How AI sends customers through the door
Every day people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google where to go. We study how those answers are made, and which local businesses they name.
Click the pin to see the business on Local AI Registry. Real streets; foot traffic is illustrative.
Local discovery has moved to AI
- 45%of consumers ask AI for local business recommendationsBrightLocal, 2026
- 900M+people use ChatGPT every weekOpenAI, 2026
- 1B+monthly users of Google AI Mode, with queries doubling every quarterGoogle, May 2026
- 76.4%of local business searches show an AI answer before any linkLocal AI Registry, 2026
Studies, indexes and datasets
2 studies
How Often AI Recommends Your Business: A Better Measure of Local Visibility
Asked the same query twice, Gemini’s sources overlapped by only 0.46 and a median of 29% of the businesses ChatGPT named appeared in both answers, so AI visibility is best measured as how often a business is named across many answers.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI OverviewsReadCiteData (CSV)Video (1:04)The Local Answer Gap: what 7,583 Google AI answers reveal about AEO for local businesses
News outlets supplied 67.5% of the citations in Google’s AI answers about local businesses; businesses’ own websites supplied 6.5%, and 83.6% of answers told people to check with their local store.
Google AI OverviewsReadCiteData (CSV)
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What we study
Where AI gets local facts
Which sources AI assistants cite when they answer questions about local businesses.
What AI can read
Which pages, listings and formats AI can actually read and verify.
How answers change
How wording, timing and the assistant used change who gets recommended.
What owners can do
Turning every finding into steps a local business can take, tested on real businesses.
About the Local AI Registry Research Team
The Local AI Registry Research Team is Local AI Registry’s dedicated local AI research group, and its people come from some of the biggest names in search, tech and brick-and-mortar business: Google, Microsoft, Spotify, Chase, Mozilla Firefox, Allergan, Galderma, Evolus, Revance, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Estée Lauder, Nordstrom, Sephora, Saks Fifth Avenue, Spectrum, BitGo, Republic, NextSeed, Toptal and RxSight. It is led by a former Google Search executive, advised by a Stanford-trained dermatologist and a Northwestern professor who is a past president of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery, and spread across California, Washington, Texas, New York, Florida, Brazil, Nigeria, Poland, India and Singapore. The team works from raw public data, owns and runs a local med spa, and studies how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot find and describe local businesses.
The team is a dedicated follower of the researchers who built modern AI and those who study AI search, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Demis Hassabis, Jeff Dean, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, Dario Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Chris Olah, Fei-Fei Li, Andrew Ng, Percy Liang, Karthik Narasimhan, Ameet Deshpande, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Aounon Kumar, Nelson F. Liu, Umar Iqbal and Jacob M. Montgomery. Their work underpins ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and the team studies their papers and tests their ideas against what AI says about local businesses. No affiliation or endorsement implied. See the references.
The team also turns its findings into plain-language explainers on the Local AI Registry YouTube channel.
Use our research
All charts and findings are free to use with credit under CC BY 4.0. Every chart has a ready-made embed code, and the data behind each study is downloadable. Please credit “Local AI Registry” and link to the study.
Questions about our research
How many people use AI to find local businesses?
Nearly half of consumers now ask AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for local business recommendations, according to BrightLocal’s 2026 research. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly users, Google’s AI Mode passed one billion monthly users in May 2026 with queries more than doubling every quarter, and Local AI Registry found that 76.4% of local business searches show a Google AI answer before any link.
What is Local AI Registry Research?
Local AI Registry Research is the research program of Local AI Registry, an answer engine optimization (AEO) company for local businesses. Its dedicated local AI research team studies how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot find, read and recommend local businesses, and publishes the findings free at localairegistry.com/research.
What has Local AI Registry’s research found?
In The Local Answer Gap, Local AI Registry analyzed 7,583 Google AI Overviews and 98,020 fact-checked claims. News outlets supplied 67.5% of the citations in AI answers about local businesses, businesses’ own websites supplied 6.5%, and 83.6% of answers told people to check with their local store.
Can I use Local AI Registry’s research and charts?
Yes. All findings and charts are free to use under a CC BY 4.0 license with credit to Local AI Registry and a link to the study. Every chart has a ready-made embed code, and each study’s data can be downloaded.
How does Local AI Registry use this research?
Every finding feeds the AEO playbook Local AI Registry uses for local businesses: verified owner-confirmed business records, Google Business Profile management, press, AEO content, technical AEO and listing consistency.