Your Google Business Profile Isn't Broken. Your Customers Just Stopped Clicking.
If your Google Business Profile numbers look soft this year, you're not imagining things...and it's probably not your fault.
Arthur "Art" Conforti's analysis, published this week, looked at 3 established U.S. florists in Texas, Wisconsin, and Maryland over May through September, and compared this year's customer interactions with the same stretch in 2025.
The result: a 26% drop in total Google Business Profile interactions.
Website clicks from the profiles fell 30%. Phone calls fell 21%.
Requests for driving directions fell 15%.
Here is the part that should get your attention. These businesses did nothing wrong. Their profiles were active, current, and well maintained. They posted regularly, listed products, collected reviews, and answered them.
Every box that local SEO checklists tell you to tick was ticked.
The engagement fell anyway.
What Changed: The Click Journey Got Shorter
Think about how a customer found a local business two years ago.
They searched, clicked a Google Business Profile, clicked the website, maybe called. Every step was a click you could count in your profile insights.
Now AI is eating the middle of that journey.
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answer the customer's question directly on the results page.
The customer still learns about your business.
They just never click through to tell you about it.
BCC Interactive's AI search statistics roundup, published just last week, found that 45% of U.S. consumers asked an AI tool to recommend a local business in the past year, up from 6% the year before.
Yet only 8% of local searchers start their journey with AI, and 43% of those still go back to Google to verify. So the traffic isn't vanishing.
It's splitting into smaller, harder-to-track paths.
One honest caveat: Conforti's study covers only three florists...which is a small sample, not a national census.
But the direction of the trend matches everything else we are seeing in zero-click search data.
Treat the 26% as a weather vane, not a precise forecast for your business.
Don't Abandon Your Google Profile
The wrong reaction to this news is "well, I guess Google profiles are dead. No use in keep that channel active or updated."
The right reaction would be to understand what your profile is for in 2026.
The same BCC roundup found that Google Business Profiles makeup 28.5% of all AI citations for local businesses across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT.
That makes your profile the single biggest feeder of business information into the AI answers that are replacing those clicks.
Let me put that plainly. Customers click less partly because AI answers quote your profile instead. A neglected profile does not just cost you clicks anymore. It costs you the answers themselves.
What to Do About It: Four Moves That Still Matter
1. Keep the profile ruthlessly current
Hours, services, photos, products, posts. Every blank field is information an AI has to guess at or find somewhere less flattering.
2. Keep collecting and answering reviews
Reviews feed both rankings and AI recommendations. An unanswered one-star review from March is the AI's first impression of you in October...
3. Make your website easy for AI to quote
Clear service pages with plain-English descriptions, FAQ sections answering real customer questions, and accurate local details. If your website is vague, the AI quotes someone else's.
4. Track impressions, not just clicks
If your profile insights show views holding steady while clicks slide, that is the zero-click effect in your own data. Watch the ratio. It tells you whether you are losing visibility (a real problem) or just losing clicks to AI answers (an adaptation problem).
The businesses that panic and let their profiles go stale will get the worst of both worlds: fewer clicks AND fewer AI mentions.
The businesses that treat their profile as the foundation of their AI visibility get the upside. Your customers haven't stopped needing you.
They've just stopped announcing themselves before they arrive. So give your business a fighting chance to appear when the AI does the talking.
If your profile numbers are sliding and you're not sure whether it's a visibility problem or an AI-shift problem, let's sort it out.
Book a free digital marketing consultation and we'll audit your local presence, map where your customers actually see you now, and lay out your next 90 days.
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