GBP Call Clicks Are Falling. Here's the Data and What's Driving It.
GBP Call Clicks Are Falling. Here's the Data and What's Driving It.
Business Opt
Real data from 179 Google Business Profiles shows clicks-to-call declining steadily, even for businesses that haven't lost a single ranking position. Local Services Ads, AI Overviews, and a new AI-powered local pack are responsible.
If your Google Business Profile is ranking in the top three and your phone is still ringing less than it was a year ago, you are not alone and it is not a glitch. Something structural has changed in how Google surfaces local businesses, and the data is starting to make it undeniable.
In February 2026, Joy Hawkins at Sterling Sky, one of the most respected local SEO agencies in North America, published a detailed breakdown of what shifted in local search throughout 2025. The findings should be required reading for any local business owner or agency managing GBP profiles. The headline number: clicks-to-call from Google Business Profiles have been declining consistently for two years, across industries, regardless of ranking position.
This article breaks down what the data shows, the three forces driving the decline, what it means for local businesses in 2026, and what to do about it.
The Data: Call Clicks Are Down Across the Board
To quantify the trend, Sterling Sky worked with Dale at Jepto to analyse 179 Google Business Profiles across 34 law firms in the USA. The data covered two years of GBP performance. The result was a consistent downward slope in clicks-to-call, month over month, regardless of whether rankings held steady, improved, or declined.
The critical detail is this: website clicks from GBPs did not show the same decline. That distinction matters. Website icons appear on GBPs primarily on desktop. Phone call icons are the primary action on mobile. The data tells us that mobile users, the dominant audience for local search, are increasingly not calling directly from a GBP listing. The traffic is going somewhere else, or not converting at the listing stage at all.
This is not a niche trend confined to law firms. The same pattern is showing up across service-based businesses globally. If your industry relies on inbound calls as a lead source and your primary acquisition channel is local search, this trend is directly relevant to your revenue.
Force One: Local Services Ads Are Taking Over the Screen
The most immediate and measurable cause of the decline is the expansion of Local Services Ads. LSAs are pay-per-lead placements that appear above the organic local map pack in Google search results. They show the business name, rating, and a direct call button, positioned before users ever reach the organic results.
At the start of 2025, LSAs were appearing on roughly 11% of local queries tracked by Sterling Sky. By November 2025, that figure had risen to 31%. That is a near-tripling of LSA presence in under twelve months. In parallel, local pack ads (standard paid placements within or adjacent to the map pack) went from appearing on 1% of mobile reports in early 2025 to around 22% by January 2026.
The practical effect is straightforward. A user searching "emergency plumber near me" on mobile now encounters paid call placements before they reach the organic map pack. Many will call from those paid results. The organic map pack, where your hard-earned GBP ranking lives, is further down the screen and faces more competition for attention than it did twelve months ago.
For businesses not running LSAs, this is a structural disadvantage. Organic local visibility has not disappeared, but it is being compressed by paid formats that carry the same visual language (ratings, reviews, call buttons) as the organic results beneath them.
Force Two: Google's AI Overviews Are Absorbing Informational Traffic
The second force is less about calls directly and more about the top of the funnel. Local businesses that invested heavily in informational blog content, articles answering common customer questions, cost guides, how-to posts, and service explainers, have seen that content's traffic erode significantly throughout 2025.
The cause is Google's AI Overviews. When a user searches "how much does a boiler service cost" or "what is included in a roof inspection," Google now answers that query directly in the search results with an AI-generated summary. The user gets their answer without clicking through to any website. Sterling Sky confirmed this pattern across multiple clients, citing data from Seer showing consistent declines in organic click-through rates when AI Overviews are present on a results page.
The downstream effect on calls is real, even if indirect. Informational content traditionally served as a trust-building mechanism. A user reads an article, gets comfortable with a business's expertise, and converts later via a call. If that article no longer receives traffic because an AI Overview is absorbing the query, the business loses a touchpoint in the customer journey.
The informational content still has value as a supporting signal for service pages, helping those pages rank and establishing topical authority. But its role as a direct traffic and lead source has shrunk materially.
Force Three: AI-Powered Local Packs Are Replacing the Standard Three-Pack
The third and most significant structural development is the emergence of AI-powered local packs. Sterling Sky identified these appearing on mobile devices in the USA, accounting for approximately 7% of tracked local keywords in their ranking reports.
The standard local pack shows three businesses, each with a name, rating, review count, and a call button. The AI-powered local pack looks different and behaves differently. It features only one or two businesses, not three. It does not include call buttons. And the businesses featured are often not the same ones appearing in the standard three-pack for the same query.
Places Scout ran analysis on this and found that AI local packs featured 5,943 unique businesses across the tracked queries, while standard three-packs for the same queries featured 18,330. That is a dramatic reduction in the pool of businesses getting visibility. If AI local packs continue to expand in prevalence globally, a significant share of mobile local search queries will be resolved with fewer businesses shown and no direct call mechanic at the listing level.
This explains the mobile-specific nature of the click-to-call decline. Desktop GBP behaviour, measured through website clicks, has not shown the same drop. The AI pack format is a mobile-first rollout, and it is stripping out the call button that mobile users would have clicked.
What This Means for Measuring Performance
One practical consequence of these shifts is that traditional GBP performance metrics are becoming misleading. If you are tracking clicks-to-call as your primary measure of GBP effectiveness and that number is falling, the instinct is to investigate the profile: check the category, audit the photos, look for suppressed listings. But if the decline is structural and driven by the forces above, no amount of profile optimisation will reverse it.
Local Falcon, in their January 2026 guide to local search ranking factors, made this point explicitly. Traditional metrics like click-through rate, organic sessions, and page-level conversions are capturing a shrinking portion of the customer journey. As AI surfaces answers directly and users engage more with zero-click results, less of that behaviour appears in familiar analytics dashboards.
The businesses that are tracking performance most accurately in 2026 are combining GBP interaction data with first-party signals: phone call volumes from call tracking numbers, form submissions, direct booking requests, and revenue attributed to local search traffic. Raw GBP click counts, viewed in isolation, no longer tell the full story.
What Local Businesses Should Do in 2026
Understanding the problem is step one. The more important question is what to change. Based on the data and the structural shifts described above, here is where the focus should go.
Run Local Services Ads if you are eligible. LSAs are available for a defined set of business categories including plumbers, electricians, cleaners, roofers, locksmiths, and a growing number of others. If your category qualifies, not running LSAs while competitors do means giving up paid screen real estate directly above the map pack. LSAs operate on a pay-per-lead model, so you only pay when a customer contacts you. The economics work differently from traditional PPC and deserve separate evaluation.
Build a consistent review engine. The AI-powered local pack, while it reduces the number of businesses featured, still selects based on trust signals. Reviews, specifically detailed and recent ones, remain a primary signal. A business with a strong, current review profile is better positioned to be included in AI-generated local results than one coasting on an older review count. The focus should be on volume, recency, and quality of review text, not just star rating.
Stop relying on informational content for direct traffic. The blog posts and guides that once drove consistent traffic are now being absorbed by AI Overviews for many queries. They still belong in your content strategy as topical authority signals supporting your service pages, but measure them differently. Track rankings and supporting signal value, not session counts.
Write content that does not already exist. Sterling Sky's strategic recommendation for 2026 is to produce content covering topics your competitors have not addressed, rather than writing better versions of what already ranks. AI is increasingly good at synthesising existing content. Original angles, local-specific insights, and genuine expertise are harder for AI to replicate and more likely to earn citation in AI-generated answers.
Consider a multi-location or multi-profile strategy. A single well-ranked GBP listing generates less mobile call traffic than it did two years ago. Businesses with multiple locations or service area profiles have more surface area in local search. Where it is commercially viable and geographically genuine, expanding your GBP footprint offsets the shrinking reach of any single listing.
The Bottom Line
The decline in GBP call clicks is not a profiling problem or a technical SEO failure. It is the result of three converging forces: paid formats taking more screen space, AI Overviews absorbing informational queries, and a new AI-powered local pack format that shows fewer businesses with no call button. Ranking well in the organic map pack remains essential and valuable, but it is no longer sufficient on its own to sustain mobile call volumes at the level businesses were generating two years ago.
The businesses that adapt fastest are the ones treating local search as a multi-channel system, combining organic GBP optimisation, paid LSA placements, a review acquisition process, and content that earns genuine authority. Businesses that continue optimising for last year's version of local search will keep seeing the numbers fall and keep looking for the wrong explanations.
Sources
Sterling Sky: The State of Local SEO in 2026 (February 2026) -- https://www.sterlingsky.ca/the-state-of-local-seo-in-2026/
Local Falcon: Guide to the Future of Local Search in 2026 -- https://www.localfalcon.com/blog/guide-to-the-future-of-local-search-in-2026-local-ranking-factors--expert-local-seo-approaches
Local Dominator: SEO News Roundup March 30 to April 5, 2026 -- https://localdominator.co/seo-news/seo-news-roundup-march-30-to-april-5-2026/
Sterling Sky: Google Local Changes Tracker -- https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-local-changes/
If your Google Business Profile is ranking in the top three and your phone is still ringing less than it was a year ago, you are not alone and it is not a glitch. Something structural has changed in how Google surfaces local businesses, and the data is starting to make it undeniable.
In February 2026, Joy Hawkins at Sterling Sky, one of the most respected local SEO agencies in North America, published a detailed breakdown of what shifted in local search throughout 2025. The findings should be required reading for any local business owner or agency managing GBP profiles. The headline number: clicks-to-call from Google Business Profiles have been declining consistently for two years, across industries, regardless of ranking position.
This article breaks down what the data shows, the three forces driving the decline, what it means for local businesses in 2026, and what to do about it.
The Data: Call Clicks Are Down Across the Board
To quantify the trend, Sterling Sky worked with Dale at Jepto to analyse 179 Google Business Profiles across 34 law firms in the USA. The data covered two years of GBP performance. The result was a consistent downward slope in clicks-to-call, month over month, regardless of whether rankings held steady, improved, or declined.
The critical detail is this: website clicks from GBPs did not show the same decline. That distinction matters. Website icons appear on GBPs primarily on desktop. Phone call icons are the primary action on mobile. The data tells us that mobile users, the dominant audience for local search, are increasingly not calling directly from a GBP listing. The traffic is going somewhere else, or not converting at the listing stage at all.
This is not a niche trend confined to law firms. The same pattern is showing up across service-based businesses globally. If your industry relies on inbound calls as a lead source and your primary acquisition channel is local search, this trend is directly relevant to your revenue.
Force One: Local Services Ads Are Taking Over the Screen
The most immediate and measurable cause of the decline is the expansion of Local Services Ads. LSAs are pay-per-lead placements that appear above the organic local map pack in Google search results. They show the business name, rating, and a direct call button, positioned before users ever reach the organic results.
At the start of 2025, LSAs were appearing on roughly 11% of local queries tracked by Sterling Sky. By November 2025, that figure had risen to 31%. That is a near-tripling of LSA presence in under twelve months. In parallel, local pack ads (standard paid placements within or adjacent to the map pack) went from appearing on 1% of mobile reports in early 2025 to around 22% by January 2026.
The practical effect is straightforward. A user searching "emergency plumber near me" on mobile now encounters paid call placements before they reach the organic map pack. Many will call from those paid results. The organic map pack, where your hard-earned GBP ranking lives, is further down the screen and faces more competition for attention than it did twelve months ago.
For businesses not running LSAs, this is a structural disadvantage. Organic local visibility has not disappeared, but it is being compressed by paid formats that carry the same visual language (ratings, reviews, call buttons) as the organic results beneath them.
Force Two: Google's AI Overviews Are Absorbing Informational Traffic
The second force is less about calls directly and more about the top of the funnel. Local businesses that invested heavily in informational blog content, articles answering common customer questions, cost guides, how-to posts, and service explainers, have seen that content's traffic erode significantly throughout 2025.
The cause is Google's AI Overviews. When a user searches "how much does a boiler service cost" or "what is included in a roof inspection," Google now answers that query directly in the search results with an AI-generated summary. The user gets their answer without clicking through to any website. Sterling Sky confirmed this pattern across multiple clients, citing data from Seer showing consistent declines in organic click-through rates when AI Overviews are present on a results page.
The downstream effect on calls is real, even if indirect. Informational content traditionally served as a trust-building mechanism. A user reads an article, gets comfortable with a business's expertise, and converts later via a call. If that article no longer receives traffic because an AI Overview is absorbing the query, the business loses a touchpoint in the customer journey.
The informational content still has value as a supporting signal for service pages, helping those pages rank and establishing topical authority. But its role as a direct traffic and lead source has shrunk materially.
Force Three: AI-Powered Local Packs Are Replacing the Standard Three-Pack
The third and most significant structural development is the emergence of AI-powered local packs. Sterling Sky identified these appearing on mobile devices in the USA, accounting for approximately 7% of tracked local keywords in their ranking reports.
The standard local pack shows three businesses, each with a name, rating, review count, and a call button. The AI-powered local pack looks different and behaves differently. It features only one or two businesses, not three. It does not include call buttons. And the businesses featured are often not the same ones appearing in the standard three-pack for the same query.
Places Scout ran analysis on this and found that AI local packs featured 5,943 unique businesses across the tracked queries, while standard three-packs for the same queries featured 18,330. That is a dramatic reduction in the pool of businesses getting visibility. If AI local packs continue to expand in prevalence globally, a significant share of mobile local search queries will be resolved with fewer businesses shown and no direct call mechanic at the listing level.
This explains the mobile-specific nature of the click-to-call decline. Desktop GBP behaviour, measured through website clicks, has not shown the same drop. The AI pack format is a mobile-first rollout, and it is stripping out the call button that mobile users would have clicked.
What This Means for Measuring Performance
One practical consequence of these shifts is that traditional GBP performance metrics are becoming misleading. If you are tracking clicks-to-call as your primary measure of GBP effectiveness and that number is falling, the instinct is to investigate the profile: check the category, audit the photos, look for suppressed listings. But if the decline is structural and driven by the forces above, no amount of profile optimisation will reverse it.
Local Falcon, in their January 2026 guide to local search ranking factors, made this point explicitly. Traditional metrics like click-through rate, organic sessions, and page-level conversions are capturing a shrinking portion of the customer journey. As AI surfaces answers directly and users engage more with zero-click results, less of that behaviour appears in familiar analytics dashboards.
The businesses that are tracking performance most accurately in 2026 are combining GBP interaction data with first-party signals: phone call volumes from call tracking numbers, form submissions, direct booking requests, and revenue attributed to local search traffic. Raw GBP click counts, viewed in isolation, no longer tell the full story.
What Local Businesses Should Do in 2026
Understanding the problem is step one. The more important question is what to change. Based on the data and the structural shifts described above, here is where the focus should go.
Run Local Services Ads if you are eligible. LSAs are available for a defined set of business categories including plumbers, electricians, cleaners, roofers, locksmiths, and a growing number of others. If your category qualifies, not running LSAs while competitors do means giving up paid screen real estate directly above the map pack. LSAs operate on a pay-per-lead model, so you only pay when a customer contacts you. The economics work differently from traditional PPC and deserve separate evaluation.
Build a consistent review engine. The AI-powered local pack, while it reduces the number of businesses featured, still selects based on trust signals. Reviews, specifically detailed and recent ones, remain a primary signal. A business with a strong, current review profile is better positioned to be included in AI-generated local results than one coasting on an older review count. The focus should be on volume, recency, and quality of review text, not just star rating.
Stop relying on informational content for direct traffic. The blog posts and guides that once drove consistent traffic are now being absorbed by AI Overviews for many queries. They still belong in your content strategy as topical authority signals supporting your service pages, but measure them differently. Track rankings and supporting signal value, not session counts.
Write content that does not already exist. Sterling Sky's strategic recommendation for 2026 is to produce content covering topics your competitors have not addressed, rather than writing better versions of what already ranks. AI is increasingly good at synthesising existing content. Original angles, local-specific insights, and genuine expertise are harder for AI to replicate and more likely to earn citation in AI-generated answers.
Consider a multi-location or multi-profile strategy. A single well-ranked GBP listing generates less mobile call traffic than it did two years ago. Businesses with multiple locations or service area profiles have more surface area in local search. Where it is commercially viable and geographically genuine, expanding your GBP footprint offsets the shrinking reach of any single listing.
The Bottom Line
The decline in GBP call clicks is not a profiling problem or a technical SEO failure. It is the result of three converging forces: paid formats taking more screen space, AI Overviews absorbing informational queries, and a new AI-powered local pack format that shows fewer businesses with no call button. Ranking well in the organic map pack remains essential and valuable, but it is no longer sufficient on its own to sustain mobile call volumes at the level businesses were generating two years ago.
The businesses that adapt fastest are the ones treating local search as a multi-channel system, combining organic GBP optimisation, paid LSA placements, a review acquisition process, and content that earns genuine authority. Businesses that continue optimising for last year's version of local search will keep seeing the numbers fall and keep looking for the wrong explanations.
Sources
Sterling Sky: The State of Local SEO in 2026 (February 2026) -- https://www.sterlingsky.ca/the-state-of-local-seo-in-2026/
Local Falcon: Guide to the Future of Local Search in 2026 -- https://www.localfalcon.com/blog/guide-to-the-future-of-local-search-in-2026-local-ranking-factors--expert-local-seo-approaches
Local Dominator: SEO News Roundup March 30 to April 5, 2026 -- https://localdominator.co/seo-news/seo-news-roundup-march-30-to-april-5-2026/
Sterling Sky: Google Local Changes Tracker -- https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-local-changes/
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