“Your next customer may never visit your website” is a sharp ad line. It is a sloppy operating plan if you run a clinic, a restaurant, a shop, or a trade in Alberta. People still call the number on the map.
What the national numbers say
BrightEdge / Google figures summarized by Omnibound put AI Overviews on roughly half of US searches by early 2026. Omnibound AIO statistics. SparkToro / Datos work cited by Stacc puts zero-click near 60%. Stacc AIO statistics.
Those figures describe publishers and national queries more than a Red Deer dentist or a Calgary restaurant. They are a reason to make pages machine-readable. They are not a reason to stop answering the phone.
What local data says
Tracsoft looked at 45 GA4 properties for local businesses. Median organic traffic was up 6.6% year over year. Maps discovery was up 21.4%. Tracsoft local AIO paper.
Whitespark, also a Calgary local-SEO shop, later counted SERP features rather than analytics: AI Overviews on 68% of their local-business query set, local packs on 39%, with informational and hybrid questions far more Overview-heavy. That is a different dataset than Tracsoft’s GA4 panel. Use both. Whitespark case study.
That is why our homepage does not sell “Generative Engine Optimization.” It sells a site a person can quote and book, plus the files Google, Maps, and assistants need to verify the same facts.
What to do this month
- Fix name, address, phone, and category on Google Business Profile before you buy a GEO retainer.
- Put the city and the service in visible homepage copy, not only the title tag.
- Add LocalBusiness schema that matches the page a human sees.
- Run a live scan. If the site cannot be fetched, no assistant can verify it either.
We do not invent ChatGPT citation percentages from a company name. If you want live assistant tests, that is the $299 audit.