates

Frequent demands can lead to damage to client relationships, waste everyone’s time, and result in errors and poor data quality. When relationship managers must log into numerous systems in order to fully view a client’s book of records, duplicate data acquisition typically occurs. It can call into question the accuracy and validity of the advice you provide. As long as we have technology in place to remove data silos and link systems and processes to enable downstream data flow, this is a reasonably simple component of client lifecycle management to resolve. Wealth managers must employ technology for managing data collection in a more efficient and less deceptive manner in order to prevent annoying customers with duplicate data requests, often very early in the sales cycle, before onboarding. As a result, both short-term and long-term client satisfaction would rise.

3. Optimize for Engagement

Customer engages with the brand via different channels, including social media, emails, websites, etc., which could pose challenges for brands to provide customers with a consistent and positive experience. Customer engagement platform aids in analysing the behaviour and industry patterns, and analysing the platforms’ data to optimise customer engagement. Brands can also streamline their workflows and automate repetitive tasks, thus enabling the customer service teams to focus on long-term customer engagement and growth.

4. Create AI-Readable Content

The way individuals search has been altered by AI. People are not merely entering keywords. They are posing comprehensive queries and receiving prompt, AI-generated responses. Content must be able to communicate the language of AI. Structured data, semantic markup, and a clear hierarchy help AI understand and surface your content in summaries and chat results. Creating AI-readable content, an approach known as AI SEO or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), means structuring information so both human readers and intelligent systems can process it, ensuring insights are accurately recognized, trusted, and cited by AI-driven platforms for improved discoverability across emerging search channels.

5. Automate at Scale

Implementing automation for bulk publishing, data synchronization, and ongoing updates ensures accuracy and saves agencies countless hours of low-value labor. Using tools such as Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit and AirOps to benchmark and track visibility automatically. Semrush offers the largest prompt database in the U.S., helping in identifying features that drive visibility compared with competitors.

The AI opportunity: agencies as strategic partners

AI is now handling advertising workflows and automated curation, surpassing manual planning, negotiation, and oversight that still reside with marketing heads, who often share domain expertise. With the surging trend of AI-driven search, the advertising context protocol is positioning agent-to-agent systems as the connective tissue that enables brands to retain strategic control while machines run the campaign engine.