Your Google listing is being seen about as often as it was a year ago. Fewer people are ringing you from it. Website clicks from it are down as well. And yet requests for directions to your door have jumped by more than a fifth.
That is not a ranking problem. It is a change in how people behave, and it means the number sitting at the top of your monthly report may be measuring the wrong thing. Four more stories follow, including new sales figures every dealer in the country should read.
Search and SEO
Calls fell almost twelve percent while direction requests rose twenty one
GMBapi published second quarter Google Business Profile data on 31 August, measured year on year across the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom. In the US, calls fell 11.9 percent and website clicks fell 12.5 percent. Direction requests rose 21.1 percent. Desktop Maps impressions swung from a 17.9 percent fall in the first quarter to a 3.2 percent rise in the second, and mobile Maps impressions rose 30.4 percent. Mobile search impressions fell 20.1 percent, enough on its own to cancel out the other gains.
Why this matters for your business: people are completing the whole journey inside Google Maps rather than starting on a results page and clicking through to you. If your reporting leads with call volume you are describing a shrinking slice of a growing pie. Give direction requests equal weight from this month. Then make your opening hours, address, categories and photos accurate, because the businesses with the most complete profile data are capturing more of what is left.
The people who called it a collapse have corrected themselves
In April the same team stood on a conference stage and said local SEO was dying, on the strength of first quarter figures showing actions and impressions down by roughly half. They have now rechecked. The revised first quarter numbers show calls and website clicks each down 15.8 percent, not fifty, with direction requests up 31.3 percent. They published the correction next to the new quarter instead of quietly swapping out the old chart.
Why this matters for your business: treat any single quarter of platform data as provisional, particularly when it arrives with a headline attached. Anyone who moved budget out of local search in April on the strength of that first reading spent money against a number that turned out to be wrong. Ask whoever reports to you what their figures looked like three months after they first published them.
You can now switch your whole site out of Google’s AI answers
Google finished rolling out two Search Console features to every site worldwide on 31 August. The first is the generative AI performance report, which shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover, broken down by page, country, device and date. The second is the Search generative AI control, a domain level toggle that removes your site from all three of those surfaces. Google says the toggle is not used as a ranking signal in ordinary search. There is still no click data in the report, and no way to opt out one page at a time before March 2027.
Why this matters for your business: open the report before you go anywhere near the toggle. For most South African businesses, appearing inside an AI answer is free visibility with your name attached, and switching it off removes that without sending the traffic back to your website. Check the report weekly all the same. It is the only place Google will tell you whether its AI layer knows you exist.
Social and Paid
Meta took the off switch out of your ad sets
Advertisers began reporting on 25 August that the placement exclusion controls had vanished from Meta Ads Manager. You can no longer stop an ad set from running on a given placement or platform. Meta points you instead at value rules, which cut a bid for a placement, a device or a mobile operating system. That cut is capped at 90 percent. Meta has published no announcement about the removal. We flagged this direction on 27 August when Messenger Stories was retired as a placement, and it has now turned up in live accounts.
Why this matters for your business: you can make a placement expensive but you can no longer switch it off, so a placement that has never converted for you will still take a share of your budget. Audit every active campaign that relied on manual placement selection and rebuild the intent with value rules. Then read the placement breakdown weekly for a month rather than monthly, because the spend will move before your reporting catches it.
Automotive
New vehicle sales rose 11.4 percent in August
naamsa reported 57,898 new vehicles sold in August, an 11.4 percent improvement on August 2025 and a step up on July. Passenger cars led with 41,216 units, up 11.6 percent, and light commercials rose 11 percent to 13,727. Exports went the other way, down 11.9 percent to 35,091 units. Toyota led the brands on 13,814, then Suzuki on 6,505 and the Volkswagen Group on 5,668. naamsa credited headline inflation easing to 4.3 percent in July and the Reserve Bank holding the repo rate at 7 percent, with prime at 10.50 percent.
Why this matters for your dealership: demand is holding and affordability is stable, so the limit on your month is unlikely to be the market. It is more likely to be whether shoppers can find you. Read that against the local search figures at the top of this brief. Direction requests are climbing while calls fall, which means more buyers are arriving unannounced and fewer are ringing ahead. Check that your service hours, your after hours contact number and your used stock pages are correct on every rooftop profile you run.
What to do this week
- Add direction requests to your monthly report and stop judging local performance on call volume alone.
- Open the generative AI performance report in Search Console before you consider the opt out toggle.
- Audit any Meta campaign that used manual placement exclusions and rebuild the intent with value rules.
- Check hours, categories and photos on every Google Business Profile location you run.
- Leave your old outbound links alone. John Mueller confirmed on 31 August that Google does not penalise you when a site you linked to years ago changes hands and turns shady.
If you would like us to look at any of this with you, get in touch and we will start with what your Business Profile data is actually telling you.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, calls and clicks keep falling as Google Maps becomes the destination
- Search Engine Land, Search Console AI performance reports rolling out globally
- Search Engine Roundtable, global Search Console AI report and AI control
- PPC Land, Meta removes ad placement controls as bid cuts get capped at 90 percent
- Jon Loomer, Meta is removing placement controls from ad sets
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google does not penalise old outbound links with shady content
- TimesLIVE, South Africa’s best selling car brands in August
- naamsa press releases