I checked 30 local businesses to see if AI recommends them. Most scored 0%.

2026-05-31 · 3 min read

Your customers stopped Googling. A growing share now ask an AI assistant — "who's the best dentist / med spa / roofer near me?" — and get back a short list of specific business names. We wanted to know how often local businesses actually make that list.

So we ran the real buying-intent questions a customer would ask across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude against 30+ local businesses in dental, med spa, real estate and law. The results were brutal.

Most scored 0%

The large majority were never named once — a 0% Share-of-Model. A handful of the same competitors got recommended over and over; everyone else was invisible. A few scored ~4% (named in roughly one of twenty-five questions) — technically present, practically absent.

What separated the visible from the invisible

The businesses that did get named shared a pattern: deep, recent reviews and a presence in third-party "best [category] in [city]" roundups. The invisible ones often had polished websites and decent Google rankings — which the AI mostly ignored.

That's the uncomfortable takeaway: traditional SEO is not AI visibility. They're different games, won with different signals.

Why it's an opportunity

Because almost no local businesses optimize for AI answers yet, the cost to become "the named one" is low right now — and it compounds. The first movers in each city and category are quietly locking in the recommendation.