The data

The shift is already here. Most businesses just cannot see it yet.

Buyers already ask AI who to call

  • 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to find a local business in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier. Source: BrightLocal, 2026.
  • Among 30 to 44 year olds who are in-market buyers for auto, restoration, and body work, 64% are now using AI-powered search. Source: BrightLocal, 2026.
  • 70% of consumers say they have increased their use of AI for search this past year; only 3% decreased it. Source: Fractl x Search Engine Land, 2026.
  • Every month, roughly 1 billion people use ChatGPT and over 2 billion see Google's AI answers. Sources: OpenAI, Feb 2026; Alphabet Q4 2025.

Most local businesses are invisible to it

  • Across 350,000+ business locations, ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses. The other 98.8% are invisible when a customer asks. Source: SOCi, 2026.
  • 77% of businesses ranking on Google's first page do not appear in ChatGPT at all. Source: Omni Eclipse, 2026.
  • Across 6.8 million AI citations, 86% came from brand-managed sources: first-party websites and business listings. Source: Yext, 2026.

Generic GEO advice treats all businesses the same. We ran the actual numbers, and that advice is wrong for the work we do.

In our testing, ChatGPT built local answers mostly from companies' own websites and trusted directories, and cited Reddit essentially zero times, even though it searched Reddit constantly.

Gemini behaved differently, citing Reddit in more than half its answers. Same question, different engine, different source mix.

How we work

High-level on purpose. The exact method is ours.

  • We break each buyer question into the sub-questions the AI actually searches, sector by sector.
  • We separate what AI truly relies on from what it merely glances at.
  • We build for long-term presence, not a one-week win. AI recommendations rotate 40 to 60 percent month to month. Source: Semrush / BrightEdge, 2026.
  • We do not fabricate. Every number we show you is a real, repeated measurement.

The science says it works.

The foundational study, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," Aggarwal et al., Princeton and Georgia Tech, KDD 2024, found the right strategies can boost visibility in AI answers by up to 40%, with lower-ranked, smaller businesses benefiting the most.

Book an intro