Southtown Web Design & Digital Marketing’s New Data Shows AI Search Is Quietly Eating San Antonio's Local Service Searches, With 30-80 Percent Declines Across Major Industries
Southtown Web Design & Digital Marketing reports “AI Overview” searches are up 307% year over year, signaling a major shift in how customers find local businesses.
A new analysis of San Antonio local search data from Southtown Web Design & Digital Marketing, a San Antonio web design and digital marketing agency, reveals that search volume for some of the city's most competitive service categories has dropped between 30 and 80 percent over the past 12 months. The analysis, drawn from DataForSEO's keyword database, points to a single likely culprit: the rapid expansion of AI-generated answers in Google search results.
Search interest in "AI Overview" — the branded name for Google's AI-generated search summaries — climbed 307 percent year over year, while traditional commercial queries that San Antonio service businesses depend on for leads have declined sharply across nearly every vertical analyzed.
"For ten years, local service businesses in San Antonio have built their websites around the same set of search terms," said Michael Lorenzana, founder of Southtown Designs. "That ground is shifting under their feet, and most of them haven't noticed yet because their phones are still ringing. The question is what happens in 2027 when those declines compound."
Key Findings
| Vertical | SA Monthly Searches | YoY Change |
| Roofing San Antonio | 2,900 | -80% |
| Fence Company San Antonio | 1,000 | -58% |
| Concrete Contractor San Antonio | 590 | -56% |
| Home Builder San Antonio | 1,900 | -56% |
| San Antonio SEO | 1,000 | -47% |
| Personal Injury Lawyer San Antonio | 5,400 | -45% |
| San Antonio Attorney | 3,600 | -46% |
| Landscaping San Antonio | 2,900 | -33% |
| Dentist San Antonio | 6,600 | -19% |
Source: DataForSEO Labs API, Google search data for the United States, April 2025 to April 2026.
Not Every Vertical Is Losing
The decline is not universal. A small group of San Antonio service categories actually grew over the same period, and the pattern offers a clue about which businesses are insulated from AI-driven search disruption.
HVAC San Antonio searches grew 26 percent year over year. "San Antonio plumber" grew 22 percent. "San Antonio web design" rose 46 percent quarter over quarter. The common thread among these resilient categories is urgency: customers searching for emergency repairs, time-sensitive services, or specialized professional help are less likely to accept an AI-generated summary as their final answer. They want a phone number, and they want it now.
Categories that lost the most ground tend to share the opposite trait: research-heavy, comparison-driven searches where an AI summary can credibly answer the customer's question without sending them to a business website at all.
What's Driving the Shift
Google began rolling out AI Overviews to all U.S. searches in 2024, and the feature has expanded steadily since. The result is a search results page where the first thing a customer sees is no longer ten blue links — it's a generated summary that often answers the query in place, drawing from multiple sources without requiring a click.
Even "near me" queries, long considered the bedrock of local search intent, are showing the same downward pattern. "Plumber near me" searches dropped 45 percent year over year nationally. "Roofer near me" fell 76 percent. "Concrete contractor near me" declined 45 percent. These are the searches that local businesses have spent a decade optimizing for.
"The volume isn't disappearing because customers stopped needing roofers or fence companies," Michael said. "It's disappearing because Google is answering more of the question before the customer ever reaches a website. That changes what local SEO has to look like."
What San Antonio Businesses Should Do
The full report, available at https://www.southtowndesigns.com/state-of-local-search-in-san-antonio/, outlines five practical adjustments local businesses can make in response to these trends. They include tightening Google Business Profile data so AI Overviews surface accurate business information, restructuring website content around questions customers actually ask rather than keyword phrases alone, adding schema markup to help AI systems correctly identify services and service areas, building citations across data aggregators that feed both Google and AI training data, and tracking visibility in AI search platforms separately from traditional rankings.
Michael noted that the businesses most at risk are those that have invested heavily in ranking for high-volume commercial keywords without diversifying into local profile optimization, review acquisition, and direct traffic channels.
About Southtown Designs
Southtown Web Design & Digital Marketing is a San Antonio-based web design and digital marketing agency founded in 2015. The firm specializes in WordPress development, local SEO, and Google Ads management for local service businesses, law firms, government organizations, and small to mid-sized companies across Texas.
Methodology
Search volume and trend data were pulled from the DataForSEO Labs API, an industry-standard keyword research database. Year-over-year comparisons reflect search volume changes between April 2025 and April 2026 in Google's U.S. search index. Keywords were selected based on representative service categories for the San Antonio metropolitan market. Full methodology is available in the published report.
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Media Contact:
Michael Lorenzana, Founder
Southtown Web Design & Digital Marketing
8530 Village Dr., San Antonio, TX 78232
(210) 373-3237
michael@southtowndesigns.com
https://www.southtowndesigns.com
