U.S. businesses lost another slice of website clicks and phone calls from their Google Business Profiles in the second quarter, while requests for driving directions kept rising. The pattern points to one cause: Google Maps now handles more of the customer journey on its own, from discovery to arrival, without routing the user through a business’s site or phone line first.
For anyone running local visibility programs, that is the story to watch this quarter, not a leaderboard shuffle. A profile can hold its rank and still lose the business outcome it was built to produce.
GMBapi’s year-over-year figures for Q2 show U.S. calls down 11.9% and website clicks down 12.5%, both softer declines than the 15.8% drop each metric posted in Q1. Direction requests rose 21.1% in Q2, continuing to grow but at a slower pace than Q1’s 31.3% gain. The clearest reversal sits in desktop Maps impressions, which fell 17.9% in Q1 and then grew 3.2% in Q2, a swing GMBapi says is confined to the United States rather than a global shift. Mobile Maps impressions rose 30.4%, desktop Search impressions gained 13.9%, and mobile Search impressions fell 20.1%, a drop large enough to offset most of the other gains on its own.
That last figure matters more than any single quarter’s headline number. Mobile Search is still the channel most local businesses depend on for referral traffic, and it is the one metric moving in the wrong direction across every dataset GMBapi published.
Europe is not tracking the same curve. EU desktop Maps impressions went from a 16.5% decline in Q1 to a steeper 34.7% decline in Q2, even as direction-request growth slowed from 21.7% to 13.1%. The U.K.’s smaller sample swung the opposite way: mobile Maps impressions moved from 22.4% growth in Q1 to a 70.8% drop in Q2, while clicks and direction requests kept climbing. None of the three markets is simply a lagging copy of another; each is moving on its own path.
GMBapi’s explanation centers on two separate ranking systems working on the same profile. Traditional Maps placement still runs on proximity, relevance, engagement, and prominence. The layer behind AI Mode and Gemini adds web context, entity matching, brand authority, and review sentiment on top of that same profile data. One system decides whether a business shows up on the map at all; the other decides whether Google trusts its own data enough to resolve the query without sending anyone anywhere.
Reviews are the raw material feeding that second system. Google has moved toward structured reviewer prompts (fixed tags covering things like ambiance, cost, and hygiene) instead of relying only on open-ended text, and it is pushing more customers to leave reviews after a visit. Cleaner review data lets Google’s AI settle a query on the spot, which lines up with direction requests climbing while calls and clicks keep shrinking.
Two outside datasets back up the profile-quality argument. Sterling Sky and Jepto examined 179 Google Business Profiles and found AI-driven local packs frequently list only two businesses where the standard Map Pack lists three, often without a way to call directly from the result, and expose only 32% as many distinct businesses as that standard pack. Separately, a 2026 local-visibility study from SOCi found Google’s own local pack surfaces far more businesses than AI platforms do, 35.9% versus 7.4% on Perplexity and 1.2% on ChatGPT, while profile accuracy runs 100% on Gemini, which draws straight from Maps data, against roughly 68% on the other two.
GMBapi had originally described the Q1 decline as far steeper, close to a 50% drop across its portfolio, in an April presentation that led it to advise some agency clients to shift budget toward paid search. The company says a retest of that dataset against a full second quarter corrected the baseline down to the 15.8% figure now published; the underlying direction of the trend did not change, only its magnitude.
Rank position alone will not surface any of this. Local dashboards built around ranking and call volume should add direction-request counts and profile completeness scores before Q3 closes, since those are the two levers GMBapi’s data ties most directly to the traffic that Maps is now keeping for itself.
Search Engine Land published this analysis by contributor Michel van Luijtelaar on August 31, 2026, drawing on GMBapi’s Q1 and Q2 2026 Google Business Profile data.
