Data report · refreshed continuously
The State of AI Search for Local Business
Before customers call anyone, they ask an AI assistant who’s best. We ran the questions they ask, unprimed, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and recorded who those assistants actually recommend. This is what 1,739 leaderboards across 21 local-service trades and 40 U.S. cities reveal about how AI picks winners, and how open those answers still are.
Dataset window June 18, 2026 – August 10, 2026
Finding 01
AI answers are wide open. Nobody owns them.
In an average market, the single most-recommended business captured only 24% of all AI mentions. The assistants spread recommendations across roughly 10businesses per question set. Unlike Google’s map pack, there is no entrenched “#1” — which means the answers are still winnable.
Finding 02
AI recommends local, not national.
Of the 9,888 distinct businesses the assistants named, 90%appeared in only one city’s answers. National chains show up, but they don’t dominate — a strong local reputation still beats brand recognition in AI recommendations.
- 01Orkin824 mentions
- 02Terminix765 mentions
- 03Two Men and a Truck701 mentions
- 04The Cleaning Authority690 mentions
- 05Roto-Rooter Plumbing & Water Cleanup455 mentions
- 06H&R Block346 mentions
- 07Two Maids & A Mop301 mentions
- 08A1 Garage Door Service272 mentions
Finding 03
Some trades are locked up. Others are up for grabs.
“Leader share” is how much of a market’s AI mentions its top business captures. Higher share means AI concentrates on a clear favorite; lower share means the field is fragmented and open. Here’s where each end of the spectrum sits.
- Chiropractors31% leader share
- Locksmiths29% leader share
- Dentists28% leader share
- Moving Companies26% leader share
- Real Estate Agents26% leader share
- Landscapers21% leader share
- Auto Repair Shops21% leader share
- Salons & Barbershops21% leader share
- Gyms & Fitness Studios22% leader share
- HVAC Companies22% leader share
Methodology
How we measured this
- Real answers, not surveys. Every figure is computed from 1,739 stored leaderboards in our production database — the same pipeline that powers the free scan. Nothing here is estimated or illustrative.
- Unprimed prompting. Each of 5 real buyer questions per market (e.g. “best plumber in ___”) was asked across 2 assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity— without naming any business, so results reflect what the models recommend on their own. That’s 17,390 individual answers parsed.
- Coverage. 21 local-service trades across 40 U.S. cities, refreshed on a rolling basis. As the corpus grows, these numbers update automatically.
- Limits we’re honest about. Mention counts are aggregated across the 2 assistants, so this report does not break out per-engine visibility. Business names come from model output and are normalized but not manually deduplicated, so distinct-business counts are a close estimate, not an audited registry.
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