Charleston SEO Recap: Who Google Quotes Now (Aug 10-16)

Somebody else started doing the talking for your business this week, in two different places, and neither one asked your permission.

On Wednesday, Joy Hawkins caught Google's AI local results quoting a single lawyer's self-promoting listicle as the source of truth for every law firm in the pack. On Thursday, Glenn Gabe caught OpenAI moving the "Sources" button in ChatGPT into a menu almost nobody opens. Different companies, same direction. The distance between a person searching and the business they are actually looking for got one layer thicker.

That is the week. Five things, ordered by how much they matter to a service business here.

First, Google's AI local results are quoting a competitor's blog post instead of the businesses

This is the story of the week and it is not close.

Joy Hawkins posted the example on X, and Barry Schwartz wrote it up at Search Engine Roundtable on August 12. Her words: "Well here is one of the best AI fails I've seen in a while. Google is quoting a single lawyer's self-promoting listicle for every law firm listed here and is using it as the primary source for this entire list, linking to it instead of the law firms' websites."

Barry replicated it himself across a few different browsers, which matters, because a one-off screenshot is a bug and a reproducible one is a behavior.

Here is the mechanic. Google now randomly drops an AI Overview on top of local results, and when it does, it writes a little blurb about each listing. That blurb needs a source. Instead of pulling from the business, Google reaches for a "best of" listicle. In Joy's example, the listicle belonged to a lawyer competing with every firm in the list.

Translate that to Rivers Avenue. You are a roofer in Mount Pleasant. A homeowner searches on their phone. Google shows an AI blurb describing you, and the sentence it uses comes from "10 Best Roofers in Charleston," written by the eleventh roofer, who wrote the whole page specifically to sit above you. Google links to him. Not you.

Barry's line was "this is not quality, this is not making Google's AI results look helpful, it is just a shame." I will go further than that. This is Google outsourcing the description of a local business to whoever was most willing to write marketing copy about their own competitors, and it is going to reward exactly the wrong kind of operator for a while.

At this point a lot of owners are thinking: "so now I have to go beg a competitor to add me to his blog post." No. But you do have to know which pages Google currently trusts to describe your market, because right now those pages are talking about you whether you participate or not.

What I would do this week:

• Search your top three money terms on your phone, not your desktop, in an incognito window. Write down every listicle that appears above or inside the local results.
• Open each one and check what it says about you. Wrong hours, wrong service list, an old address. Fix what you can by contacting the site, and note what you cannot.
• Put the same facts in plain sentences on your own site. Not in a design element, not in a graphic. Sentences. If a model is going to quote something about your business, give it a better option than a competitor's sales page.

This is why law firm SEO in Charleston has stopped being about ranking one page and started being about controlling what the whole web says about your practice. It is also the second half of what I wrote Tuesday about the AI local pack with no call button. Fewer businesses shown, no way to dial them, and now a competitor writing the description.

Second, Search Console's AI report opened up for almost everybody, and it still hides the useful half

On August 11, Barry checked around 25 Search Console profiles he has access to and found the generative AI performance report live on all of them. John Mueller replied on Reddit to slow that down a bit: "Correct, it's not yet every domain. (Also, like the discover and news reports, these are only shown if there's sufficient data to display.)"

So it is not universal. But it went from a small test group to most people in about ten weeks, which means it is probably sitting in your account right now, as an expandable tab under the main performance report.

I pulled up Google's own announcement to confirm what is in it. The June 3 Search Central post from Hillel Maoz and Moshe Samet lists exactly five things: impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. Notice what is missing. No clicks. No queries.

I have been openly annoyed about this since June, and I still am. Google will tell you that you appeared in an AI answer and will not tell you whether anyone came. That is a report about Google's reach, not about your business.

Use it anyway, because it is the only free number on AI visibility that exists, and the pages dimension is worth your time. Open the generative AI tab, set it to the last 28 days, sort by pages, and write down your top five. Then compare that list to your top five pages by clicks in the regular report.

When those two lists do not match, and for most local businesses they do not, the gap tells you which pages the AI systems reach for versus which ones the blue links reward. Those are increasingly two different sets of pages, which is the same thing I found testing whether schema markup helps Charleston local SEO a couple of weeks ago.

Third, September takes two Google Ads settings out of your hands

Last Sunday I wrote about the September 1 auto upgrade to AI Max. This week Google added a second one to the same month.

Anu Adegbola reported it at Search Engine Land on August 13, and Barry followed up Friday with Google's comment. The campaign level language targeting setting is being removed from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns in late September. Google's updated help document says it plainly: "Starting in September 2026, the way language targeting works is changing for Search campaigns and the Search Network portion of Performance Max campaigns."

Google told Barry the reasoning is simplification, removing redundancy and setup errors, and that its systems already match languages automatically. No restructuring is required, so if you run one English campaign and one Spanish campaign, both keep working. Matching now leans on the language of your ad creative and your landing page, plus what languages Google thinks the user knows. Language exclusions were never supported and still are not.

For a Charleston home services company this is smaller than the AI Max change, but it points the same way. Your landing page is now your targeting. If you run Spanish ads in North Charleston or Summerville and those ads point at an English page with a translate widget bolted on, the campaign setting was carrying you. In late September it stops carrying you.

(I keep writing the same sentence this month. Google is not asking anymore, it is reading your pages and deciding. Whatever is on the page is now the setting.)

Both September items are covered in more detail in last week's recap, including the exact opt out steps for AI Max. If you run ads and have not read that yet, read it before the first.

Fourth, OpenAI put ChatGPT's sources behind a three dot menu

Glenn Gabe spotted this one and Barry covered it August 13. The "Sources" button that used to sit in the footer of a ChatGPT response is now sometimes tucked inside the three dot "More actions" menu. You click the dots, then click "View sources," then the side panel opens.

Gabe's take: "That can definitely decrease visibility and clicks for citations that show up in the right-side panel." He also wondered aloud whether the point is to keep attention on the ads. I suspect he is right, and I do not think OpenAI will say so.

What this does to a local business is worth naming. Getting cited by ChatGPT was already mostly a brand impression rather than a traffic source. This makes it almost purely a brand impression. Somebody asks ChatGPT who to call for a burst pipe on James Island, your name appears in the answer, and the odds of them clicking through just dropped again.

So stop measuring AI citations by referral traffic, because you will conclude they are worthless and you will be measuring the wrong thing. Measure whether the sentence containing your name is accurate and complete. If the model says "a Charleston plumbing company" you lost. If it says your business name, your neighborhood, and what you actually do, you won, and the call comes later from a search for your name.

Fifth, the rankings moved again on August 12, and the board is still blank

Barry reported a volatility spike starting August 12 and running into the 13th, with something like fourteen tracking tools lighting up, including Semrush Sensor, Mozcast, AccuRanker, Sistrix, Algoroo, and DataForSEO. His framing was restrained. The tools spiked, the community chatter stayed cool.

I checked Google's Search Status Dashboard myself, same as every week. The newest Ranking entry is still the June 2026 spam update from June 24, two days and one hour. Nothing logged for July. Nothing logged for August. That is five unconfirmed swings since July 18, against an official record that has not moved in almost two months.

My position has not changed. You cannot fix what nobody will confirm. Open Search Console, compare the last 28 days to the previous 28, filter by page, and write one line in a text file about what you saw. Then leave it alone. The owners who get hurt in a stretch like this are the ones who rebuild a page during week three of an unconfirmed shuffle and then have no idea what caused the recovery.

The small print

Four smaller things worth ten minutes.

Google is still poaching agency ad accounts. Bia Camargo posted an email on LinkedIn on August 11 that a Google rep sent directly to her client, an account she actively manages, going around her entirely. Anthony Higman replied that it has been happening to his shop for four years and called the rep program "very broken." If you pay somebody to run your ads and a Google rep calls offering to optimize your account, that is a sales motion, not a service. Loop in whoever manages the account before you agree to anything, including a screen share.

Google Business Profile added a "Report owner response" option, spotted August 14. Customers can now flag your reply to a review as off topic, profane, or harassing. Keep your review responses boring and professional. That advice was already right and is now enforceable.

Barry also posted a plain warning about Cloudflare on August 13, which I will repeat because I see it in audits constantly. Misconfigure your CDN or host and your rankings drop off a cliff and your pages start leaving the index, and the cause is usually that you accidentally blocked Google from crawling. (We run on Cloudflare too. Check your bot rules before you blame an algorithm.)

And AI generated images are now appearing inside AI Overviews in the wild, a month after Google said they were coming. The answer box draws pictures now.

What to prioritize this week

Ranked, and it is five things:

1. Tonight, run your top three money terms on your phone and read what Google says about you. Find the listicle it is quoting.
2. This week, open the generative AI tab in Search Console and write down your top five pages by AI impressions. That list is your real AI footprint.
3. Before September 1, settle your Google Ads campaign settings, and make sure any Spanish ads point at an actual Spanish page.
4. This month, rewrite your service and about pages as source material. Plain sentences, real service list, real neighborhoods, no vague "greater Charleston area."
5. Do not react to the August 12 volatility. Log it and move on.

Notice that four of those five are about controlling what somebody else says about you, and only one is about your rankings. That is not an accident, and it is not going back the other way.

This is how we work with service businesses across the Lowcountry. The job used to be getting you to the top of a page. Increasingly the job is making sure that when a machine describes your business to a stranger, it gets it right.