Charleston's AI local pack has no call button

Google built a new version of the local pack, and it does not have a call button.

That is the sentence I keep repeating to Charleston owners this month, because it is the part everybody skips past. We spend all our energy arguing about rankings, and meanwhile Google quietly removed the button that turns a ranking into a ringing phone. If you run a plumbing company in West Ashley or an HVAC outfit off Rivers Avenue, the click-to-call is not a nice-to-have. It is the transaction.

Joy Hawkins at Sterling Sky published the numbers in her State of Local SEO in 2026 writeup on June 26, and she has been hammering the point on her X account ever since. She tracks real ranking reports at scale rather than vibes, and what she found is worse than "AI is changing search."

One or two businesses, mobile only, no way to dial

Here is what Sterling Sky measured in the AI-powered local packs Google is rolling out.

They show up on roughly 7 percent of the keywords Sterling Sky tracks. Small, for now. But where they appear, they display one to two businesses instead of three. Across the same query set, AI local packs surfaced 5,943 unique businesses where the traditional 3-pack surfaced 18,330. That is about 32 percent as many businesses getting seen. In the 322 markets they examined, 88 percent had fewer unique businesses in the AI local pack than in the classic one.

And they have no call buttons. Currently mobile only, currently US only.

Sit with the mobile-only part, because that is where the damage is. Desktop local results tend to show a website link. Mobile shows the call icon. Mobile is where a homeowner stands in a flooded laundry room at 11pm. Google removed the dial button from precisely the surface, and precisely the moment, where a service business converts.

Hawkins also asked Dale at Jepto to pull two years of click data across 179 Google Business Profiles spanning 34 US law firms. Clicks-to-call were sliding steadily downward. Not for profiles that lost rankings. For profiles that held their positions the whole time. You can do everything right, keep your spot, and still watch the phone go quieter.

Joy Hawkins and Caleb Ulku broke this down at length with Edward Sturm last week, and if you want the unvarnished practitioner version of what is working and what is dying in local right now, this is the hour to spend.

Google is now citing Google

The second half of this story landed from a completely different direction, and once you put the two together the strategy gets obvious.

Profound, an AI visibility platform, tracked citation share inside Google's AI Mode from April 15 to June 30, analyzing more than 32 million google.com/searchviewer instances. Their finding: google.com became the second most-cited domain in Google's own AI Mode, with its citation share up 8.4x in about ten weeks. Search Engine Land reported it on July 15.

Almost all of that growth came from two surfaces. Product Knowledge Panels, and Google Business Profile cards.

The five verticals where the shift hit hardest were hospitality and travel, home services, restaurants and dining, real estate, and healthcare. Every one of those is local-intent. Home services is on the list. That is Charleston's economy.

So AI Mode gets a local question, and instead of citing your website, it cites a Google-hosted card about your business. Your profile becomes the answer. Your site becomes optional.

At this point a lot of owners are thinking: fine, I am still the one being shown, who cares which box it happens in. I think that is wrong for one specific reason. When Google hosts the card, Google controls what is on it, how many competitors sit beside it, whether there is a call button, and whether an ad sits above it. You are a tenant. Hawkins found local pack ads went from 1 percent of Sterling Sky's mobile reports in early 2025 to almost 22 percent by December, and Local Services Ads went from 11 percent to 31 percent over the same stretch. The free real estate shrinks while the paid real estate expands. Being shown is not the same as being reachable.

This is not the same problem as being invisible in ChatGPT

I wrote earlier this summer about how Charleston businesses winning the map pack are often nowhere in AI answers, and I do not want to blur two different problems together.

That one is an absence problem. ChatGPT and Perplexity synthesize from across the web, and if you are thin outside of Google, they never name you.

This one is the opposite. You are present. Google put you in the answer. It just built the answer so the customer finishes inside Google, on a card with fewer competitors visible and no way to dial. SparkToro's clickstream study with Similarweb found 68.01 percent of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45 percent in 2024. Pew Research Center watched 68,879 real queries from 900 US adults and found people clicked a traditional result 8 percent of the time when an AI summary appeared, versus 15 percent when it did not. (Pew's data is from March 2025, so treat it as the early read. The direction has not reversed.)

Two different fights. Both worth having.

What I would actually do about this in Charleston

None of this is a reason to panic, and it is definitely not a reason to buy an "AI SEO" package from someone who cold-called you. The levers are boring, and they are the same levers, just weighted differently now.

Treat the profile as the landing page, because it is

If Google cites your Business Profile card instead of your homepage, the card is the page. Every empty field on it is missing copy. Services listed individually. A real service area, accurate to the neighborhoods you actually cover. Hours that are true, including holidays. Photos from this year, not from the truck you sold in 2023.

Profound was blunt about this: incomplete fields, outdated hours, and stale photography are exit points, because the panel is now the customer's primary touchpoint.

Rebuild the path to a phone call that you control

If Google removed the call button, every other route to the phone has to be excellent. The number visible above the fold on mobile, tappable, on every page. A site that loads fast enough that a person in a hurry does not bounce, which I got into when I wrote about how Charleston plumbers win the 2am leak search. And branded search treated as a real channel, because the customer who already knows your name skips the AI layer entirely.

Keep reviews recent, because the card runs on them

The Business Profile card leads with rating and reviews. That is the credibility signal doing the work inside the AI answer. Recency matters more than raw count here, which is the same conclusion I landed on when I looked at why fresh Google reviews now beat review volume. A steady drip of new reviews, plus fast owner replies, keeps the surfaced card looking alive.

Watch calls, not just rankings

This is the one most Charleston owners get wrong. If your rank report is green and your phone is quieter, the rank report is measuring the wrong thing. Pull call volume by month for the last two years and set it next to your rankings. If the lines diverge the way Jepto's law firm data diverged, you know why, and you can stop blaming your receptionist.

The honest read

Google is compressing local discovery into surfaces it owns, showing fewer businesses, and monetizing the space it freed up. I do not think that reverses. I also do not think it is fatal, because 7 percent of keywords is still only 7 percent, and the classic 3-pack is still doing most of the work in Charleston today.

What it does mean is that the gap between a fully built Business Profile and a half-finished one is about to get much more expensive. When three businesses showed, a mediocre profile could ride along. When one shows, it will not.

This week, do one thing. Open your Business Profile on your phone, not your desktop, and look at it the way a stranger in Mount Pleasant with a broken water heater would. Every field that is blank or stale is a reason for Google to show somebody else. Fix those, then check what "near me" is actually doing to your visibility while you are in there.

If you want a second set of eyes on the profile and the local footprint underneath it, that is a good chunk of what our Charleston SEO work actually involves. But the audit above is free, and you can run it yourself in fifteen minutes.