- 45% of US consumers used generative AI tools for local recommendations in BrightLocal's 2026 survey, up from 6% in 2025.
- AI answers name very few businesses, so clear and consistent information matters.
- GEO, AEO, and AI SEO are names for the same job. Google says no special optimization is needed beyond good SEO.
- Nobody can guarantee placement. What helps is specifics, consistent listings, recent reviews, and mentions on other sites.
- Google Search is still where most local searches start, so treat this as an addition to SEO, not a replacement.
More customers are asking an AI tool who to hire. You can't buy your way into those answers, and nobody can promise you a spot. You can make your business easier for these tools to find, understand, and trust. Here is what we know and what to do.
What changed
In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, 45% said they use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.
AI answers are also more selective than a page of search results. SOCi studied more than 350,000 locations of multi-location brands and found that ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of them, against a 35.9% appearance rate in Google's local 3-Pack. That study looked at chains, not independent businesses, but the pattern is the point: a few names get mentioned.
Some perspective, though. In another BrightLocal study, 52% of consumers started their most recent local search on Google Search and 8% started with an AI tool. So this is something to add to your search work, not a reason to drop it.
GEO, AEO, AI SEO: one job, three names
You'll see this work sold as generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), or AI SEO. They are names for the same goal: getting AI tools to find, understand, and mention your business. The term GEO comes from a 2023 research paper, and the labels have multiplied since.
Google's own position is blunt. Its documentation says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. A guide it published in 2026 adds that, from Google's side, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO. So be wary of anyone selling GEO as a separate, secret discipline.
How AI tools decide who to name
They don't publish their rules, and anyone who claims to know them exactly is guessing. What we can observe is that they draw on the same public information search engines use: your website, your business listings, your reviews, and what other sites say about you. An AI tool can only repeat what it can read.
We now have a better picture of which sources they read. In 2026 BrightLocal tracked nearly 2 million citations in local AI answers from ChatGPT and Google's AI features. Google Business Profile was the most-cited single source, at more than a quarter of all citations, and Yelp appeared as a source in 80% of ChatGPT's answers. A companion study found that 42% of citations pointed to businesses' own websites.
The same study found the answers aren't stable. When a search was repeated, only 20% to 33% of the businesses named were the same. That's one more reason to distrust anyone who promises a spot.
Eight things that improve your odds
- Say plainly what you do, where, and for whom. In text on your site, not inside images. "Emergency plumbing in Tulsa and Broken Arrow" beats "Quality you can trust."
- Publish specifics. Services, service areas, and hours.
- Answer real questions. Add a short FAQ to each service page, written the way a customer would ask.
- Make your details identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, and hours should match on Google, Yelp, Bing, Apple, and the directories for your industry. Claim your Yelp page even if you never look at it.
- Earn recent reviews and reply to them. In BrightLocal's survey, 74% of consumers look for reviews written in the last three months.
- Get mentioned on other sites. Your chamber of commerce, industry directories, supplier pages, and local news all act as confirmation.
- Add structured data. It's code on your site that states your business type, services, and hours in a form machines read directly. Google says it isn't required for its AI answers, and that it has to match what's visible on the page. It still removes guesswork.
- Don't block the crawlers. OpenAI recommends allowing its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, in your site's robots.txt file. Most small business sites allow it by default. Ask whoever built yours.
How to check where you stand
Write down five questions a customer might ask, such as "who's a good family dentist in Raleigh, North Carolina?" Ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google. Note who gets named and what's said about you.
Repeat it monthly. Answers vary from person to person and day to day, so look at the trend across several questions, not at any single result.
What to avoid
- Anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers.
- Stuffing pages with keywords or filler. It makes you less clear, not more.
- Special files or markup sold as an AI fix. Google says you don't need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in its AI features.
- Fake reviews. They put your Google profile at risk, and they're banned by an FTC rule.
Sources
- BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults)
- SOCi, Local Visibility Index 2026 (350,000+ locations of 2,751 multi-location brands)
- BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026 (1,227 US consumers)
- Google Search Central, "AI features and your website"
- Google Search Central, "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search," 2026
- BrightLocal, top sources and directories for local AI search, August 2026 (1,355 locations)
- BrightLocal, study of 200,085 local AI searches, September 2026
- OpenAI, overview of OpenAI crawlers
- Aggarwal and others, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," 2023
