What I Need to Know About What Google Is Doing, and What Olly Olly Is Doing About It

The headlines you’ve probably seen

In May 2026, Google announced what they called “the biggest change to the search box in 25 years.” AI summaries. A new search experience. Voice and image search. Conversational queries. The internet erupted with takes SEO is dead, Google killed search, contractors should panic.

Most of those takes are wrong. AI Mode isn’t the default search experience. Traditional search results haven’t been replaced. And for local searches like “plumber near me” or “HVAC repair Austin,” the search results page looks essentially the same as it did the day before the announcement.

So if the headlines are wrong, what actually changed? And why are so many marketing companies trying to sell contractors on “AI-era SEO” as if it’s a brand new thing?

Here’s the truth: the changes that actually matter for your business didn’t happen in May 2026. They’ve been happening quietly, in plain sight, for the last five years. And almost no marketing company has been honest with contractors about what they are.

What actually changed (and why it matters more than the headlines)

Five years ago, a contractor running an HVAC company in Austin could type “HVAC repair Austin” into Google and see, on a mobile phone:

• Two or three paid text ads at the top
• The Map Pack which is three local businesses with a map, each one with a tap-to-call button right there in the result
• Ten organic links below

If you showed up in the Map Pack for free because your Google Business Profile was good, your reviews were strong, and your location was right. A homeowner could tap your business name and hit Call without ever leaving the search results. That was free leads from Google.

Run the same search today. Here’s what’s different:

• Three Local Services Ads (LSAs) at the very top. These are paid. Each has a Call button right on the ad and a Google Verified badge. They sit above everything else on the page.
• Two or three paid text ads below the LSAs.
• The Map Pack with the tap-to-call button removed from the organic listings. The Call button is gone. If you tap the business, you go to its profile, where you then have to find the phone number and tap a second time to call.
• A sponsored ad inside or just below the Map Pack with a Call button.
• An AI Overview, on some searches, summarizing information about the topic.
• The organic blue links, pushed well below the fold.

Count the placements with a Call button. In 2020, there were five; three from free Map Pack listings and two or three paid ads. In 2026, there are six or seven and every single Call button on the page is on a paid placement. The free Call buttons that used to exist on organic Map Pack listings? Gone.

Google has been quietly adjusting this over the last year, frequently removing the quick ‘Call’ button from organic Map Pack listings during mobile layout tests. If you tap the business now, you often go to its profile first andGoogle made this change quietly in 2025. Most contractors have never heard about it. But if your phone has been ringing less from Google over the past year and you couldn’t figure out why, this is most of the reason.

Why Google is doing this

This is the part that matters most, because once you understand it, you understand why the trend is going to keep going.

Google makes money exactly one way on a search: when somebody clicks a paid ad. That’s it. Organic clicks generate nothing. Map Pack clicks generate nothing. AI summaries generate nothing. So when Google’s executives look at a search query, the only question that matters is: did we make any money on this one?

For 20 years this didn’t matter, because Google had so much volume and ads were so plentiful that the average search was wildly profitable. That math has broken in the last three years, for three reasons.

First, people are clicking less. About 60% of Google searches now end without any click to a website at all. Users get answers right on the results page from the Knowledge Panel, featured snippets, the Map Pack, or AI summaries. Same number of searches happening. Far fewer chances for Google to make money on each one.

Second, AI costs a fortune. The computing power needed to serve AI summaries is 10 to 100 times more expensive per search than serving plain blue links. Google’s spending on AI infrastructure and data centers has surged from roughly $30 billion a few years ago to over $50 billion annually now, driven by the massive computing power required to run AI summaries. Significantly more money to deliver answers, and they’re delivering more answers than ever before.

Third, people are leaving for ChatGPT. Google’s global search share dropped from 92% in 2020 to 89.3% in March 2026 which is the the biggest single-year drop since 2009. About a quarter of Americans now turn to ChatGPT before Google for some questions.

Stack these three together. Fewer clicks per search. Higher cost per search. Audience eroding. There is one strategic response Google can take: make every remaining click more valuable by selling more of them as ads.

That’s why the SERP has 2-3x more paid placements than it did five years ago. That’s why the Call button moved from free to paid. That’s why Local Services Ads exist at all they’re a brand new ad slot Google invented in 2018 so they could monetize a part of the results page (the local pack) that used to be free.

And here’s the crucial part: this trend isn’t reversing. Google is a publicly traded company that needs to grow ad revenue 15-20% per year on a $400 billion base. Their economics force them to keep favoring paid over organic. Forever. The truth is the old way of coasting on a basic organic setup is changing. Anyone telling you that you can rely solely on standard organic rankings without an omnipresent strategy doesn’t understand Google’s business. You can win by knowing that the old SERP isn’t coming back 2026 changes from Google shows that.

What this means for your business

If you run a home services company, here’s what you need to internalize.

Your organic strategy has to change. A plumber who got 30% of their leads from free Map Pack visibility in 2020 is getting a fraction of that today, even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Google moved the goalposts. The Call button is gone. The Map Pack got smaller. Your organic listing got pushed down the page. The contractors who still win organic visibility now are the ones whose profile data, reviews, and structured website content are so strong that Google’s AI is forced to pull them into the map, the summary, or whatever other surface Google uses to make recommendations. That’s still winnable, but it’s a different game than ranking a blue link. The free game from five years ago is over. The new organic game is about being unmissable to Google’s AI.

The contractors competing with you on paid placements are increasingly the only contractors showing up. There are now six or seven paid placements above the organic listings on a typical local search. Every one of them has a Call button. Your organic listing has none. When a homeowner taps Call from the results page, they’re tapping a competitor’s paid ad.

The good news: AI competitors aren’t a real threat to your business. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can answer informational questions, how does a heat pump work, what’s the difference between a furnace and a boiler, but they can’t reliably answer “plumber near me at 11pm.” They don’t have the real-time data. They don’t have the map integration. They don’t have the Call button. In one study, Google’s Local Pack appeared for 36% of searches; ChatGPT recommended a specific local business 1.2% of the time. That gap isn’t closing anytime soon.

The bad news: Google knows this, and they’re monetizing it accordingly. Local-intent search is the part of Google’s business that AI competitors can’t touch so Google is squeezing every dollar they can out of it. The Call button move is the cleanest evidence. They removed it from free and made it paid because they know homeowners with a flooded basement at 11pm are going to tap the first Call button they see, and Google wants that tap to be on an ad.

What contractors usually do wrong from here

Most contractors I talk to land in one of three places when they hear all this for the first time.

The first response is denial. “I’ve been running my business for 20 years on word of mouth and reviews. I don’t need to pay Google.” That was true five years ago. It’s not true today. The structural changes to the SERP mean even a contractor with a perfect GBP and 200 5-star reviews is competing for an organic placement that’s been pushed below the fold, lost its Call button, and is sitting under six paid ads.

The second response is despair. “So I have to pay Google to get any leads now? Forever?” Yes, mostly. But this is actually better news than it sounds, because paid placement done well has a much higher ROI than most contractors realize. We see typical contractors getting 5-10x return on ad spend (ROAS) meaning $5,000 to $10,000 in booked revenue for every $1,000 in LSA budget and some categories like roofing during storm season or HVAC during heat waves hit 30x or more. (ROAS measures revenue generated against ad spend, not net profit after your labor and material costs. Your actual margin on that work is yours to manage.) The cost of paid placement is much lower than the cost of being invisible.

The third response is rushing to set up LSA themselves and quitting two months later. LSA is brutal to run correctly. The setup is more complicated than Google admits. The bidding is non-obvious. The lead disputes (now called “lead rating”) are time-consuming. The bad leads that come through can crater your ROI if you don’t fight them. About 60% of contractors who try to run LSA themselves either give up or run it so badly that they lose money on it. This is the part where most marketing companies will tell you they can help and many of them can’t, because they don’t actually know how to manage an LSA program at scale.

What Olly Olly does about it

I’ll be direct about what we do, because most marketing companies aren’t.

We run your Local Services Ads. Setup, verification, bidding strategy, service area configuration, daily monitoring, weekly optimization. We fight every bad lead through Google’s automated rating system to get you credit on the calls that shouldn’t have been charged. We AI-grade every inbound call so you can see what was said, whether it converted, and what to do about the ones that didn’t. We do this for thousands of contractors and we know the levers that most agencies don’t.

We manage your Google Business Profile. GBP is the database Google’s AI reads when it decides who to recommend in search results, in AI summaries, and in voice queries. We make sure yours is complete, current, and consistent. Our GBP Guardian reverses unauthorized edits which happen more than most contractors realize before they hurt your ranking.

We drive your review velocity. Google’s AI weighs review recency and volume heavily. A business with 200 recent reviews at 4.8 stars beats a business with 40 reviews at 4.6, even if the second business is closer. We automate review collection from your happy customers, monitor velocity across platforms, and flag drops before they hurt your ranking.

We keep your website structured for AI. Your website now does two jobs converts the customers who land on it, and feeds structured information to Google’s AI about who you are and what you do. We generate and publish fresh service pages and location pages directly to your WordPress site, with schema markup and proper structure, so AI knows exactly what you do and where.

We show you where you’re winning and losing. Our visibility heatmaps show your ranking across your service area, neighborhood by neighborhood. If you’re dropping out of search results in a specific zip code, we see it and fix it. You can’t fix what you can’t measure, and most contractors have never been able to measure this until now.

That’s it. Four-part defense against everything that’s changed about how Google works. Nothing more, nothing less.

What you should do, in order of priority

If you take nothing else away from this:

One. If you’re not running LSA, start. The Call button is paid now. The top of every local search is paid now. The free lead game from Google is mostly over. The contractors winning your market in 2026 are the ones running paid placement, and the longer you wait, the more they consolidate.

Two. Audit your Google Business Profile. Hours, services, photos, posts. Make sure it’s accurate and complete. If you don’t have the time, this is the second-easiest thing to outsource.

Three. Build a review velocity habit. Three to five new reviews a month, every month. Recency matters more than total count.

Four. Make sure your website actually tells Google’s AI what you do and where. Plain-language service descriptions. Real photos. Location pages for every area you serve.

You can do all of this yourself if you have the time and the discipline. Most contractors don’t, which is what we’re for. Either way, the priorities are the same.

Open Google on your phone. Search for your trade in your city. Look at the page.

Count the paid placements above the organic results. Look at where the Call buttons are. Notice the ones in the Map Pack aren’t there anymore.

That page is the entire game for the next ten years of your business. If you’re winning on that page right now, keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re not, and you’ve been wondering why your phone has been ringing less, this is the reason. The contractors who figure that out and act on it win the next decade in their market.

You can fix this yourself. You can hire us. You can hire someone else. But the page on your phone is the page everyone else is looking at too.

In the end the reality is the top of Google is paid every day you wait is just more calls going to your competitors. Schedule a strategy call with one of our paid experts, let us handle the setup, the bidding and the worry so you can focus on booking jobs.