In AI Mode, your Google Business Profile may be the answer. What to fix
Google's own profile and product cards are now among AI Mode's most-cited sources. Which profile fields to fix, and why citation share is not traffic.
The short answer
For local and product questions, Google's AI Mode increasingly cites Google's own Business Profile and product cards instead of your website. Fix the profile fields an answer can quote: primary category, services, hours, attributes, product data and review replies. Then check your own local prompts, because citation share shows what AI Mode links to, not where visitors go.
Key takeaways
- Profound's data for 15 April to 30 June 2026 showed google.com's citation share in AI Mode growing 8.4 times, making it the second most-cited domain.
- The growth came from Google Business Profile and Product Knowledge Panel cards, with local-intent sectors such as travel, home services, restaurants and healthcare most affected.
- A profile card in an AI Mode answer can stand in for your homepage, so the profile's categories, services and hours now carry the facts buyers see first.
- Citation share measures what AI Mode links to, not the traffic or calls a business receives.
- Check your own local prompts in AI Mode before rewriting anything, and track AI Mode separately from AI Overviews.
In this article
What changed in AI Mode's sources
Google's own pages became one of the main things AI Mode cites. Profound, which sells AI visibility software, tracked AI Mode citations between 15 April and 30 June 2026. Over that period google.com's citation share in AI Mode grew 8.4 times, and it became the second most-cited domain.1
The growth did not come from search results pages. It came from two card types: Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels. In an analysis of more than 32 million Business Profile citations, Profound found that sectors relying on local intent absorbed most of the change, naming hospitality and travel, home services, restaurants, real estate and healthcare.1 For e-commerce, questions about comparisons, compatibility or specifications increasingly defaulted to product panels.
Our view: for a local business, the profile is now a page that AI Mode reads and quotes, often before your own site. Treat it with the same care as your homepage.
AI Mode citations, 15 Apr–30 Jun 2026
Google's own cards moved up the source list
Citation share is not traffic
A citation to a profile card tells you what AI Mode links to, not where people go next. Search Engine Journal's report on the same data makes this caveat directly, and it is the right one.2 Someone who sees your hours and phone number in a card may call you without ever visiting your website. Someone else may see a competitor's card and never scroll further.
So the change cuts both ways. Website sessions from local queries may fall while calls, direction requests and bookings hold steady or rise. If you report only website traffic, you could read a healthy quarter as a bad one.
Our view: for local businesses, add profile actions (calls, direction requests, bookings and website clicks from the profile) to the AI visibility report next to website sessions. Our earlier piece on who AI Mode cites by query type explains why the source mix differs so much between local, product and informational questions.
Which profile fields does an AI answer quote?
An AI Mode answer quotes the fields that resolve the question: what you are, what you offer, when you are open and whether people are happy. Those map onto a short list of profile fields, and each one is either right or wrong.
- Primary category. The single most important field. A dental clinic filed as a general health practice will lose "emergency dentist open now" questions to a competitor with the narrower category.
- Secondary categories and services. List the services buyers ask about by name, with short descriptions in plain words.
- Hours, including holiday hours. An answer that says you are open when you are closed costs a customer and some trust.
- Attributes. Accessibility, payment options, languages spoken and booking options are the details comparison questions turn on.
- Products. For retailers, product data in Merchant Center feeds the product panels that answer specification questions.
- Reviews and replies. Recent reviews, and replies that address the complaint, give an answer something to summarise.
Every field should agree with your website and the main directories. When the profile says one thing and your site another, an answer may quote either, and a buyer cannot tell which is current.
Who should care most?
Businesses whose buyers ask "near me" and "open now" questions should care first: clinics, hotels, restaurants, trades and car dealers. Car retail shows how fast buyers move. In Cox Automotive's US tracker (Q2 2026 wave, about 480 dealers and 1,500 shoppers planning a purchase), 63% of shoppers said they would definitely or probably use AI for their next vehicle purchase.3 Only 29% of dealers had started to adjust to AI-powered search.3
We covered that gap in what dealers should fix first. The profile is usually near the top of that list, because a dealer's inventory, service hours and reviews all surface through it.
B2B firms without a storefront should care less. Their buyers ask questions that pull analyst pages, reviews and the company's own site, and a profile card rarely decides the answer.
A one-hour profile check before you touch the website
- Ask the questions
Run ten local prompts in AI Mode: services, hours, "near me", comparisons.
- Note the sources
Record whether your profile card, your site or a rival's card is cited.
- Check the fields
Category, services, hours, attributes and products against your website.
- Fix and date it
Correct mismatches and log the date, so the next check shows the effect.
How do you know whether it is happening to you?
Ask AI Mode the questions your customers ask and record what it cites. Use prompts in the language and country your customers use, include the service and the area in plain words, and repeat them on more than one day, because answers vary between runs.
Keep AI Mode separate from AI Overviews in that log. They draw on different sources and behave differently, which is why we argued for tracking them as two channels. Search Console now reports AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions, as covered in our note on the new reports, but it does not tell you which card was cited.
When we audit, our AI answer monitor runs each prompt on three separate days across six engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google AI. It uses official APIs where they are offered and a licensed AI-answer data provider otherwise. For a local business, Google AI is the engine to read first.
What not to do
Do not stuff the business name or description with keywords. Google's guidelines treat that as a violation, and an answer that quotes a padded name reads badly to the buyer. Do not buy or swap reviews either: an answer summarising suspicious reviews does you no favours, and the profile can be suspended.
Do not abandon the website. Profile cards answer the short questions. Comparison, pricing and specification questions still pull from pages that explain the detail, and those pages are what other engines cite. Our view: fix the profile this week, because it is quick, then return to the pages that answer the longer questions.
Sources
- Profound, google.com in AI Mode citations, 15 Apr–30 Jun 2026; industry breakdown from 32M+ Business Profile citations (Jul 2026)
- Search Engine Journal, Google is AI Mode's No. 2 cited domain, data shows (Jul 2026)
- Cox Automotive, AI in Auto Retail Tracker: US dealers and in-market shoppers, Q1–Q2 2026 (Aug 2026)
