Part 3 of our series on AI search. Part 2 covered B2B.
“What’s a good dentist near me?” “Who’s the best plumber in Coquitlam?” People used to type that into Google. Now a lot of them ask ChatGPT.
BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey found 45% of people now use AI tools to find local businesses. A year earlier, it was 6% (Emulent).
Here’s the problem. SOCi analyzed more than 350,000 business locations and found ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of them (Emulent). Insites studied 10,000 US local businesses: 41% are never recommended by ChatGPT, even when it knows they exist (Insites).
So AI knows who you are. It just doesn’t pick you. Why?
What decides it
Review volume, by a mile. In the Insites study, businesses recommended by both ChatGPT and Perplexity averaged 133 Google reviews. The ones AI ignored averaged 11. That’s a 12x gap (Insites).
And volume beats perfection. On their data, a business with 150 reviews at 4.2 stars is more likely to be recommended than one with 20 reviews at 4.9 (Insites). So stop worrying about the one 3-star review. Worry about the 50 happy customers who never left one.
A complete Google Business Profile. Businesses picked by both AI platforms had profiles that were 77.8% complete. The invisible ones: 31.5%. Showing up in Google’s Local Pack (the map with three businesses) made a business 3.5x more likely to be recommended (Insites).
Your website. Your own site was cited in 72% of AI answers about local businesses (Insites). It’s where AI goes to understand what you actually do, where, and for how much.
Consistent information. SOCi found that only 68% of the contact details ChatGPT and Perplexity show match the business’s Google profile (Emulent). Old address on Yelp, different phone number on Facebook: AI gets confused, and confused AI picks someone else.
What barely mattered: technical SEO perfection. Clean heading structure and passing every technical audit showed almost no link to AI recommendations in the Insites data (Insites). Still worth doing for Google. Just not where the AI gains are.
The local business plan
- This week: ask the AI. Type what your customers would: “best [your service] in [your city],” “[your service] near [your neighbourhood] open Saturday.” Try ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Are you named? Who is?
- Week 1: finish your Google Business Profile. Every field. Categories, hours (holiday hours too), services, service area, photos, attributes. If it’s 30% done, you’re in the invisible group.
- Starting now, forever: build a review habit. Ask every happy customer, every time. A text or email with a direct link right after the job works best. Answer every review, good or bad. One warning: Google has tightened its rules against bulk requests, incentives and coordinated campaigns (Insites). Don’t buy reviews, don’t offer discounts for them. Just ask, consistently.
- Week 2: make your info match everywhere. Same name, address, phone and hours on Google, your website, Yelp, Facebook, industry directories. Pick one version and fix the rest.
- Month 1: one page per service on your website. What you do, where, roughly what it costs, and the five questions people always ask you. Plain language. AI can only recommend you for things your site clearly says you do.
- Ongoing: keep Instagram for your community, not for AI. Facebook and Instagram are losing ground as AI sources, while Reddit stays strong. If people talk about your business there, read it and respond helpfully. Never post ads there.
If you only do two things from this list, do 2 and 3. Profile and reviews. That’s where the gap is.
The bottom line
For local businesses, AI visibility isn’t a technical project. It’s the stuff that was always good business: happy customers who say so publicly, a profile that’s complete, a website that clearly says what you do.
The difference is that it now decides whether you’re one of the two or three names AI gives, or not mentioned at all.
Next in the series: e-commerce, and why ChatGPT Shopping now runs on product feeds.
Curious what ChatGPT says when someone asks for a business like yours in your city? Get in touch and we’ll check it with you.
