Red Isle WebPicture checking your Google listing the way you'd check a lobster trap. Pull it up this spring and everything looks fine. Still ranked near the top for your trade in your end of the Island. Reviews holding at 4.8, photos up to date. But the phone's been slower than it was two summers ago, slow enough to make you wonder if the number's broken.
Nothing was broken. Something moved.
Calls from Google listings are dropping across North America because Google changed what its results look like. AI-written answers sit at the top, the map panel on many searches now shows one or two businesses instead of three, call buttons are disappearing, and ads take up more of the page. Your listing can hold its ranking and still send you fewer calls.
What did Google change?
Four things at once, stacking on top of each other. AI Overviews, the AI-written answer Google drops at the top of a lot of searches, are the one you've probably already noticed. They push everything else further down the page. I wrote about those earlier this summer.
The second is newer and hits closer to the phone. Google has started replacing the familiar map box, the one that showed three local businesses with call buttons, with an AI-powered version that shows one or two businesses and no call button at all. Sterling Sky, a local search firm that has been tracking these new panels since late 2025, ran the numbers with a rank-tracking tool called Places Scout: the AI panels surfaced about a third as many businesses as the old three-packs did.
Fewer spots, and the spots that remain are harder to call from.
Third, in some trades Google has swapped the call button on listings for photos. And fourth, ads. By December 2025, ads inside the map results showed on roughly one in five of the mobile searches Sterling Sky tracks, up from about one in a hundred at the start of that year.
Jepto, an analytics firm Sterling Sky asked to check the pattern, pulled two years of data on 179 law firm listings in the US and found calls fell steadily over that stretch while clicks from the listing to the website held flat. Law firms aren't your trade, but it's the same pattern already showing up in Sterling Sky's numbers above, fewer people tapping the phone icon and just as many finding the website.
Is this happening on PEI yet?
AI Overviews already show on Canadian searches, and some of what's coming is close behind. The shrunken AI map panels are showing on mobile in the United States so far, and Google tends to test in one market before rolling it out everywhere. I can't tell you the month it lands here. I can tell you the direction.
PEI is not Toronto, and fewer businesses compete for those map spots here, so an Island shop may feel this later and gentler than a mainland firm. It's the kind of change worth knowing about early, before it costs you calls.
What can you do about it?
Keep your Google listing complete and current, because the AI answers are built partly from it. Hours, services, photos, steady reviews. That part hasn't changed.
Then put real weight on the one piece of the internet you own. Google can shrink the map panel whenever it likes. It cannot shrink your website. In that two-year data, website clicks held up while calls from listings sank, and when an AI assembles an answer about businesses like yours, websites are a big part of what it reads. A site that plainly says what you do, where you work, and what it costs gives both the person and the machine something solid to land on.
And write down the answers to the questions people phone you about. Every trade has a handful of them. What does it cost, how long does it take, do you come out to my area, do I need this at all. A page that answers those in plain words is content the businesses around you have not written, and it works whether the visitor is a person or an AI deciding who to mention.
"So is it even worth trying to show up on Google?"
Yes, because fewer spots raises the bar for the businesses still standing in them. When the panel shows two names instead of three, the complete, consistent business with a real website behind it is the one that keeps the spot. Walking away from Google because it got harder would hand that spot to whoever stayed.
The good news
This is a smaller problem on the Island than the headlines make it sound. The competition for those spots is thinner here, and most of your neighbours haven't adjusted to any of this yet. The fixes are the boring fundamentals you can control anyway. A tidy Google listing, matching info everywhere, a steady trickle of reviews, and a website that answers real questions. None of that is a big job on PEI.
The website part of that whole list is the piece I build. Red Isle Web makes sites for Island businesses at a one-time price with no monthly fee, so both the person searching and the AI summarizing the results can see what you do and pick you. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I'll look at how your business shows up on Google right now and tell you what I'd fix first.