How to Be the Business AI Recommends
Something shifted this year in how people find local businesses, and it moved fast enough that most owners haven’t heard about it yet. That’s usually good news for whoever hears about it first.
Here’s a small experiment worth doing. Open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend a business like yours in your city. A good acupuncturist in Portland. A reliable electrician in Tulsa. Whatever describes what you do.
See what comes back. Either way it’s worth knowing, and if your name isn’t in the answer, you’re in very good company.
Why It Matters
Think about what happens in each case.
Someone searches Google for an acupuncturist in your city. They get a map with three businesses, ten links underneath, a couple of ads, maybe a directory page listing forty practitioners. There’s room in that result for you to be the second choice, or the fourth, or the one they scroll down to because your photo looked friendly.
Someone asks ChatGPT the same question and gets two names. Sometimes three. They call one of them.
A search engine hands people a page of choices. An assistant hands them a name.
Being at the top of Google Maps and being named by an assistant turn out to be two fairly separate achievements. That’s new this year, and it means there’s a second place to show up that most businesses haven’t thought about yet.
Tomorrow’s forecast, in your inbox.
One email. Five minutes. Written for owners, not engineers.
How Far Along This Already Is
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found the share of consumers who’ve used AI to find a local business went from 6% to 45% in a single year. Worth being precise: that’s people who’ve done it at least once in the past twelve months, not the share of every local search. But moving from one in sixteen to nearly one in two inside a year is the kind of shift that tends to keep going.
Now the encouraging half. SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index looked at nearly 350,000 business locations across 2,751 brands, asked the assistants for local recommendations, and counted who got named.
ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of those locations. Gemini managed 11%, Perplexity 7.4%. The same businesses appeared in Google’s local three-pack 35.9% of the time.
Read that as a scoreboard and it looks discouraging. Read it as a map and it’s the opposite. Almost the entire field is standing outside a door nobody has walked through, and the people who go first tend to stay in the room a while.
One honest note before we go further. SOCi studied multi-location brands, not independent single-location businesses. Your clinic wasn’t in that sample. The direction very likely holds for you, but that’s an inference on my part, and you should know it.
What Seems to Decide It
The reassuring part is that the deciding factors are things you already control, and none of them require an agency.
Brands showing up nowhere in AI recommendations shared a profile: ratings around 3.4 stars and review response rates under 5%. The ones doing well had the reverse. Liberty Tax improved its profile coverage, ratings, and data accuracy and ended up recommended 19.2% of the time on Gemini and 26.9% on Perplexity, well above its category average. Culver’s reached 30% on ChatGPT and 45.8% on Gemini on the strength of strong ratings and complete listings.
There’s a plain accuracy story underneath it too. SOCi found business profile information was only about 68% correct on ChatGPT and Perplexity, against 100% on Gemini, which reads straight from Google Maps. A fair number of these recommendations are running on old hours and disconnected phone numbers, which means accurate information is worth more right now than it will be later.
I want to be careful here, because this is where a lot of coverage of this study overreaches. Nothing in it shows that your website, your content, or your links stopped mattering — these systems draw from many places, and your broader web presence still feeds what they know about you. What the data does suggest is that reputation signals, profile completeness, review quality, and consistent business information carry more weight than most owners would guess.
Who Should Pay Attention
This is most useful if your customers are local and choosing from a short list. Clinics, dentists, trades, restaurants, salons, law and accounting practices — anyone whose next customer is deciding between a couple of names.
It’s less pressing if your work comes entirely by referral, though a referred customer usually looks you up before calling, and increasingly that lookup is a question rather than a search.
The Owner’s Forecast
Within two years, “how do we show up when someone asks an assistant?” becomes a normal thing owners bring to whoever handles their marketing. Most agencies won’t have a great answer at first, because the answer is unglamorous and lives in a Google Business Profile rather than in a strategy deck. Owners who worked it out themselves early will be ahead of their own advisors for a while, which doesn’t happen often.
I’ve marked this moderate rather than high on purpose. The behavior shift is well documented and moving quickly. The visibility numbers come from one study of multi-location brands, and these systems change how they source local recommendations often enough that today’s percentages will look different by winter. I’m confident about the direction and the mechanism, less so about the decimal places.
The part I’d bet on: whoever tidies up the basics early tends to hold the position. These systems favor businesses with consistent information and a steady history of reviews, and that’s not something a competitor can put together over a weekend.
Your Next Move
None of this costs money. It costs one focused hour, and it’s an hour with an unusually good return right now.
Good. Run the experiment properly. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to recommend a business in your category and city, phrased three or four different ways, the way a real customer would say it. Write down what comes back. Ten minutes, and you’ll know where you stand.
Better. Open your Google Business Profile and finish it. Every field, correct hours, current phone, real photos, a full list of services described in the words customers actually use. This is the source these systems lean on hardest, and most profiles are two-thirds empty — which is exactly why finishing yours goes a long way.
Best. Build your rating past 4.0 and start answering reviews, all of them, briefly, including the good ones. Then make your name, address, and phone number identical everywhere they appear: Google, Yelp, your own website, the directory you forgot you were listed in. Consistency is what gives an assistant enough confidence to say your name out loud.
If you do one thing this week, do the first. Knowing where you actually stand is worth more than any advice I can give you about it.
Today’s Instrument
None today.
Everything above is free and takes an hour. There’s a small industry forming around selling “AI visibility” services, and some of it will be worth paying for eventually — but not before you’ve done the hour yourself and know what’s actually missing.
Tomorrow: the review request that actually gets answered, and when to send it.
Owners Are Asking
Does this mean SEO is dead?
No, and be wary of anyone who tells you it is. Google is still where most local searching happens, and the same things that make you visible there — a complete profile, good reviews, accurate information — are what these assistants read. You’re reaching a second audience with the same work.
How long until I show up after fixing things?
Nobody can tell you honestly. These systems refresh what they know on their own schedule, and reviews arrive at whatever pace your customers leave them. Think in months rather than days, and treat it as upkeep rather than a project with a finish line.
Should I hire someone for “AI visibility”?
Not yet. The work that matters right now is your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and consistent information. That’s an afternoon of your own attention, and you’ll judge an agency’s pitch far better once you’ve seen your own results firsthand.
I asked ChatGPT and it named a business that closed. What does that mean?
It means the underlying information is stale, which is common — profile accuracy on ChatGPT was measured around 68%. It also means that position is available, because whoever is sitting in it isn’t defending it.
Sources: SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index (350,000+ locations across 2,751 brands) · BrightLocal, 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey