How Google's AI Overviews Decide Which Contractors to Recommend
Type "best kitchen remodeler near me" into Google today, and there's a good chance you won't see ten blue links first. You'll see an AI-generated summary, complete with a short list of contractors, sitting above everything else. Homeowners trust that summary more than they probably should and remodelers who don't understand how it's built are losing work they never even knew they were competing for. What an AI Overview Actually Is An AI Overview is Google's attempt to answer a search question directly, using its own language model to summarize information pulled from across the web. Instead of asking a homeowner to click five different sites and compare them, Google tries to hand over the answer already assembled. For a query like "who does bathroom remodels in [city]," that means the AI is scanning contractor websites, review platforms, local directories, and news mentions, then deciding which two or three businesses deserve to be na...