Two Different Games
Home care search breaks into two distinct types of query, and Google treats them differently.
Transactional queries — the ones where a family is ready to call — still show the standard local pack and organic results. Google AI Overview does not appear when someone types "home care agencies in Tampa." The Map Pack does. Those three agency names do.
Informational queries — the ones where a family is trying to understand what they are looking for — are where AI Overview dominates. "What is companion care." "How much does in-home care cost." "What questions should I ask a home care agency." On those queries, 67% of the time, Google now answers the question before the family clicks anything.
The implication: the research phase of the buying process is increasingly happening inside Google's AI, not on individual websites. Families are arriving at transactional searches already informed — and they formed their impressions somewhere.
What Gets Cited in AI Answers
AI Overview does not randomly select its sources. It pulls from pages that already rank well organically for the query.
An agency that ranks on page one for an informational query has a reasonable probability of having its content contribute to the AI Overview for that query. An agency on page three does not.
This means the path to AI visibility is not separate from the path to organic visibility. It is the same path. Build pages that answer specific questions well enough to rank on page one. Those pages feed the AI answers that families see before they ever click.
Directories Are Winning Right Now
Our broader AI study found that across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, and Claude, directories appear in AI answers 4 times more often than individual agency websites.
This is not surprising. Directories have deep, structured content about many agencies. AI models find them easy to summarize and cite.
For most agencies, the near-term play is not to out-publish the directories. It is to appear prominently within them — complete, accurate, and with enough reviews to stand out when a directory listing is surfaced in an AI answer.
The longer-term play is to build the kind of content directories cannot replicate: specific, local, first-person, authoritative answers that reflect actual experience in your market.
What This Means for an Agency Owner
The 37% number is not a warning that AI is taking over home care search. Transactional searches — the ones that end in phone calls — still work the same way. The Map Pack still determines who gets called.
The 37% is a signal about what is happening upstream. Families are arriving at those transactional searches pre-informed. They already have a rough understanding of cost, of what to expect, of what questions to ask. That understanding was shaped somewhere.
If your agency has content that contributes to those informational searches — a page that actually answers "how much does home care cost in [your city]," a page that explains what companion care is and who it serves — you are shaping that understanding. If you do not, someone else is.
The Feedback Loop
Good organic ranking leads to AI Overview visibility. AI Overview visibility increases awareness among families in the research phase. Families who encounter a brand during research are more likely to search for it specifically when they are ready to act — which improves local pack performance.
The agencies that will benefit from AI search growth are not the ones trying to hack AI prompts. They are the ones that have built enough real content authority in their market that the AI has something credible to surface.
That authority starts with the same things it always has: complete profiles, consistent reviews, and pages that actually answer the questions families are typing.
Source: HCB AI Search Visibility Study — 54 keywords tested across 4 AI platforms, 2026. For a full breakdown of how to optimize for both local search and AI visibility, see Google Local SEO for Home Care or our AI Marketing for Home Care service.