AI never names
6 in 7 local businesses

When someone asks an AI assistant for the best dentist, plumber or injury lawyer in town, a short list of names comes back. We wanted to know how many local businesses make those lists, and what the ones that do have in common.

We scanned 25 markets: dentists, personal injury lawyers, plumbers, roofers and med spas in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix. In each one we asked the four leading AI assistants the questions people typically ask when they look for that kind of business, and checked every answer against the businesses in Google's local listings for that industry in that city.

1. Most local businesses are invisible to AI. 5,721 of 6,682 businesses (85.6%) were not named once. No market came in under 80%; New York's personal injury lawyers reached 95.6%.
2. Strong reviews help, but they are no guarantee. The share of businesses AI names rises with the number of Google reviews, yet 47% of businesses with more than 1,000 reviews were never named. The star rating made almost no difference.
3. Without a website, a business is almost never named. 4.4% of businesses without a website were named, against 17.5% of those with one.
4. The assistants rarely agree. Of the businesses AI recommended, 70.7% were named by only one of the four assistants. Only 4% were named by all four.
5. A few businesses take a large share. In a typical market, five businesses received a third of all recommendations.
6. AI reads lists more than websites. More than half of the pages AI cited were lists, articles and other third-party pages; only one in five was a business's own website.

Across the 25 markets, 85.6% of the listed businesses we checked were never recommended by any of the four assistants. The typical (median) market came in at 83.6%. The narrowest gap was among Chicago roofers, where 80.4% went unnamed; the widest among New York personal injury lawyers, where 95.6% did, so only about 1 in 23 firms was named.

The pattern holds across industries and cities. Personal injury law is the hardest industry to break into (89.8% never named), and New York (88.9%) and Houston (87.1%) are the hardest cities, the two largest markets in the study by number of businesses.

Reviews matter: the more Google reviews a business has, the more likely AI is to name it. Only 5% of businesses with no reviews were named, against 53.1% of those with more than 1,000. But the link is weaker than most owners would expect. Even in the top group, 47% of businesses were never named, and across all markets the rank correlation between a business's review count and how often AI named it was 0.30 (0 would mean no link, 1 a perfect one).

The gap is just as visible at the top of each market. Of the ten businesses with the most Google reviews in each market, an average of 4 were never named (median 4, from 0 to 9). In 9 of the 25 markets, at least half of the ten most-reviewed businesses were missing from every answer. The business AI recommended most often was not necessarily the best reviewed: across the markets, AI's top pick had anywhere from 69 to 11,845 reviews.

Across the 25 markets the four assistants recommended 1,971 different businesses between them. Most were a single assistant's pick: 70.7% were named by only one of the four, and only 4% by all four. Being recommended by ChatGPT says little about being recommended by Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, so a business, or the agency working for it, has to look at each assistant separately.

The assistants cite the pages they used. Yelp was the most cited site, in one answer in five, followed by local "best of" lists such as Trustanalytica and BestInHood, Reddit and the Better Business Bureau. Some of the most cited sites serve one industry only (TopRatedDentist, Super Lawyers), which puts them high in the overall list on the strength of a single industry.