AI Search Is Rewriting Local SEO Rules in Southeast Asia

Local search used to be simple: get your Google Business Profile right, build citations, earn reviews, show up in the three-pack. Proximity was a moat. Now, with Gemini folded into Search, Android, Chrome, and Workspace — and 750 million monthly active users generating AI-powered answers before anyone clicks anything — the local SEO playbook is getting a serious rewrite.

Google Zero Is Real, But Pichai Is Half Right

When Sundar Pichai told investors that zero-click concerns are overblown because Google is filtering out “low-quality clicks,” he wasn’t wrong — but he was conveniently incomplete. Search Engine Journal reports that Pichai’s framing positions AI Overviews as a quality filter rather than a traffic drain. For brand marketers managing awareness campaigns, that spin offers cold comfort.

For local search, though, the dynamic is genuinely different. A user asking Gemini “best mookata near Asok at 10pm” isn’t going to be satisfied with an AI summary — they need a name, an address, and ideally a phone number. The intent is transactional and hyper-specific. Gemini has to resolve it to a real-world entity. That means local businesses with strong, structured, verified presence still have meaningful leverage — but only if they’ve built the data infrastructure that AI can actually pull from confidently. A patchy GBP with inconsistent NAP data across Wongnai, Grab Food, and Google is now a liability, not just a missed opportunity.

What the Gemini Citation List Tells Local Strategists

Ahrefs’ June 2026 analysis of the 50 most-cited domains in Gemini is a useful proxy for understanding what AI search trusts. Unsurprisingly, the list skews heavily toward authoritative publishers with structured content, clear entity signals, and high editorial standards. What’s instructive for local and regional brands isn’t who made the list — it’s the underlying logic of why they made it.

Gemini cites sources it can verify and attribute. For local businesses, that means the citation-building discipline that used to serve directory rankings now directly feeds AI answer eligibility. In Southeast Asian markets, this creates a specific challenge: platform fragmentation. A restaurant in Jakarta might be listed accurately on GoFood but have outdated hours on Google and no presence on Zomato. Gemini, pulling from multiple data points to construct a confident answer, will either surface a competitor with cleaner data or hedge with vague language — neither outcome helps you.

The tactical implication: treat your cross-platform listing consistency as an AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) problem, not just a local SEO hygiene issue. Audit your entity footprint across every platform your Southeast Asian customers actually use — and that list includes LINE, Grab, Shopee Food, and Klook, not just Google.

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Merchant Center’s AI Report Changes the Ecommerce-Local Equation

SEMrush reports that Google is adding an AI performance insights report to Merchant Center — giving ecommerce brands visibility into how their products appear across AI-powered shopping experiences. This is significant for any brand that straddles physical retail and online commerce, which in Southeast Asia is most serious consumer brands.

The practical implication: AI shopping surfaces are becoming a distinct performance channel, and they have their own optimisation logic. Product data quality — titles, descriptions, attributes, pricing accuracy, image resolution — now directly influences AI answer eligibility, not just Shopping tab rankings. A brand with 200 SKUs and inconsistent product feed hygiene is going to appear less frequently in Gemini shopping answers than a competitor with 50 SKUs and immaculate data.

For brands with physical stores in markets like Thailand or Vietnam, where the path to purchase often starts on mobile and ends in-store, this creates a new attribution gap. Your AI shopping performance report might look flat even as it’s driving footfall. Getting ahead of this means building UTM and offline conversion tracking before the report rolls out broadly — not after you’re trying to explain a budget discrepancy to a CFO.

Building Local Authority That AI Search Can Actually Use

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about AI search and local SEO: the brands that will maintain visibility aren’t necessarily those who understand Gemini’s algorithm. They’re the ones who’ve done the unglamorous work of entity disambiguation — making sure Google, and every AI trained on web data, knows unambiguously who they are, where they are, and what they’re known for.

In practical terms for a Southeast Asian brand: that means a verified and regularly updated Google Business Profile with posts, photos, and Q&A actively managed. It means consistent citations across regional platforms. It means structured schema markup on your website that explicitly declares your business category, service area, and operating hours in a machine-readable format. And increasingly, it means earning mentions in publications that AI systems cite — regional business media, local lifestyle platforms, and niche vertical sites that Gemini treats as credible sources.

Proximity is still a strategy. But now it has to be a documented strategy — one that AI systems can find, verify, and confidently recommend.

Key Takeaways

• Audit your entity footprint across all Southeast Asian platforms your customers use — inconsistent NAP data is now an AEO liability, not just an SEO inconvenience.
• Treat Gemini citation logic as your new backlink strategy: earn mentions from regionally authoritative sources with clear editorial standards.
• Set up offline conversion tracking before Google’s AI Merchant Center report rolls out widely — the attribution gap between AI shopping surfaces and in-store traffic will otherwise be invisible.

The deeper question worth sitting with: if AI search increasingly rewards verified, structured, entity-clear brands, does that mean local SEO is converging with brand strategy? And if so, which team in your organisation actually owns that problem?

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At grzzly, we work with Southeast Asian brands navigating exactly this shift — from traditional local pack optimisation to building the kind of structured, AI-legible presence that performs across Search, Gemini, and regional platforms simultaneously. If your local search strategy was built for 2023, it probably needs a rethink. Let’s talk