How to appear in Google's AI Overviews as a contractor

When a homeowner Googles who repairs a slab leak, Google increasingly answers the question itself, in a summary that sits above every blue link. That summary is the AI Overview, and it changes the math for a contractor. The old goal was to rank near the top and collect the click. The new reality is that the summary often gives the homeowner enough to move on without clicking anyone. This post is the honest version of what that means and what you can still do.

Yes, and the effect is measurable. Pew Research Center, using real browsing data from 900 US adults in 2025, found that when an AI summary was present people clicked an organic link on just 8% of visits, versus 15% when no summary appeared. They clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time. Ahrefs measured the same squeeze from the ranking side: position-1 organic click-through on queries with an AI Overview fell 34.5% by April 2025 and 58% by December 2025. Google has publicly disputed the Pew study, which is worth knowing, but the direction is not really in question.

It breaks your question into smaller ones and pulls a source for each, a behavior Ahrefs calls query fan-out. Profound, across 100,000 prompts, found AI Overviews reference about 7.7 domains per response, more than any other engine it measured. So the overview is not quoting one winner. It is stitching together the page that best answers the cost part, the page that answers the how-long part, and the page that answers the is-this-company-legit part. Your job is to own one of those sub-answers cleanly.

Nobody has published a clean measurement of this, and you should distrust anyone who quotes you a precise number. The figures floating around for how often AI Overviews appear on local service queries versus the Local Pack, the map with three businesses, are blogspam, not research. What we can say honestly is that both surfaces exist, that the Local Pack still drives a lot of local intent, and that the overview and the map compete for the same space above the fold. Treat your Google Business Profile as the anchor and the overview as an additional surface to win, not a replacement.

1. Answer sub-questions in their own clearly-labeled sections. If the fan-out wants a cost answer, give it a heading that says cost and a real range beneath it.
2. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and consistent, since it anchors the Local Pack that sits next to the overview.
3. Publish the diligence facts a homeowner checks: license, insurance, service area, response time, in plain quotable text.
4. Stop chasing a single #1 ranking. Spread coverage across the questions that make up a job, because the overview rewards breadth over one top page.
5. Measure appearances, not just rank. The overview can cite you without you ranking first, and it can skip you while you rank first.