Research shows coffee shops not appearing in AI Overviews – BeanScene

A study in the United States (US) has found three out of four coffee shops aren’t appearing in Google’s AI Overview results, a search function now used by 2.5 billion people each year.

The research group extracted 926 coffee shops, cafés, and roasteries from the 10,000-business dataset within Local Falcon’s Restaurant AI Visibility Index. Of these venues, they found 77.2 per cent did not appear in Google’s AI answers, a huge increase compared to the reported 13.2 per cent that don’t appear on Google Maps.

Diving deeper into the data, researchers identified that chains were impacted more significantly. They are reported to miss out on being included in the results 95.7 per cent of the time, while independents were only missed 68.2 per cent of the time.

A strong Google review rating did nothing to improve a business’ chances of being included in AI Overviews. Venues with more than 1000 Google reviews had a higher chance of being missed compared with venues with fewer than 50.

However, star ratings did appear to increase the likelihood of being featured. Venues rated 4.0 to 4.4 were missing 87.6 per cent of the time, while those rated 4.5 and above came in at 61.6 per cent.

“Coffee has more to lose here than any category we looked at. These are businesses that turn up almost every time on Google Maps, that have spent years building their ratings, and then a customer asks AI where to get a good espresso and three in four of them aren’t in the answer,” says David Hunter, CEO of Local Falcon.

“The part that surprised me is that the chains are the ones getting cut out, which leaves the door open for independent roasters and cafés in a way it isn’t open on other platforms.”

While the data for this study is based on US venues, it is thought the same results could apply to coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. As more people turn to AI summary tools, the way in which customers find their next coffee hit may face significant change.