Google's grip on local discovery slipped 12 points.

Twelve points in a year. Google is still overwhelmingly dominant — this isn't an exit signal. But a fifth of the channel's relative share went somewhere, and finding out where before your competitors do is worth a few years of advantage.

Where it went

AI assistants. Similarweb shows 35% of U.S. consumers now using AI tools for discovery. For "find me a reliable electrician," an assistant is a genuinely better interface — it filters, summarizes and answers follow-ups. The catch is that it's doing the choosing.

Social and video. Recommendation requests in neighborhood Facebook groups, before-and-after work on Instagram, short-form repair video. These are functioning as discovery, not just awareness.

Vertical marketplaces. Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, Nextdoor, Houzz, Zocdoc. Consumers increasingly start where reviews and booking already live — and these are heavily-weighted sources for AI assistants, so presence there counts twice.

Why this doesn't mean deprioritizing Google

Seventy-one percent is still the biggest thing in local marketing. And your profile now has a second job: it's one of the most authoritative structured records of your business anywhere, and AI systems read it.

The playbook

• Categories chosen against what actually ranks in your market — check the top three in the map pack, not your intuition.
• Every service listed with a real description. Photos on a regular cadence. Weekly posts. Q&A seeded and answered.
• Name, address and phone consistent everywhere Google cross-references.
• Claim the verticals that matter in your category — complete profiles, not empty placeholders.
• Build earned mentions. Ahrefs found brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 versus 0.218 for backlinks.
• Measure across surfaces. Rankings alone no longer describe your visibility.

Local discovery is fragmenting from one dominant channel into several. That's more work — but a single-channel world rewards whoever spends the most, and a fragmented one rewards whoever is consistently present everywhere the customer might look. That's a game a well-run local business can win.