I get asked some version of this question a lot by professional services clients: “We’re not a chippy or a hairdresser, so does local marketing even apply to us?” It’s a fair question. The instinct is that local search is for businesses people walk into, not for the kind of firm someone researches for a fortnight before even picking up the phone. I’d argue the opposite. Local matters more for professional services, not less, because the trust bar is higher and the research phase is longer.
There is a rumour that Google’s own figures back this up. Various places online attribute a Google engineer as saying that roughly 46% of all searches now carry local intent, and the average small or medium business receives just over 1,000 searches a month through its Google Business Profile alone (although the source of that often-cited stat is a little murky.
Either way, that’s not random passing foot traffic to a shopfront, it’s a meaningful chunk of that is someone typing “conveyancing solicitor Birmingham” or “IFA near me” into their phone at 9pm, working through a shortlist before they ever fill in a contact form.
The trust bar is the whole game
Here’s where professional services differ from retail, and where I think a lot of local SEO advice misses the point when it’s written for coffee shops and locksmiths. Nobody agonises over which sandwich shop to trust with their financial future. They absolutely do agonise over which accountant, solicitor or adviser to trust with theirs. That means your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your local content aren’t just visibility tools, they’re the first, and sometimes only, credibility check a prospective client does before they’ll even consider calling you.
BrightLocal’s 2026 research on local business discovery found something worth taking seriously here: the share of consumers who’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT to find or vet a local business jumped from 6% to 45% in a single year (BrightLocal, 2026). People aren’t just Googling your firm any more. They’re asking an AI assistant to summarise who’s good, and that assistant is drawing on the same signals, reviews, consistency, depth of content, that used to matter “only” for traditional search.
AI recommends professional services very differently to Google
This is the bit I find genuinely useful for clients, and it’s specific enough to West Midlands and wider UK firms that it’s worth sitting with. A study looking specifically at how AI tools recommend lawyers, accountants and dentists across UK and international cities found that Google’s local pack spreads visibility fairly widely, surfacing roughly 36% of businesses in a category at some point. ChatGPT does the opposite: it recommends just 1.2% of local businesses in any given category, concentrating attention on a small, often repeated handful (PolyGrowth, 2026). Gemini sat at around 11% and Perplexity at 7%, so even between AI tools there’s no consistency.
Put plainly, being the “safe pick” for one AI tool doesn’t mean much on its own. The same study scored UK markets for how open or closed they currently are, and found Leeds accountants sitting at the wide-open end of the scale, essentially no incumbent had claimed consistent visibility across multiple AI tools yet, while London accountants were the most locked-down market in the entire study. I’d put money on most mid-sized West Midlands towns looking a lot more like Leeds than London right now. That’s an opportunity, but only for firms that get their content and citations sorted before a competitor does.
What actually earns that AI visibility?
None of this is exotic. It’s the unglamorous groundwork done properly: a complete, accurate Google Business Profile with your actual service areas and specialisms rather than a generic “professional services” category, a steady drip of genuine client reviews rather than a burst you asked for once, and website content that reads like it was written by someone who actually understands conveyancing, or auto-enrolment, or probate, rather than content that could describe any firm in the country. That last point matters as much for AI tools as it does for a human reader doing due diligence at 9pm. Thin, generic content gets summarised and skipped. Specific, well-evidenced content gets cited and remembered.
I’d steer well clear of chasing “AI SEO” as a separate discipline, incidentally. The firms winning cross-engine visibility in that study weren’t doing anything mystical, they were simply doing local marketing properly, consistently, over time, in a way that happened to also feed the AI layer sitting on top of search. Get the fundamentals right for a human researching your firm, and you’re largely doing the right thing for the AI summarising you too.
If you’d like to see how ZenithSpark can help you improve your local search, get in touch with us. We’re in Stourbridge, so call us on 01384 468035 or use our contact form
Sources: Google Business Profile Insights (2025); BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey (2026); PolyGrowth, “How AI recommends local businesses: a study of lawyers, accountants, and dentists” (2026).