Think about the last time you needed a plumber, a divorce lawyer, or a good restaurant for a client dinner. Chances are, you didn't scroll through ten blue links and open five tabs to compare them. You asked an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, or Gemini — and it handed you two or three names, already decided for you. That's not a small shift. It's a fundamental change in how local SEO works, and it's happening right now, in real time, whether your bu