Stop Chasing the Local 3-Pack, Start Building an Entity That Ranks Beyond it

The local pack is shrinking. AI Overviews are taking up more of the search results page, and if AI Mode becomes the default search experience, the ranking factors agencies have optimized for years like business name, category, landing page, reviews, and proximity may no longer be what gets clients found. Here’s what agencies need to do right now before their clients feel the impact.

Let’s be honest about something that’s been sitting with a lot of us in local SEO. For the better part of a decade, we’ve been telling clients the same story: get in the 3-pack, stay in the 3-pack, the leads will follow. It was the one metric that justified the retainer.

The Local Map Pack Isn’t What It Was

The truth is the 3-pack is no longer what it was even a year ago.

According to Places Scout, which tracks across 1,200 mobile ranking reports, local pack ads went from appearing on less than 3% of tracked keywords in early November 2025 to roughly 22% by January 2026. PPC Land Instead of three businesses with call buttons and directions links, users are increasingly seeing condensed AI-generated summaries with one or two results. The organic space your clients used to occupy for free is getting monetized. Most consumers have no idea it’s happening. But marketers see it, and businesses feel it. Sterling Sky has been tracking clicks-to-call from Google Business Profiles across 179 profiles and 34 law firms in the US, and the pattern is clear: those numbers have been declining for two years straight. Sterling Sky

And that’s before you factor in what happens if AI Mode becomes the default search experience.

AI Overviews are already here. More than 40% of local business queries were triggering them as of April 2025, according to a Local Falcon whitepaper based on 60,000 queries. They sit above the pack, summarizing options before a user ever sees a listing.

AI Mode is a separate shift. It’s Google’s fully conversational search experience powered by Gemini. Where AI Overviews sit on top of the existing results page, AI Mode replaces it. If it becomes the default, users may never see a traditional local pack at all.

So organic placement is shrinking. Paid placement has its own performance requirements. And the format users search in may change entirely. The agencies that win the next few years aren’t the ones who get better at 3-pack optimization. They’re the ones who help clients build something none of that can take away: a well-structured, trusted, data-rich entity that Google’s AI wants to reference, recommend, and surface across every format.

Pay to Play. Perform to Stay.

Here’s what makes this harder to ignore: even pay-to-play has rules now.

Local Service Ads sit above everything.  Above traditional Google Ads, above the pack, above organic. But buying your way in doesn’t mean you stay there. Google ranks LSAs based on an auction that factors in both your bid and overall profile quality. Including your rating, number of reviews, average response time, high-quality images, and completed verification checks. Google Support

Response speed is non-negotiable. Google tracks whether leads come in by phone or message and adjusts placement based on how fast you respond. The algorithm favors businesses that engage immediately. Boomcycle Miss calls consistently and Google routes those leads to someone who won’t.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx6xy-S54n4iM7VGIiCSSwzYZ05z1RFsMi?si=gvfK4zcTgets6ctr

Google also routes every LSA call through their own number and uses AI to analyze the conversation evaluating whether you closed the lead, provided good service, and were the right fit for the customer. Boomcycle

Reviews, photos, messaging availability, business hours, verified credentials, all of it feeds the ranking. The point is this: even when your client is paying for visibility, Google is still evaluating whether their business deserves it. The bar for earning and keeping that top placement is only getting higher.

What ‘Building an Entity’ Actually Means

1. A Clean, Rich Data Set

This is the foundation. AI doesn’t rely on a single source to build its understanding of your business. It pulls from your website, your GBP, structured data like schema markup, third-party directories, review platforms, and media mentions. All of it feeds into an entity profile. The businesses that show up in AI-generated answers aren’t necessarily the biggest or most established. They’re the ones that gave the AI the most to work with. Thin data means AI has less to work with. And when it has less to work with, it recommends someone it has more confidence in.

AI answers are shockingly easy to manipulate right now.  The signals that drive LLM recommendations are not the same ones that drive traditional Maps rankings. Here is what to prioritize:

• H1 headers that explicitly declare the service and location
• Meta titles and meta descriptions that clearly state what the business does and where
• GBP description that is specific about core services and service area
• Complete, detailed business descriptions on third-party platforms like Yelp, OpenTable, and industry-specific directories
• Schema markup — widely recommended, worth implementing

2. PR Mentions and Third-Party Validation

One of the most undervalued signals in the AI era is external mention. Not links, mentions. AI is trained to treat third-party corroboration as a trust signal. A business mentioned by name in a local news roundup, a neighborhood blog, a lifestyle publication, or a Reddit thread carries weight that no amount of GBP optimization can replicate.

This is why digital PR, a discipline many local SEO agencies have ignored or outsourced, is now a core local SEO strategy. A plumber mentioned in a “best plumbers in Denver” roundup on a local news site, a restaurant featured in a neighborhood food blog, a law firm cited in a local bar association article, these are the kinds of mentions AI is pulling from.

Your clients’ digital footprint across the entire web now matters more than their GBP optimization score. Here’s where to focus:

• Local and regional press mentions
• “Best of” and listicle features on local publications and blogs
• Reddit threads and community forum mentions
• Third-party review platforms beyond Google like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Houzz, and industry-specific directories
• Influencer and micro-influencer mentions
• Business descriptions on platforms like OpenTable, Uber Eats, and Tripadvisor

3. Local Citation Building, But the Right Way

The new citation strategy is about quality and context. Every citation is a data point in the AI’s model of your entity. A listing on a high-authority, topically relevant directory carries more weight than a generic business listing, and a citation that includes rich information like services, hours, photos, descriptions, and categories is exponentially more valuable than a bare-bones name and phone number.

Authority matters more than ever here. When you ask an AI for a trusted restoration company, BBB listings get cited. That tells you something. AI is pulling from sources it considers credible third-party validators, not just aggregators. A verified BBB profile with complete business information, reviews, and accreditation status is a stronger entity signal than being listed on fifty low-authority directories.

Focus your citation efforts on directories that carry topical authority in your client’s industry, directories that AI has demonstrated it pulls from, and platforms where a complete rich profile is possible, not just a name and phone number.

4. Reviews as Structured Semantic Data

Reviews have always mattered for local SEO, but in the AI era they function differently. AI reads review content to build an understanding of what a business actually does well.

Think about what AI is actually trying to do. It’s matching a specific query to the most relevant business. If your client’s reviews don’t contain the language that matches how customers search, AI can’t make the connection. Reviews aren’t just social proof anymore. They’re training data.

Recency matters more than most agencies realize. Google’s AI analyzed just 179 recent reviews to generate a sentiment summary for a business with over 2,000 total reviews. Your entire review history is not being weighted equally. What customers are saying right now is what AI is working from.

Brightlocal Consumer Review Summary

Responding to reviews matters too. Active, thoughtful responses signal to AI that the business is engaged and current. Ignoring negative reviews doesn’t just hurt consumer trust, it leaves recent negative sentiment unaddressed in the data AI is actively reading.

The Bottom Line

The agencies that will define the next era of local search are the ones willing to shift their value proposition toward what’s honest about where the market is heading, not what’s comfortable to sell.