Local AI search · Original data
How does ChatGPT recommend businesses
It does not rank you against your competitors. There is no list of local businesses inside ChatGPT with you somewhere on it, waiting to move up.
What happens is simpler and stranger. When somebody asks where to go, the model searches, opens a handful of pages, and writes an answer out of what those pages say. The businesses named in the answer are the businesses named on the pages. That is close to the whole mechanism.
Which means your competitors have not beaten you at anything, they were simply present in the material the model happened to read.
We tested how much that differs from Google, because most advice assumes the two work alike. On five local searches in Miami we pulled the live Google top ten and compared it against the sources ChatGPT used for the same question. Twelve of 55 sources overlapped, which is twenty two percent. Whatever earns a place in Google on these questions is mostly not what the model ends up reading.
The sharpest example came from a bakery search. One business sits second in Google for "best bakery in Brickell Miami". Another sits fourth. Across eight phrasings of that question, ChatGPT named neither of them once.
Three things decide whether you get named, in order of how much they matter.
The first is whether somebody else has written about you. City magazines, review platforms and local round-ups supply most of what the model reads. One mention in a guide outweighs a year of your own blog, because the model reads it as outside opinion rather than your own marketing.
The second is how the question is asked. Broad questions pull in directories and lists, and the same four or five big names repeat. Narrow questions, the kind that mention one specific service or one street, reach further down and are far likelier to surface a smaller business.
The third is whether the model can reach your site at all when it tries. The crawler is called OAI-SearchBot. If your robots.txt blocks it, or your security layer treats it as a bot attack, you are invisible by accident.
None of this is permanent. We re-ran the same ten businesses two days apart and in the most changeable categories the results moved by up to two places out of ten, with the same businesses in the sample. The answers move because the pages behind them move, and that is the part you can actually work on.