Citations to google.com inside AI Mode, Google’s conversational search experience, rose 8.4x between mid-April and the end of June, according to new tracking data from the AI-visibility analytics firm Profound. That growth made google.com the No. 2 most-cited domain across everything AI Mode references, trailing only the leading external source in Profound’s dataset.

The stakes are narrow but real for two kinds of businesses: anyone selling locally and anyone selling a physical product. Profound says almost all of the increase traces back to two Google-owned surfaces now appearing inline inside AI Mode answers: Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels.

For local-intent searches, that means a business’s own Google-hosted profile, showing hours, photos, address, and reviews, can now surface as a card the user reads before ever clicking to an outside website. Profound found the effect concentrated in five categories where local intent drives revenue.

Product searches showed a parallel pattern. Queries built around comparing products, checking compatibility, or looking up specs increasingly surfaced Google’s own product cards rather than links to a retailer or brand site, Profound reported.

Here is the GEO angle worth naming directly: GEO, generative engine optimization, the practice of optimizing for LLM-driven answers, has mostly meant getting a page written, structured, and cited. For local and product queries, this data suggests the more direct lever is not a page at all. It is the completeness of a Google Business Profile or a product feed that Google already hosts. A business can rank nowhere organically and still be the entity AI Mode surfaces, simply because Google is answering with its own inventory of that business’s data.

That data-source point cuts both ways, and it deserves scrutiny before anyone rewrites a strategy around it. Profound is a single vendor measuring its own tracked query set, drawn from more than 32 million instances of the AI Mode results surface. No competing measurement firm has published a comparable figure for the same window, and Google has not confirmed an 8.4x figure of its own. A vendor whose business is AI-visibility monitoring also benefits from a headline this dramatic.

The mechanism described is still plausible on its face. Google has spent years building Business Profiles and Knowledge Panels as first-party answer surfaces for exactly these query types, well before AI Mode existed. Feeding them into a generative answer layer that Google itself controls is a low-friction move, not a surprising one. What is missing from the report is any measurement of what publishers actually lost in click-through as a result, only which domain got cited.

For local and e-commerce operators, the near-term test is concrete. Pull up AI Mode results for your highest-intent local or product queries and check whether your own Business Profile or product data appears ahead of your website. If it does, treat profile completeness (hours, photos, review volume, product attributes) as a ranking factor in its own right, not a directory listing to fill in once and forget.

Search Engine Land, reporting by Danny Goodwin, published July 15, 2026, citing data from Profound.