Field notes

I asked AI about local businesses. Owners should see the answers

Jeff R. Turner July 6, 2026 6 min
  • AI search
  • Local business

I have spent the last few months asking AI engines the questions your customers ask. Best plumber near this town. An orthopedic surgeon who does this specific procedure. A lawyer who handles this specific kind of case. Hundreds of prompts, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers, Claude, and Gemini.

The pattern is consistent, and if you own a business, it should get your attention: the engines confidently name two or three businesses, describe them in detail, and never mention everyone else. There is no page two.

Do customers really search this way now?

Yes, and the numbers are not subtle. ChatGPT alone has 900 million weekly users, per OpenAI’s February 2026 announcement. BrightEdge reports 48% of Google searches now show an AI-generated answer at the top. And when that answer appears, Pew Research found people click traditional links roughly half as often, 8% of the time versus 15% without one.

Put those together: the question your customer used to type into a search box, then evaluate ten blue links for, is increasingly answered for them, in a paragraph, with names in it. Either your name is in the paragraph or it is not.

Why does AI recommend one business over another?

Because one business is legible to the machine and the other is not. When an AI engine assembles an answer, it leans on what it can read and verify: a website that answers questions in plain language instead of describing itself in adjectives, consistent information across directories, third-party mentions it can cite, reviews with real detail in them.

What it does not do is reward the things owners assume matter. Being the oldest firm in town, the biggest, the best regarded at the chamber. The machine cannot see reputation. It can only see evidence. Plenty of excellent businesses are invisible in AI answers, and their thinner competitors get named, purely on legibility.

The other thing I see constantly: the engines get things wrong. Old hours. Services a business stopped offering years ago. In a few cases, a competitor’s strengths attributed to someone else. Nobody at these companies knew, because nobody had ever asked the machine about themselves.

What questions should you ask about your own business?

Open any AI assistant and ask it what your customers would ask. Not your company name. The buying questions:

  • “Who is the best [what you do] near [your town]?”
  • “I need [the specific, high-value thing you do]. Who should I call?”
  • “Is [your business name] any good? What do they specialize in?”

Note three things: whether you are named, what is said about you, and who gets named instead. Then ask the same questions in a second engine, because the answers differ more than you would expect.

What do you do if you’re invisible?

First, do not panic-buy anything. The gap is fixable, and the race is genuinely open, because almost nobody in most local markets is running it yet. The broad moves: rewrite your key pages as answers to real questions rather than descriptions of yourself, get your information consistent everywhere it appears, and earn a few mentions the engines can cite.

The specific moves depend on what the engines currently believe about you, and that is worth knowing precisely rather than guessing. We run a free visibility scan that shows you exactly what the major engines say about your business, screenshots included. No score theater, just the answers your customers are already seeing.

Request the free scan, or if you have already seen the answers and want the fix plan, book a call.