Your Customers Are Asking AI About You. Here's What It Says.

A customer used to type "plumber near me" into Google, scan ten links and call two of them. More and more, they ask an assistant instead: "Who's a good plumber in my town who can come this week?" The assistant answers in a paragraph and names two or three businesses.

If you're one of the names, you get the call. If you're not, you never find out you were in the running.

How many customers are actually doing this?

More than most owners think. In BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of consumers said they use ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before. That made AI the third most-used source of business recommendations in the survey. ChatGPT was the most used, by 31% of consumers in the previous 12 months, followed by Google's AI Mode at 23%.

That doesn't mean Google search is going away. It means a growing share of first impressions now happen inside an answer you didn't write.

Where do AI answers about local businesses come from?

The assistant isn't guessing. It pulls from pages it can read and sources it trusts. BrightLocal analyzed 1.9 million citations in AI answers about local businesses across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. Business websites made up 42% of all citations. Google Business Profiles made up 28.5%, Yelp 9.5% and Facebook 2.2%.

So the two places you control most directly, your own website and your Google Business Profile, are also the two biggest sources.

There's a second signal: what the rest of the web says about you. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that how often a brand is mentioned across the web correlated far more strongly with appearing in Google's AI Overviews (0.664) than backlinks did (0.218). In a follow-up across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, YouTube mentions correlated most strongly of all. Correlation isn't proof of cause, but the direction is clear: assistants recommend businesses they keep seeing.

What does an assistant say when it can't read your site?

Usually, nothing about you. It recommends someone else whose details it could read, or it gives a generic answer ("look for licensed plumbers with good reviews") and the customer goes back to searching.

The most common reasons an assistant can't use your site are fixable:

• Your site blocks the crawlers. Some hosting and security services now do this by default: since July 2025, Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers on new domains unless the owner allows them. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Your details aren't machine-readable. Your name, address, phone, hours and services are written in a design, not marked up as structured data that software can read with certainty.
• Your answers aren't on the page. People ask assistants questions ("how much does a water heater replacement cost?"). If your site never answers the questions customers ask, there's nothing to quote.
• Your details don't match. A different phone number on your site, your Google profile and an old directory listing tells software it can't be sure which one is right.

Five things to check this week

1. Open your robots.txt (yourbusiness.com/robots.txt). If you see `Disallow: /` under GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, ask whoever runs your site whether that was on purpose.
2. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, then link to it from your contact page. It's the second-largest source of local AI citations in BrightLocal's study.
3. Add an FAQ page with the eight or ten questions customers actually ask you, each with a short, direct answer. Prices or price ranges, service area, timing and how to book matter most.
4. Use one phone number and one address everywhere: your site, your Google profile, Yelp, Facebook and any directory you're listed in.
5. Add structured data. A LocalBusiness block (schema.org) tells software your name, address, phone, hours and services with certainty. Many website builders have a setting or plugin for it. Some sites also add a short llms.txt file, a newer, optional plain-text summary proposed in 2024 for AI tools to read.

Check your own site in ten seconds

We built a free tool that runs these checks on your public website and gives you a score out of 100, with the fix for each one. It doesn't use AI to judge you; it's the same rule-based checks every time, so you can see your score move as you fix things.