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Your Google Business Listing May Now Show an AI-Written Summary Instead of Your Own Description

The Short Answer

Google is rolling out a change where a local business’s knowledge panel displays an “AI Overview” summary at the top, with a “Show more” button that opens an AI Mode-style chat for follow-up questions. It is still being tested, but it is part of a bigger shift: increasingly, an AI-written summary is the first thing a searcher sees about your business, not your own words.

What This Actually Looks Like

Instead of showing your business description as you wrote it, the updated panel displays an “AI Overview” label with a short AI-generated summary underneath. Tapping “Show more” opens an interactive chat interface where a searcher can ask follow-up questions about your business directly, rather than reading a static description.
The concern raised by the SEO reporter who first spotted this is a fair one: these summaries have been shown pulling from outdated information, in one documented case a business description that was several years old. Business owners no longer directly control how their profile is introduced in that first moment someone sees it.

Why This Should Sound Familiar

This is the same shift we have been tracking since AI Overviews started eating into regular search clicks: the AI answering the question is reading from somewhere, and what it reads from is still your website and your Business Profile. The businesses that show up accurately in an AI summary are the ones whose underlying information is accurate, current, and consistent everywhere Google can see it. The ones with a five-year-old website description are the ones getting misrepresented.

What You Can Still Control

  • Keep your website's About and service pages current and specific, since AI Overviews are shown pulling directly from actual site wording
  • Keep your Business Profile description, categories, and services accurate and current, since Google still reads directly from those fields
  • Make sure your hours, services, and service area say the exact same thing everywhere Google can see them, your website, your profile, and directory listings, since inconsistency is a common source of an outdated or wrong AI summary
  • Check what your own AI Overview currently says about your business every so often, the same way you would check your reviews

Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Not directly. This is a search results format Google controls at the platform level, not a setting inside your Business Profile.
Not necessarily. Google is still testing this rollout, and reporting suggests it may show alongside other panel information rather than fully replacing it everywhere.
Because the AI summary is shown to sometimes pull from outdated information, like an old website description. What you control, your website and your profile, is now the direct source material the AI reads from, not just something a human visitor reads separately.

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