What AI search actually changes for a local business

Every few years something arrives that is supposed to end search marketing. This time it is assistants: people asking ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead of typing into a search box and working through the results themselves. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 US adults in February 2026, about half used AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024, and about four in ten used them to search for information.¹ The reaction splits neatly into two camps, the businesses convinced everything they have built is about to stop working, and the ones certain nothing has changed. Both are wrong in useful ways.

The part that has genuinely changed

The shortlist is now being drawn up somewhere you cannot see. When somebody searched for a plumber in their area, they saw a page of options and made their own choice. When they ask an assistant, they get three names and a sentence about each. You are either in that answer or you are not, and there is no second page to be on.

The same thing is happening inside Google. A separate Pew study tracked the Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025: on pages with an AI summary, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% on pages without one.² Fewer people work through the list themselves.

The questions have changed shape too. Nobody types "emergency plumber SE15" at an assistant. They ask something closer to how they would ask a friend: a boiler making a noise, on a Sunday, and can anyone come out today. That is a longer, messier question with far more detail in it, which means the answer can be far more specific about who fits.

And the answer gets assembled from sources the assistant already trusts. Your website is one of them. Your Google Business Profile is another. So are directories, local press, review sites, forum threads, and whatever your customers have written about you in places you have never looked at. Google's AI Mode draws on the Knowledge Graph and information about the real world as well as web pages,³ and OpenAI says ChatGPT works with third-party providers for local information such as nearby business listings, without naming them.⁴ I have set out how that assembly appears to work in more detail.

The part that has not

What makes a business worth recommending is exactly what it always was. Assistants are pattern-matching against the same signals people use: does this business do the specific thing being asked about, is it near enough, is it open, do other people rate it, and is there enough consistent information to be confident it exists as described. Those map closely onto relevance, distance and prominence, the three factors Google uses to rank local results.⁵

That last point is the one businesses underestimate. An assistant with conflicting information about you will usually just recommend somebody else. It has no incentive to work out which of your three listed phone numbers is the current one.

Most of the work of getting recommended by an assistant is the unglamorous work of being described consistently everywhere you appear.

What I would actually do about it

1. 01Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, and write down what comes back. You cannot improve a position you have never measured. Do it monthly, with the same questions each time.
2. 02Find out where the answers come from. Assistants often cite: Claude includes citations in every web search response,⁶ and Copilot lists hyperlinked citations below answers grounded in the web.⁷ When they name a directory or a review site you are missing from, that is your next job, and it is a concrete one.
3. 03Make your pages answerable. A page that states plainly what you do, where you do it, what it costs, and how quickly you can get there is easy to quote. A page of atmosphere is not.
4. 04Get your details identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services. Any disagreement between sources is a reason to leave you out.
5. 05Keep asking for reviews, and keep replying to them. More reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking on Google,⁵ and reviews are one of the few places where your customers describe your business in their own words, which happens to be the vocabulary people use when they ask.

What I would not bother with yet

Rewriting your whole site into a question-and-answer format because somebody said assistants prefer it. Buying a tool whose main output is a score with no method behind it. Paying for placement in a directory nobody has heard of on the argument that AI reads everything. These are the three pitches I hear most often and I would decline all of them.

The honest summary

If you have been doing local search properly, you are already most of the way there. The additions are a measurement habit, some attention to how quotable your pages are, and a stricter approach to consistency than you probably had before.

If you have not been doing local search properly, the assistants have simply made the gap more expensive. Being fourth used to mean fewer clicks. Now it can mean not being mentioned at all. If you want to work out which of those two you are, the first five things I check in an audit are a reasonable place to start.