I Put SEOquake on Google's AI Overviews for Five St. Louis Searches. 74 Percent of What the AI Cited Was Google Business Profiles.

The AI Overview is the new top of the page. Nobody can see what it reads.

The trend everyone is writing about is the zero-click search. Google answers the question at the top of the page, the searcher never scrolls, and the business that used to win the click now has to win a mention inside the answer instead. For a home-service business that means one question matters more than its rank: when Google writes the answer for furnace repair in my town, what is it reading?

Until this week I answered that by hand, hovering over the little link icons in the overview one at a time. Then Semrush rebuilt SEOquake, its free browser extension, released September 9. The rebuild is mostly about page checks: meta tags, headings, links, structured data, a SEObar while you browse. But on my install it also dropped an Analyze sources button right above Google's AI Overview, with an Export AI sources link that writes every citation to a CSV with Semrush's rank, traffic, and backlink numbers next to it. Free. No account needed for the basic metrics.

So I stopped hovering and started counting.

Five searches, 88 citations, one export button

The setup: October 1, from St. Louis, Chrome with SEOquake installed, and Google itself telling me the results were not personalized. I searched five home-service queries that triggered an AI Overview: hvac repair st louis, ac repair st louis, furnace repair st louis, water heater repair st louis, and emergency plumber st louis. For each one I exported the AI Overview sources, and for four of them I also exported the organic page one so I could compare.

The headline number: 88 sources across the five overviews. 65 of them were Google Business Profiles, the listing pages Google shows in Maps. That is 74 percent. Three were directory pages, two Home Depot services pages and one Yelp search page. One was Google's own Maps terms page. The other 19 were business websites.

The overviews came in two shapes, and the shape decided everything. Three of them, hvac repair, furnace repair, and emergency plumber, were list answers with a map: a sentence, a ranked set of companies, and 23 or 24 sources each. In all three, exactly 20 of the sources were Business Profiles. The websites got three slots or fewer. The other two, ac repair and water heater repair, were written answers with 9 sources each. In those, the websites took over: 4 of 9 for ac repair, and 7 of 9 for water heater repair.

When the websites did get cited, the AI was not reading homepages. On the water heater overview, 6 of the 7 business pages cited were water heater service pages: a plumbing company's water heater page, an HVAC company's water heater repair page, a franchise's St. Louis water heater page. One HVAC company was cited on the ac repair overview twice, once for its homepage and once for its AC repair page. Across all five overviews, 10 of the 19 business URLs were specific service or location pages.

And the bar for getting in was low. One cited water heater site has 11 backlinks to its homepage, and Semrush estimates it gets about 443 organic visits a month. One cited emergency plumber site is estimated at about 111. Meanwhile Reddit sat at the top of the organic results for hvac repair and was not cited by the overview at all.

The overlap with page one was high where I could check it. Every website the ac repair overview cited also ranked on page one, 5 of 5 domains. For furnace repair it was 3 of 4, and for hvac repair 2 of 3. The AI is not finding secret sources. It is reading the Maps pack and the page-one sites, and it prefers the page on the site that matches the question.

Two honest gaps. When I searched roofing contractor, plumber, dentist, and personal injury lawyer in St. Louis the same morning, Google showed no AI Overview at all. And kitchen remodeling showed one, but the SEOquake button never loaded on it. Five searches is a morning, not a study.

For a local service business, the AI Overview is mostly your Google Business Profile

When Google decides the answer is a list of companies, it builds that list from Business Profiles. Twenty of them, every time in this test. Your website gets a few seats at most. If your profile has the wrong category, thin services, stale photos, or a review count that stopped moving in 2024, that is the page the AI is reading about you, and it is reading it more than anything else you own.

When Google decides the answer is a written explanation, the website comes back, but not the homepage. It is the page that answers the specific question. That lines up with what I found counting AI citations by page in the page-not-domain test: for the median business one page carried 63 percent of its citations, and about half the time the AI cited the homepage or a page about a different service than the one in the question.

And it is the same split I keep hitting from different angles. The business introduces itself on its own site. Everyone else vouches for it, and in local search the loudest someone else is Google's own profile page. I counted the vouching side in the ask-what versus ask-whether test, and the zero-click side in the AI Overviews piece. This is the first time I could see the source list for the overview itself, line by line.

Fix the profile first. Then build the page the question is about.

One. Treat the Business Profile as your primary AI page, because in three of five overviews it was 20 of the sources. Right primary category, every service listed, real photos, hours that are true, and reviews that keep arriving. That is not old-school Maps hygiene anymore. It is the raw material for the answer at the top of the page.

Two. Build one page per service you want to be cited for. Water heater repair, furnace repair, AC repair, emergency plumbing. Not a services page with ten bullets. The written overviews cited service pages over homepages, including on sites with almost no backlinks.

Three. Make sure that page can rank on page one, because almost every website the overviews cited was already there. The overview is choosing among the page-one results and the Maps pack, not discovering you.

Four. Check your own searches. Install SEOquake, search your service plus your town, click Analyze sources on the AI Overview, and export it. If your profile is in the list and your service page is not, you know which page to build. If neither is in the list, start with the profile.

SEOquake shows you one search. Semrush tracks all of them.

SEOquake is the free way in. You can get it from the Chrome Web Store, and Semrush says it also installs on Edge, Brave, and Arc, with Chrome the only officially supported browser for now. Without a Semrush account you get rank, traffic, and backlink counts next to each source. Connect a free account and it adds Authority Score and visit data.

The limit is that it is one search, on one day, from one place. The overviews in this test changed shape by query, and they will change again next month. The AI Visibility tooling in Semrush One tracks your brand's presence and citations across Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini over time, so you are not rebuilding this spreadsheet by hand every week. If you only want the AI side, the AI Visibility Toolkit is where I would start, and it now lets you look at individual URLs and subfolders, which is the level this test says matters.

The answer at the top of the page is built from your profile and one good page

74 percent of what Google's AI Overview cited for these five St. Louis searches was Google Business Profiles. When it cited websites, it cited the page that answered the question, and it did not care much how many backlinks that site had.

So stop asking whether your homepage ranks. Ask two smaller questions. Is my profile good enough to be one of the twenty? And do I have the one page that answers the exact service someone just searched? A free extension can tell you both in about a minute.