Google's March Update Rewards Brands in Local Search

The aggregator era in local search just took a significant hit. Google’s March 2026 core update reshuffled visibility in ways that should have every multi-location brand and neighbourhood-level business paying close attention — because the winners weren’t who the conventional wisdom predicted.

Aggregators Lost. Brands and Governments Won.

Search Engine Journal’s analysis of the March core update reveals a clear directional signal: YouTube, Reddit, and major aggregator platforms lost measurable US search visibility in its wake, while brand-owned domains and government sites gained ground. This isn’t a minor algorithmic tweak — it’s Google continuing to pull back from the “best of the web aggregated in one place” model that dominated the 2010s.

For local SEO, the implication is direct. If you’ve been relying on your Shopee store listing, your Agoda property page, or your Grab merchant profile as your primary search presence, that strategy just got riskier. Aggregators serve a purpose, but they are not a substitute for owning your own entity signals in Google’s index. The brands gaining visibility here have one thing in common: Google can identify them as a coherent, authoritative entity — not just a listing inside someone else’s platform.

What “Entity Authority” Actually Means at Street Level

Locally, entity authority comes down to a few concrete building blocks. Your Google Business Profile needs to be treated as a live product, not a set-and-forget registration. That means consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data across every directory and platform, a steady cadence of Google Posts, and — critically — review velocity that signals an active business to Google’s local ranking systems.

Beyond GBP, structured data markup on your own domain (specifically LocalBusiness schema) helps Google connect your website to your physical presence. For multi-location brands in Southeast Asia, this becomes a translation challenge: you’re often managing separate entities across Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, each with their own language variants and address formats. A single schema implementation that doesn’t account for language and locale specificity will underperform against a locally-tuned competitor every time.

The March update’s reward for brand sites suggests Google is increasingly weighting owned digital presence over third-party representation. That’s a meaningful shift for any brand that has over-indexed on marketplace visibility at the expense of its own domain authority.

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AI Search Revenue Is Growing — and That Changes the Local Equation

Here’s the part most local SEO conversations are missing. Alphabet’s Q1 2026 earnings showed search ad revenue growing, with AI-integrated search surfaces contributing to that growth — even as Google’s Network revenue (ads served on third-party sites) declined to $6.97 billion, a continuation of a multi-quarter trend reported by Search Engine Journal. Microsoft showed a comparable pattern with Bing’s AI integration.

What this signals for local search specifically: AI-generated answers are increasingly appearing for queries that used to resolve cleanly to a local pack or map result. “Best ramen near Asok,” “dermatologist open Saturday in Poblacion,” “car service KL Sentral” — these are exactly the high-intent local queries that AI overviews are beginning to intercept before a user ever reaches the map pack.

For brands optimising local presence, AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is no longer a future consideration. It’s a present one. Your GBP attributes, your FAQ content, your service-area pages — all of it is now potential source material for AI-generated local answers. The brands that structure their local content for machine comprehension, not just human readability, will show up in these surfaces. The ones that don’t will find their map pack traffic quietly eroding without a clean explanation in their analytics.

The Practical Response for Southeast Asian Brands

Three things warrant immediate attention for any brand competing in local search across SEA right now.

First, audit your aggregator dependency. Run a visibility analysis across your key local keywords and identify what percentage of your search real estate is owned by you versus third-party platforms. If Lazada, Agoda, or a local directory ranks higher than your own domain for your brand’s core service terms, you have a structural risk that the March update made more visible.

Second, build out location-specific content on your own domain. Not thin city pages with swapped-out place names — actual content that reflects local context, local customer questions, and local service specifics. Google’s quality signals for the March update heavily favoured depth and specificity over scale. A well-crafted Kuala Lumpur service page with genuine local detail will outperform ten generic location templates.

Third, start treating your GBP as an AEO asset. Add specific service descriptions, use Q&A to pre-populate the questions AI systems will likely surface, and ensure your business attributes are complete and accurate. In a world where AI search revenue is growing and AI answers are intercepting local queries, your GBP data is increasingly the raw material for how your business gets described without your input.

Proximity was always a ranking factor in local search. What’s changed is that proximity alone — even paired with a strong aggregator listing — is no longer enough. Google is asking a harder question now: is this a real, coherent, authoritative brand that I can confidently surface to my users? The March update made clear what the answer needs to look like.

As AI search surfaces continue to mature, the interesting strategic question isn’t whether local SEO still matters — it clearly does. It’s whether the signals that define a trustworthy local entity in Google’s eyes are the same ones that will determine visibility in AI-mediated answers. And if they’re not identical, which ones do you optimise for first?

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At grzzly, we work with brands across Southeast Asia on exactly this challenge — untangling aggregator dependency, building entity authority at the location level, and preparing local search infrastructure for AI-era visibility. If your local search presence feels like it’s built on rented land, we should talk. Let’s talk