The words AI uses when it recommends a local business (2026 study)

Key findings

• Quality is the first reason given: 63% of the answers mention it, usually with a concrete detail (“high-quality ingredients”, “quality workmanship”).
• Reviews and ratings come second (58%): assistants quote star ratings and review counts, such as “over 1,000 five-star reviews”.
• Being a specialist matters (54%): assistants say what a business is best at, in a few words.
• Years in business are quoted in half the answers (51%): “since 1998”, “over 25 years”.
• Price is rarely a reason (17%), no more often than being family-run (17%).

What it means for a local business

1. Make quality visible as facts, not adjectives: the products you use, awards, photos of your work, on your website and your Google Business Profile.
2. Collect reviews continuously. AI assistants count them and quote them. Ask every happy customer.
3. Say what you specialise in, in the same words everywhere: website, Google profile, directories. An assistant repeats a specialty it finds in several places.
4. Show your founding year (“since 2009”) as text, where it can be read and quoted.
5. Don't build your description around price. It is seldom what an assistant uses to justify a recommendation.

More in our guide How a local business gets recommended by ChatGPT.

The assistants rarely agree

Two smaller tests run the same way point in the same direction: each assistant has its own list.

• “What's the best garage in Sion?” (30 September 2026): put to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the question gave 15 answers and 12 different garages. Not a single garage was named by all three.
• “Which tool checks whether AI recommends my business?” (2 October 2026): 6 questions of this kind, asked to the same three assistants, gave 18 answers naming 45 different tools (after merging duplicates and removing things that are not tools, such as review sites or forums). They seldom named the same ones. PickableAI was named in none of the 18 answers.

Being recommended by one assistant tells you little about the others: check all three. See How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business.

Method

• Answers: 136 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, with live web search, collected from 27 September to 2 October 2026 during PickableAI checks on 20 local businesses in 18 cities.
• Questions: the questions customers ask, such as “best barber in Manchester”, asked in English. All answers are in English.
• Counting: each theme has a list of keywords (examples in the table above). An answer counts once for a theme if it contains at least one of its keywords, matched automatically (regular expressions, no manual reading). Each share is the number of answers containing the theme divided by 136.
• Names: business names are not published. The answers name real businesses that did not ask to be part of a study.

Limits

• Small sample: 136 answers about 20 businesses. Read the figures as orders of magnitude, not precise rates.
• Keyword matching is crude: a sentence like “not the cheapest” counts for price; a synonym missing from our lists is not counted.
• English only: answers given in other languages may use other words.
• AI answers vary from one run to the next: repeating the study would give somewhat different figures.
• Not representative of every trade and every country.