Gemini swapped law firm websites for a map pack

The short answer: between August 15 and August 18, 2026, the Gemini app stopped citing law firm websites in its answers to local lawyer questions and started showing a map pack instead: a row of Google Maps listings with a star rating and a category, inside the answer. Before the switch, 95 percent of Gemini's answers to the questions New Yorkers type when they need a lawyer carried at least one website citation. By August 18 it was 22 percent, and 82 percent carried a map pack. Firms are still named in the written answer. What changed is the thing the reader can click.

How we noticed

We were checking a different story. On August 20, Axios and Forbes reported that Reddit's share of ChatGPT search citations had collapsed by about 86 percent since August 8. In our legal answers, Reddit never mattered: about 1 percent of ChatGPT's citations all July, then zero since August 12, on counts small enough that a chart would flatter the noise. Where AI citations for lawyers actually come from is its own explainer. But the same audit showed Gemini's daily citation count had fallen by roughly 90 percent the same week, and the reason was not Reddit.

What the daily samples show

We ask the three engines the same set of New York lawyer questions every day and keep every answer, about 50 per engine per day. For each Gemini answer we record two separate facts: did it carry at least one website citation, and did it carry a map pack. Here is the share of each day's answers with either, from August 4 to August 21.

What a Gemini map pack is

Gemini now grounds local-intent questions in Google Maps. Each listing in the pack shows the business name, its Maps star rating, and its category, such as "Personal injury attorney". The firms in the pack are Maps listings, the same entries a client would see searching Google Maps for a lawyer nearby. Gemini then writes its usual paragraph or two under the pack, and that paragraph still recommends firms by name. We count a named recommendation in the prose as a recommendation, exactly as before. We count a map pack listing as what it is, a maps ranking, and report it separately: ChatGPT started attaching a map pack to lawyer questions in July, and we made that call then.

The difference is what disappeared. ChatGPT's map pack sits alongside its website citations: in the same August 18 to 21 window, 111 of 113 ChatGPT answers with a map pack also cited at least one website. Google's AI Overviews behave the same way, 106 of 117. Gemini's pack replaced the citations. When Gemini shows a map pack, the link under the answer points at a firm's Google Maps listing, and almost never at its website.

What this means for your firm

• Your website is still the source on two of three engines.ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews cite law firm websites at the same rate they did in July. Nothing about this change touches them.
• On Gemini, the surface under a local lawyer answer is now your Maps listing. Name, star rating, category. Which firms make the pack is Google's choice, and we have not measured what moves it; we can only report whether your firm appears, and how often. Anyone who tells you they know the lever this week is guessing.
• Being named still works the old way. Gemini's written recommendation under the pack is built the way it was before, leaning toward established brands. A firm can be named in the prose and absent from the pack, or the reverse. They are two different facts about the same answer, and we report both.
• Date every claim. This happened in three days, with no announcement, and ChatGPT's map pack has come and gone on individual questions since July. As of August 21 the pack is on about 80 percent of Gemini's local lawyer answers. Whether it stays is Google's call, so we measure it daily, per engine, and report the map pack and the written recommendation as separate numbers.

Usual caveats: one metro, consumer Gemini as a client would use it (not the API), a two and a half week window, and a pack parser we wrote on August 21 and checked against every one of the 595 pack listings in the window. Answers from August 15 onward were re-read with that parser; the zero before it is a true zero, confirmed by scanning the raw answers for the pack's markup.