Google's mobile Local Panel now displays its action buttons across two stacked rows instead of a single line, according to a screenshot-based observation published by Search Engine Roundtable.

The Local Panel — the knowledge card that surfaces for branded and local-business queries — typically exposes interactive controls pulled from a business's Google Business Profile: directions, call, website, save, share, and occasionally booking, ordering or review links. Splitting those affordances across two rows changes which buttons a user sees before scrolling.

What changed in the mobile layout

The new arrangement pushes the highest-intent actions — directions, call and website — onto the top row, while secondary controls (save, share, write a review, view photos) move to a second row underneath. The button block at the top of the card is now visibly taller, and the visible business description, hours, attributes and review snippets sit further down the fold.

For users, the change trades horizontal compactness for vertical depth. For businesses, it raises a practical question: which action still earns prime real estate, and which one just got demoted?

Which verticals feel the impact first

The shift touches every business that depends on a local card, but the ranking of intent differs by category:

• Restaurants and food ordering. Order, reservation and menu buttons compete with directions and call; placement in row one versus row two directly affects tap-through.
• Service businesses (plumbers, lawyers, clinics). Call and directions dominate conversions; a clean row-one placement preserves existing behavior, while a website button pushed to row two may see fewer clicks.
• Retail and appointment-based brands. Book, order and curbside links are high-value; their vertical position now determines visibility.
• Multi-location enterprises. Consistency of the Local Panel across hundreds of GBP listings becomes harder to audit when Google experiments with button ordering.

How this differs from prior Local Panel changes

Google has historically toggled between icon and label styles, swapped order buttons for reservation buttons, and added COVID-era attributes that later disappeared. Two-row layouts represent a more structural change than a styling refresh: the card now allocates more vertical space to affordances and less to textual content such as the business description and star rating snippet.

That reallocation matters because local SEO reporting has long treated the Local Panel as a fixed-height container where adding one element crowds out another. Two rows effectively expand that container's affordance region while shrinking the editorial region.

Confirmed versus speculative

The observation originates from a Search Engine Roundtable screenshot report. Google has not issued a public statement on the layout, and no announcement appears on the Google Business Profile help center or the Search Central blog. Treat the change as a confirmed UI observation on mobile and as unconfirmed at the desktop level, where the Local Panel already had room to display buttons more generously.

What to monitor next

Three signals will clarify whether the two-row layout is a permanent rollout, an A/B test, or a regional experiment:

1. Click distribution by button position. Google Business Profile call tracking, GBP website click logs and direction-request volume should show whether demoted buttons lose share to row-one buttons.
2. Coverage across device classes. Mobile-first indexing reports and Live Test tools can confirm whether the two-row rendering appears on Android Chrome, iOS Safari and desktop at parity.
3. Appearance in the Local Pack versus the Local Finder. The Local Pack (map plus three results) and the Local Finder (expanded list) draw from the same GBP data but render buttons differently; whether both adopt two rows will determine the breadth of impact.

If the layout stabilizes across devices, expect renewed attention to button-level conversion reporting from local SEO tools and a new round of GBP optimization advice focused on which actions deserve a website link, a booking partner or an attribute entry.