Google is testing a version of local search in which the structured business knowledge panel, the box that has anchored branded local queries for more than a decade, is replaced by an “AI Overview” label sitting atop model-generated prose, with a “Show more” button that opens an AI Mode chat about the business itself.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz replicated the experience on September 17 after Ben Fisher posted a screenshot to LinkedIn. Schwartz said Google appeared to have been testing variations “for a while.” Running the test on his own company, he found the summary largely correct, though it surfaced an outdated “niche solutions” reference he attributed to stale copy on his corporate site rather than to the model.
That attribution is the whole story. The panel used to be a structured record, hours, address, category, owner-supplied description. The replacement is a generated paragraph assembled from whatever text Google can crawl. Thin or contradictory web copy no longer just hurts rankings; it becomes the AI’s confident description of the business at the moment of discovery.
Schwartz’s own reaction registered the discomfort plainly: “I am not sure I want AI describing my business, when I can.”
A parallel signal landed on September 18, when Google updated its aggregator unit and supplier unit developer documentation to add support for local business queries, pointing eligible providers to the Local Point of Interest Feed alongside the existing hotel, flight, and ground-transportation feeds. Structured local data is becoming a supply pipeline, not a display surface.
The through-line ties back to the AI search visibility reports inside Google Search Console and the citation patterns documented at BrightonSEO: the crawlable text is the record now.