Voice Search SEO Trends Nashville Companies Should Watch

The voice search trends worth watching are changes in the tools around it, not a new kind of optimization. Google announced in March 2025 that it was replacing its voice assistant on phones with its generative AI assistant, Gemini. The structured data that older voice search advice relied on has been retired or narrowed. And voice queries still cannot be separated out in Search Console. What has not changed is the part a business controls: the hours, address, and answers a spoken question relies on.

Trend 1: assistants are becoming generative AI assistants

On March 14, 2025, Google announced that it was “upgrading more users on mobile devices from Google Assistant to Gemini,” and that “the classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores.” The same announcement said Google was “bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs.”

For a business, that means a spoken question to Google on an upgraded device goes to an AI assistant that composes its answer. How Google’s AI features choose and present information is covered by its guidance on AI features in Search, which says “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” The practical preparation for voice and for AI answers is the same: be findable, be accurate, and answer questions clearly.

Trend 2: the markup voice advice relied on is gone or narrow

Older voice search guides recommended structured data that no longer does what they promised:

• How-to rich results were retired. Google’s 2023 announcement said that “as of September 13, Google Search no longer shows How-to rich results on desktop, which means this result type is now deprecated.”
• FAQ rich results have ended. Google’s Search Central updates record that the FAQ rich result “will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026.”
• Speakable markup is still in beta and limited. Google’s speakable documentation says “the speakable property works for users in the U.S. that have Google Home devices set to English, and publishers that publish content in English.”

A question-and-answer section on a page can still be useful to readers. It no longer earns a special search display through FAQ markup, so write it for the reader and not for a result type.

Trend 3: voice is still not measurable on its own

Search Console does not report voice queries separately. Its performance report groups data by query, page, country, device, search appearance, and date, and its search type filter covers web, image, video, and news. There is no voice dimension, so the report gives no way to tell a spoken query from a typed one.

That makes claims about “voice traffic” growth hard to check. Treat any report of voice-driven results with caution, including one that counts long, question-shaped queries as voice by assumption. What you can measure is whether question queries that match your services appear in Search Console, and whether your Business Profile records call-button clicks and direction requests.

What a spoken “open now” depends on

Spoken questions about a local business include questions about the next hour: is it open, how do I get there, who nearby does this. The answer can only be as good as the business information the assistant finds. For a Nashville business, the risky weeks are the ones when its hours change. If you open late during CMA Fest, which the festival site currently lists for June 10 to 13, 2027, or close for a holiday, Google’s guidelines for representing your business allow special hours “for particular days, like holidays or special events.” Setting them is what keeps a spoken answer right that week. The same applies to your address and map pin, which decide where spoken directions lead.

What to do now

• Keep hours, special hours, and address accurate on your Business Profile, and update them before each holiday or event week rather than after.
• Put answers first on the pages that get the most customer questions: the question as a heading, the answer in the first sentence beneath it.
• Retire FAQ and how-to markup as a voice strategy, since those rich results are gone, and do not make speakable markup its foundation either: it remains a limited beta that Google documents for answering topical news queries on Assistant-enabled smart speakers, not a general local-business voice tactic.
• Check Search Console’s question queries each quarter, since they record the questions that already reach your site.