How Google AI Overviews are Affecting Plumbers, Roofers, and HVAC Companies

The 58% number that's making the rounds

A figure that's been getting passed around the SEO crowd lately: top-ranking pages with an AI Overview sitting above them are seeing roughly a 58% drop in click-through rate. That's not a typo. You can be the #1 organic result, the one Google's own algorithm decided is the best answer on the planet, and well over half of those clicks just don't happen anymore. Google answered the question right there on the results page, and the searcher moved on.

I want to be honest about that stat. It's been quoted in a few different studies with slightly different methodologies, and the real number probably swings a lot depending on the type of query. Informational queries get hit hardest. Local intent queries ("plumber near me," "roofer in Tampa") still drive clicks because someone actually needs to call somebody. But the trend line is the trend line, and it's pointing the same direction in every dataset I've seen.

What Google actually took from us

Daniel Foley Carter put this well on X recently. The clicks Google quietly absorbed weren't transactional clicks. They were the pre-consideration clicks. The "how do I know if my roof needs replacing" research, the "why is my water heater making that noise" curiosity, the "what does a furnace tune-up cost" homework. That whole top of the funnel used to feed your blog, build familiarity with your brand, and turn into a phone call three weeks later when something actually broke.

Google scraped all of it, summarized it in a box at the top of the page, and kept the visit. The searcher gets their answer and never sees your name. By the time they need a plumber, they're searching cold all over again, and now they're choosing between five companies they've never heard of instead of calling the one whose article helped them last month.

Why this isn't a problem you can solve with "more SEO"

Here's where a lot of agencies are going to get their clients in trouble over the next year. They're going to keep selling the same playbook. More blog posts, more keywords, more on-page tweaks, more backlinks. And they're going to keep reporting on rankings, because rankings still look good. Position 3, position 1, featured snippet. All green arrows.

Meanwhile the phones are quieter. Because rank doesn't mean what it used to. The thing that mattered about ranking was the click. The click is the thing you've been paying for all along, even if the invoice said "SEO." When the click goes away, the strategy has to change, not get louder.

The new game: get cited, not just ranked

Noah Igler had a sharp point on this last week. The LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's own AI Overviews) don't rank URLs the way classic search did. They rank entities and they pull from a specific set of sources: news sites, press releases, authoritative local pages, Reddit threads, Wikipedia, and structured data they can actually trust. If you're not showing up in those source layers, the AI doesn't know you exist. And if the AI doesn't know you exist, it can't cite you in the answer box that just ate your click.

That's the whole game behind AEO, or answer engine optimization. It's not a replacement for SEO. It's the layer that sits on top of it now. SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you cited. Without both, you're invisible in the new SERP, even when you technically still "rank."

What's actually working in 2026

I've spent the last 18 months pulling apart what AI Overviews cite and what they ignore. Here's the short version of what's moving the needle for home service companies right now:

• Press releases and local news pickups. A real press release distributed through a real wire service, picked up by a couple of local affiliate sites, does more for AI citation than 30 blog posts. The LLMs trust news domains. They don't trust your /blog/ folder by default.
• Reddit and forum mentions of your brand name. ChatGPT and Perplexity lean heavily on Reddit. If your brand has zero presence in r/HomeImprovement, r/Plumbing, or your local city subreddit, you're invisible to those engines. Get mentioned naturally, in real threads, by real people you've helped.
• Structured data that maps you as an entity. LocalBusiness schema, Service schema, FAQPage schema, and Person schema for the owner. The AI engines parse this stuff directly. Most home service sites have either no schema or wrong schema. Fixing this is one of the highest-ROI things you can do in a single week.
• Google Business Profile fully built out. Posts, services, products, Q&A, photos with EXIF, the works. AI Overviews for local queries pull from GBP almost verbatim. Half-finished profiles get skipped. (If yours is suspended, the whole AI conversation is moot until you get the suspension lifted.)
• Genuine third-party authority. BBB profile, Angi profile, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, industry association memberships, manufacturer certifications (GAF Master Elite for roofers, Nexstar for plumbers and HVAC). Each one is an entity reference that helps the AI confirm you're real.
• Author bios on every blog post. Real person, real photo, real bio, real credentials. The AI engines lean on E-E-A-T signals harder than classic Google ever did. Anonymous blog posts get cited about as often as anonymous Wikipedia edits.
• Pages that directly answer specific questions. Not 3,000-word SEO bait. Tight, useful pages that answer one question really well, with the answer in the first sentence. That's the format the LLMs lift.

The Finch piece that's making the rounds

There's a post on Finch's blog floating around the SEO community making basically the same argument I'm making here. Their angle is "optimize for visibility on the SERP itself, not just clicks," and they're right. The SERP is the destination now, not the doorway. Your job is to be the brand that gets named in the AI summary, the source that gets cited, the local business in the map pack, and the answer that gets surfaced even when nobody clicks through.

The piece is worth a read. I don't agree with every tactic they recommend (some of it leans pretty AI-tool heavy in a way that I think misses the point for local home service businesses), but the core read on what's happening to the SERP is correct.

What I'd actually do this quarter if you're a home service company

Forget the long-term roadmap for a second. If you've got 90 days and a reasonable budget, here's the order I'd attack this in:

1. Audit your AI visibility. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Search "best plumber in [your city]," "roofing company [your city] reviews," "[your brand name]." Write down what comes back. If your name isn't there, you have a visibility problem, not a ranking problem.
2. Fix your schema and your GBP first. These are the fastest wins. Real LocalBusiness schema, real Service schema for each service, a fully built out Google Business Profile with weekly posts. This alone can pull you into AI citations within a few weeks.
3. Run one real press release per quarter. Something newsworthy, not a "we exist" announcement. Charity sponsorship, a local event, a company milestone, a community partnership. Distribute it through a real wire service. Get one local pickup.
4. Build out Reddit presence carefully. Not spam. Real answers in real threads where your expertise actually helps. Over time, the brand mention pattern feeds the LLMs.
5. Tighten your content strategy. Less long-form SEO bait. More short, sharp answer pages that match the way LLMs lift content. One question, one clear answer, supporting detail underneath.
6. Track citations, not just rankings. Pick five queries that matter to you. Check monthly in the major AI engines. Are you getting named? That's the new ranking report.

A quick word on panic

I've watched a lot of SEO companies and small business owners panic about AI Overviews this year. Don't. The fundamentals didn't change. Real businesses with real reviews, real authority, real local presence, and a clean technical foundation are still winning. The companies getting hit hardest are the ones who built their entire strategy around informational blog traffic and never invested in brand, citations, or local authority.

If that's you, the fix is real work, but it's not exotic. Most of it is stuff good local SEO practitioners have been recommending for years. The difference now is that ignoring it doesn't just slow your growth. It actively makes you invisible.

Where this leaves you

AI Overviews aren't going away. If anything, Google is going to expand them, and ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are going to keep eating into the search habit on their own. The question isn't whether to adapt. It's how fast you can get your brand into the source layer the AI engines actually pull from. That's the work. It's slower than buying ads, it's less glamorous than a redesign, and it's the only thing that builds you back into the answer instead of leaving you stranded on page one of a SERP nobody clicks anymore.

Stuart McHenry Consulting has been helping home service companies do exactly this work for the last couple of years. If you want a real read on where your brand sits in the AI engines right now, the contact page takes about 30 seconds. No pitch deck, no junior account manager. Just a straight answer.