Local Services Ads Start Billing for Missed Calls, Google’s Fourth Spam Update of the Year, and a Four-Day Deadline on Your Business Listing
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Here’s what happened last week in SEO, AEO, GEO, and social, and what it means if you run a law firm or a local service business in the US.
Google Ads and Local Services Ads
Starting October 1, Google will bill you for some calls nobody answers. Local Services Ads advertisers will be charged for missed calls received during business hours when the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds and for qualifying follow-up calls from the same caller that come after an unbillable first call (PPC Land). If your phone system routes callers through a menu, the 20-second clock only starts once they press a key, so an IVR system effectively buys you a filter that a direct ring-through line doesn’t have. Google says “a few exceptions,” and future spam and robocall safeguards are coming, without a mechanism, timeline, or appeal process attached to either.
Key takeaway: before October 1, pull your LSA call log and see how many business-hour calls currently go unanswered. If the number is meaningful, decide who covers the phone during the day and set up call forwarding or an answering service for the calls nobody can pick up.
Local Services Ads are also getting bigger, at least in testing. Anthony Higman, founder of Adsquire, posted screenshots of an expanded LSA format with a larger image and a more prominent highlight box beneath the main listing (Search Engine Land). There’s no confirmed rollout date, but a visually larger unit above your organic listing pushes everything below it further down the screen regardless.
Paid search costs keep climbing generally. The Content Marketing Institute reports PPC costs have risen more than 25% since 2023 (Content Marketing Institute). One marketer cut keywords that drove traffic but not buyers and shifted spend toward active-shopping-stage searches, producing a 50% increase in leads alongside a 24% cost reduction with no added budget.
Your Google Business Profile
Anyone can now suggest an edit to your Google listing, and Google gives you four days to say no. If you don’t respond, Google may publish the change automatically when your own website appears to support it, and some edits go live with no notification at all (Search Engine Roundtable). Turn on notifications, check your edit history weekly, and reject anything your own site doesn’t confirm.
Review activity is getting its own alert too. Google is emailing owners a notice titled “Protecting your Business Profile from Spam Reviews,” which also pauses new reviews temporarily while it investigates (Search Engine Roundtable). Owners who first posted it noted it’s landed on newly opened locations, so check your inbox before assuming customers went quiet.
SEO and Search Console
Google’s fourth spam update of the year began rolling out globally September 24 and can take up to two weeks (Search Engine Land). Wait for the rollout to finish before comparing rankings.
Search Console gained a multimodal search filter September 24, covering Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome’s “search this image,” showing impressions and clicks by page, country, and device, with no query-level data (Search Engine Journal).
AI Search and Visibility
A 28-day study from Detailed (an Ahrefs company) tracked 1,300+ prompts daily across ChatGPT and AI Overviews, collecting 70,000+ responses (Detailed). Leading brands appeared 82-89% of the days, but identical full brand lists repeated on only 0.3-1.1% of random day pairs. More strikingly, 36% of apparent brand drop-offs on ChatGPT were the same business reappearing under a slightly different name, a real risk if your listings aren’t name-consistent.
Peec AI data shows external links inside AI Overview answer text rising to 26.2% by September 20, though some underlined text now opens AI Mode instead of a website (Search Engine Journal).
Website and Content for AI
Whitespark’s Darren Shaw and Duda’s Russ Jeffery detailed what local AI visibility requires: crawler access (Cloudflare often blocks AI crawlers by default), server-rendered HTML (most AI systems don’t run JavaScript), and cleaning up orphaned old pages with stale phone numbers (Search Engine Journal). Shaw’s core advice: Write proof as plain text with your business name attached (“Johnson Plumbing is rated 5.0 across 500 reviews”), since a review widget is invisible to a language model.
Facebook is capping free link posts at two per month for some Pages before requiring a Meta One subscription (Social Media Today). LinkedIn is testing a Network tab showing only posts from your connections (Social Media Today). California signed SB 1050 requiring disclosure on ads using AI-generated performers (Governor of California).
AI Models and Cost
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at roughly 20% below its flagship’s price, and OpenAI released cheaper GPT-6 Sol and Luna models (Manila Times).
The AI Traffic Story Worth a Second Look
A widely circulated claim that AI Overviews are killing law firm traffic doesn’t hold up: a Great Jakes review of a year of client data found AI referrals averaging just 0.47% of sessions, while Google still delivers roughly 48% and LinkedIn generates 187% more sessions than all AI engines combined (LawFuel). Firms cited inside AI Overviews did see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks, so check your own Search Console generative AI data rather than borrowing someone else’s number.
Prompt of the Week
Darren Shaw’s Ask Maps prompt turns competitors’ one-star reviews into page copy. Adapted for a law firm or home service business:
“For [practice area or trade] businesses in [city, state], analyze their Google reviews and list the most common complaints found in the negative ones. Group the complaints into themes and rank them by how often they appear. For each theme, draft one sentence a business could put on its service page that directly answers the complaint with a specific commitment, and flag any commitment that a team of [number] people might struggle to actually deliver.
