There's No Such Thing as Position #1 Anymore: How AI Is Rewriting Local Search

If you’ve Googled your business lately and seen your ranking bounce around like a ping-pong ball, you’re not imagining it. And if your ranking report says #3 while a customer across town swears you’re nowhere on page one, you’re both right.

Something fundamental changed in local search this year, and the data behind it is now too big to dismiss. Here’s what happened, what we’re seeing with our own clients in Bend and beyond, and what to actually do about it.

The Data: Rankings Got 48.7% More Volatile Overnight

The week of May 18, 2026, Google rolled out its May core update. SEOs immediately started reporting something strange: two people searching the exact same keyword at the same time were seeing different results.

Joy Hawkins and the team at Sterling Sky dug into it with Yext, analyzing 8.16 million location-specific snapshots of search results. The findings:

• Organic ranking volatility jumped 48.7% the same week the update rolled out
• 97% of the reports they examined became more volatile
• The biggest swings hit mobile organic results for location keywords, searches like “plumber bend oregon” or “divorce lawyer seattle”
• This wasn’t classic personalization. The tests used logged-out users with no click history, and the shuffling happened anyway

Schieler De’Land at Service Lifter, whose testing first surfaced the pattern, offers the working hypothesis that best fits the data: Google may no longer be trying to determine one universally “correct” ranking for every searcher. Instead, AI now lets Google contextualize enough about an individual user, their language, their history, what they appear to value, to send each person on a search journey specific to them.

The question stops being “which company deserves to rank #1?” and becomes “which company is the best match for this person?”

What This Looks Like in Bend

Take a search like “property management bend oregon.” A year ago, the top ten was fairly stable: the same established companies in roughly the same order for almost everyone. Today that ordering shuffles depending on who’s asking.

An out-of-state investor with a small portfolio, a homeowner renting out their first house, and a developer researching multifamily operators may each see a different mix of Bend property managers, weighted toward whatever the system believes they value: responsiveness, scale, local ownership, price.

Same city, same keyword, three different “page ones.” We watched this dynamic reward one of our own clients. When Ridgeline Property Management sharpened its identity from Central Oregon generalist to Bend specialist, clicks grew 166% and AI tools started citing them, because the systems finally understood exactly who they were a match for.

The same holds for the trades. The “best plumber in Bend” is no longer one answer. It’s the budget-friendly answer for the searcher who has always hired the value option, the premium answer for the homeowner who searches for warranties and certifications, and the old-house specialist for the person who’s spent three weekends researching their 1920s Craftsman.

It’s Not Just Google, and Not Just Bend

We see the same shift in AI search itself. Our San Diego clients feel it clearly: TPS Printing, a commercial print shop, and A-B-CPR, a CPR training company, are both getting a growing share of traffic from AI-driven queries, people asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews who to hire rather than scrolling a list of blue links.

AI platforms don’t return ten options. They recommend one, two, maybe three businesses. And they choose based on the same matching logic: which business does the system understand well enough, and trust enough, to put in front of this specific person?

Every platform doing the asking holds an enormous dataset on both sides of the match. On the searcher’s side: past searches, language, location, what they’ve valued before. On the business side: reviews, website copy, services, pricing signals, sentiment, photos, mentions across the web. Today the matching leans on values like “prefers local companies” or “shops on reviews.” It isn’t hard to imagine the profile getting more personal over time, down to how well a business’s whole vibe aligns with a searcher’s worldview. That’s speculation, but the direction of travel is clear: the more the platforms know, the more curated the results become.

How a Local Business Wins the Matching Game

If search is becoming a matching problem, generic branding is becoming a liability. “Family owned, honest, affordable, quality service” describes every HVAC company in Oregon and gives the AI nothing to match on. Here’s what actually works.

1. Have a clear identity, and commit to it

Decide who you serve best, what you believe, and why customers pick you, then say it plainly everywhere. Specialist beats generalist in a matching system, because a specialist is an obvious match for somebody. That’s exactly why the Bend-first repositioning worked for Ridgeline.

2. Publish proof of work

Case studies and project stories are matching fuel. If you document a tree-root removal on a clogged sewer line at a Craftsman house in Midtown Bend, you’ve just told every AI system that you’re the plumber for old-house sewer problems in central Bend. When someone whose search history is full of Craftsman renovation questions asks for a plumber, you’re the aligned answer. Share the work you do and the kinds of people you do it for.

3. Generate reviews that say something specific

Reviews are no longer just a star count. They’re the corroborating evidence AI reads to learn what you’re actually good at. A review that says “great service” helps a little. A review that says “they honored a 10-year warranty without a fight” or “the only shop that could match our brand colors on a rush order” tells the matching system exactly which searchers you belong in front of. Ask for reviews consistently and make it easy for customers to mention the specific job.

4. Make every channel tell the same story

Your website, Google Business Profile, and connected social accounts are all inputs to the entity these systems build about you. When they agree on who you are, what you do, and where you work, confidence goes up and you get selected more often. When they conflict or sit abandoned, you’re handing the match to a competitor. Structured data and a properly configured website make all of it machine-readable.

5. Stop measuring by Googling yourself

One search is one snapshot of one possible result. Since this update, a single rank check is even less representative than it used to be. Judge your SEO by the pattern across many searches and, more importantly, by outcomes: is the phone ringing more, are leads up, can you trace calls back to Google? That’s the scoreboard that can’t be shuffled.

The Bottom Line

Rankings aren’t dead, and SEO isn’t dead. But we’re watching search move from ranking webpages for queries toward matching people with businesses. The winners won’t just be the companies Google believes are relevant. They’ll be the companies the AI understands well enough to know exactly who they’re relevant to.

That’s the work we do at Slade Insights: helping local businesses build the clear identity, proof of work, review engine, and technical foundation that make them the obvious match. It’s how a Bend property manager grew leads 77% in six months, and it’s where every local business needs to be heading.

If you want to know how the AI platforms currently see your business, and who they think you’re a match for, let’s talk. We’ll show you exactly where you stand.