Google’s local pack occasionally generates an AI Overview summary for each business listing, and local SEO practitioner Joy Hawkins found one instance where that summary for a set of law firms all traced back to a single competing lawyer’s self-promotional listicle. Google linked to that listicle rather than to any of the firms’ own websites, so the result promoted the description a rival wrote instead of the business’s own information. That is a sourcing problem built into how the AI layer picks citations, not a rendering bug limited to one search.
The structural issue is worth stating plainly. A law firm’s own site, the page it controls and optimizes, loses the citation entirely. In its place, Google links to a page written and published by a competing firm, and that competitor’s page becomes the thing a searcher clicks.
A self-promotional listicle is also a poor choice of primary source for a comparison of firms in the first place. The page exists to rank its author’s own practice favorably against the very competitors it claims to describe, so any AI summary built on top of it inherits whoever wrote the ranking. Treating a single competitor’s marketing page as the authoritative description for an entire category of businesses is not a neutral sourcing decision.
Barry Schwartz, reporting for Search Engine Roundtable, did not treat Hawkins’s screenshot as a one-off. He wrote that he reproduced the same listicle citation after several attempts, across a few different browsers, which rules out a single cached result tied to one session or one machine. He also described the underlying behavior as intermittent: Google does not attach an AI Overview to every local pack result, and the listicle citation only appears when that AI layer renders at all.
That intermittency matters for anyone trying to check it. A local SEO cannot run one search, see a clean result, and conclude a category is unaffected, because the AI summary and its source may simply not have rendered on that attempt. Confirming what Google is citing for a given category takes repeated queries across sessions and browsers, tracked over time rather than checked once.
No setting addresses this, and neither Hawkins’s example nor Schwartz’s follow-up describes an opt-out. Google Business Profile does not offer a control over which page an AI Overview draws from. That leaves monitoring as the only available response right now: watch which sources the local pack cites for your own category on a recurring basis, rather than assume your own listing or website supplies the summary by default.
The stake is direct for a local business owner. The description that appears next to a listing, the text a searcher reads before ever clicking through, may not be built from anything the business itself wrote or published. If a competitor’s listicle is the source Google keeps citing for a category, that competitor is shaping how prospective clients read the business, and the business will not know it is happening without checking.
Search teams managing multi-location or local-service clients should add a recurring check to their reporting: run core category queries in the local pack, note whether an AI Overview appears, and record which domain it cites when it does. A single instance of a rival’s listicle standing in for a client’s own site is a finding worth escalating before a client asks why a competitor’s page is doing the talking.
Search Engine Roundtable, reported by Barry Schwartz, published August 12, 2026.
