- Google’s AI-powered local pack is now appearing on up to 13% of mobile queries in Canada, showing different ranking factors than the traditional local pack, with awards and trust signals outperforming standard review counts.
- Local ad spend is quietly becoming the smarter ROI play as Google squeezes organic space; the businesses that pivot early are seeing lower cost-per-conversion while organic traffic slowly erodes.
In a recent episode published on the JGoldie Agency SEO YouTube channel, agency owner Joey Goldie shared an unusually grounded breakdown of what’s working in local SEO right now. Goldie runs a Canada and US-based agency focused exclusively on local SEO for small businesses across home services, law, and elder care. He’s been in the industry since 2006, and what he described in this YouTube video carries weight precisely because it comes from active client testing, not trend speculation.
Google’s AI Local Pack Is Real, and It Ranks Differently
The most pressing observation Goldie shared involves what he calls an AI-powered local pack appearing in Canadian search results. His agency has been tracking it for roughly a year. It started appearing on approximately 7% of mobile queries, and as of the video it was tracking at around 13% of mobile queries, with occasional desktop appearances.
This is not an AI Overview appended above standard results. According to Goldie, it displaces the local pack entirely. “Instead of having a local pack, you get this AI-powered local pack and it looks different, and it definitely has different ranking factors, which is kind of crazy.”
That divergence is the part worth studying. The ranking signals feeding the AI local pack appear to differ materially from those driving standard local pack performance. Goldie’s team has identified and replicated one emerging pattern: awards and third-party credentials are carrying outsized weight. A business displaying a Super Lawyers award, an Avvo rating, or a Best Lawyer designation, prominently on-site, was appearing in AI local pack results in cases where it would never reach the traditional pack. “I’m starting to see lots of cases where AI is recommending businesses that would never rank in the local pack,” he said.
The practical implication for agencies: the traditional playbook that centers almost entirely on Google reviews as the primary local ranking lever is now incomplete. Building what might be called institutional trust signals, awards, press mentions, and directory-level credentials, is no longer optional for clients competing in AI-visible markets.
Content That Actually Moves in 2026: Story Format and Raw Data
Two content approaches Goldie flags as producing real results right now are counterintuitive against standard agency practice.
The first is story-based content modeled after Reddit’s format. His team collects detailed job narratives from clients, including location, scope, cost, duration, and specific decisions made, then publishes them not on a standalone case studies page but embedded within the relevant service page. A painting job narrative lives on the exterior painting page. A bathroom renovation story lives on the bathroom renovation page. “The key is to not publish as case studies, as what most SEOs do. They’ll have a case studies page or a gallery page, which is just totally useless for SEO.” The intent match for a service page is far stronger when the content contains specific, verifiable job execution detail.
The second approach involves sourcing and presenting government datasets and census figures that are genuinely hard to find and harder to interpret. Goldie’s team has used accident statistics and demographic figures for law clients specifically because this type of data cannot be easily duplicated.
Both approaches share the same mechanism. They produce information gain. Google has been explicit that content adding something a user cannot find in multiple other places is what it wants to surface. Generic service page copy structured around keyword density fails that test. Specific job narratives and sourced statistics do not.
Google Is Structurally Pushing Ads, and the ROI Is Holding Up
Goldie’s read on Google’s commercial agenda is direct. He has been pushing paid ads harder to clients for over a year, not because he thinks ads are superior in principle, but because Google’s interface changes make the current organic environment structurally hostile. “Everything that they are pushing is to make themselves more money, and they want you running these ads. All the updates they’re doing, all the core updates, everything I’m tracking, the one clear trend is Google wants to make more money.”
He called out one specific change that makes the point clearly: Google removed call buttons from organic local pack listings while keeping them on ads. The result is a search interface where paid placement has a functional advantage that organic position cannot match, regardless of ranking.
His agency’s response has been to reallocate time from content production toward ads management for clients where the math supports it. What surprised him is that the conversion economics have improved. Cost-per-conversion on many accounts has gone down, not up. Advertisers are getting more for their money even as organic shrinks.
Search Console’s AI Feature Is Currently Useless for Local Practitioners
Goldie’s dismissal of Google’s new generative AI feature inside Search Console lands as one of the more practically relevant moments in the conversation. He found it “very underwhelming” because it surfaces impressions data without click data. “If it had clicks, I would find this useful. But impressions without clicks are kind of meaningless.”
This is not a minor quibble. The utility of Search Console data in the AI era depends entirely on being able to distinguish AI-sourced impressions, which frequently produce zero-click results, from behavior that generates actual sessions. Goldie reports AI traffic holding at roughly 2% of Google’s total traffic for his local service clients over the past year, with no meaningful growth trend, though he notes B2B and SaaS categories may show different patterns.
His workaround is a custom reporting dashboard built on GA4 data that identifies which pages generate AI referrals from Claude, ChatGPT, and similar platforms. He acknowledges it is imperfect but describes it as the best available option.
Link Building Is Now a Risk Calculation, Not a Standard Deliverable
Goldie’s comments on link building mark a real posture shift. He describes seeing core update penalties on client sites that did not acquire links aggressively. Small, incremental campaigns are now generating enough of a signal to attract scrutiny where previously only heavy volume drew attention.
“Link building for small businesses is becoming more of a liability than something that you want to do.” He adds that agencies spinning up hundreds of location page variants rapidly are seeing site-wide penalties, not just indexing failures. This aligns with how Google’s helpful content updates have evolved, progressively expanding the penalty surface area rather than targeting only the most egregious cases.
For agencies running link acquisition as a standard deliverable, this is a practical risk issue. Organic trust signal building through awards, verified directory listings, and local press coverage now offers better risk-adjusted return than low-volume link campaigns operating on networks Google is actively learning to recognize. Semrush’s local SEO framework reflects this shift, placing quality local citations and behavioral signals ahead of link volume as the primary prominence factors for local rankings.
Expert Analysis: The Local SEO Stack Is Being Rebuilt Whether Agencies Are Ready or Not
What Goldie’s data describes collectively is a compression of the traditional local SEO stack. Organic space is shrinking simultaneously from multiple directions: AI Overviews absorbing clicks before users reach listings, AI local packs displacing traditional results with different ranking logic, ad placements expanding inside the local interface, and penalty sensitivity rising on tactics that used to carry low risk.
The agencies navigating this period well share a few operational characteristics. They measure AI pack visibility as a separate metric from standard local pack rankings. They build content around information that is specific and not easily replicated, job narratives, sourced data, and firsthand expertise rather than keyword-structured service pages. They treat GBP as an active AI citation asset, not a set-it-and-forget listing. And they are integrating paid spend into local strategy without treating it as evidence that SEO has failed.
The deeper structural point is that local SEO ranking factors have not disappeared. Proximity, relevance, and prominence still dictate whose listing gets displayed. What has been changed is the way AI considers prominence, and this includes criteria that very few firms are currently accounting for, such as credential display, third-party validation, structured data, and citation consistency. Those firms that incorporate these criteria into their normal service package will be ahead of the curve, even as others catch on to what has already happened.
