AI Overviews are recommending your competitors. Not you.

Across the HVAC and plumbing accounts I audited on the North Shore, Google's AI Overview rendered for most service searches. On nearly all of them, the Overview cited competitors and didn't cite the audited business. Four to six regional contractor domains show up in the citations across nearly every audit. If you're a local operator and your domain isn't one of them, you have an answer-engine visibility problem on top of whatever your paid-search account looks like.

This isn't an SEO ranking issue in the old sense. The Overview pulls from sources Google trusts for *answers*, not necessarily the top organic results. So even if your site ranks page one organically, you can be missing from the answer entirely. The audit captures both.

The other thing the audit data shows: the same handful of competitors keep getting cited. They aren't doing anything magical. They have on-page content that answers real customer questions, a clean local footprint, and structured data that matches what's on the page. That's it. The gap is closeable.

For every HVAC and plumbing audit, I capture the AI Overview that rendered (or didn't) for a set of real service searches in the prospect's town. For each search where the Overview rendered, I record which domains were cited. The findings show how many searches had an Overview, how many cited competitors, how many cited the business, and which competitor domains came up most often.

This sits next to the paid-search audit, the SERP audit, and the tracking audit. The AI-layer visibility is its own problem and the audit treats it that way. If a free audit comes back showing zero AI Overview citations across the captured searches, that gap goes in the report with the others.

Nothing here is "AEO optimization" in the magical sense. It's a check on what's already happening, with a clear next step if your shop is missing.