Data report · updated as new leaderboards land
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 and Gemini, and recorded who those assistants actually recommend. This is what 840 leaderboards covering 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 to October 8, 2026
Finding 01
AI answers are wide open. Nobody owns them.
In an average market, the single most-recommended business captured only 25% of all AI mentions. The assistants spread recommendations across roughly 9 businesses 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 15,347 distinct businesses the assistants named, 89% 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.
- 01Two Men and a Truck1,545 mentions
- 02Orkin1,354 mentions
- 03Terminix1,308 mentions
- 04The Cleaning Authority1,118 mentions
- 05H&R Block789 mentions
- 06Roto-Rooter Plumbing & Water Cleanup781 mentions
- 07A1 Garage Door Service688 mentions
- 08All My Sons Moving & Storage655 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.
- Locksmiths32% leader share
- Chiropractors31% leader share
- Real Estate Agents28% leader share
- Dentists28% leader share
- Moving Companies26% leader share
- Salons & Barbershops20% leader share
- Landscapers21% leader share
- Gyms & Fitness Studios21% leader share
- Lawyers22% leader share
- Auto Repair Shops22% leader share
Companion report: where AI gets these answers →
Finding 04
The answers don’t hold still.
Every market gets re-measured. Comparing each market’s first leaderboard to its latest (840 markets, an average of 89 days apart), only 51% of top-3 businesses kept their spot, and 55% of markets had a different #1. Cuts both ways: being named today isn’t a durable asset, and most markets crowned a new leader within weeks, so the answers are still winnable.
Methodology
How we measured this
- Real answers, not surveys. Every figure is computed from 3,981 stored measurements of 840 leaderboards in our production database. 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 and Gemini, without naming any business, so results reflect what the models recommend on their own. That is 39,810 recorded answers. Claude and Perplexity are not in this corpus; your own free scan adds both.
- Coverage. 21 local-service trades across 40 U.S. cities. Markets are re-measured on a rolling cycle rather than all at once, so every leaderboard page carries the date it was last measured, and these numbers update as the corpus grows.
- Stability. The churn figures compare each market’s earliest and latest leaderboards, at least 28 days apart, matching business names with token-boundary-aware fuzzy matching so spelling variants count as retained (churn is understated, never inflated). Some volatility reflects the assistants’ own answer-to-answer variation rather than a change in what they read. We report it anyway, because it is exactly what a buyer asking today versus next month would see.
- 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.
Is AI recommending you?
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