Everything in this post comes from research someone else published this year, and we link to all of it. BrightLocal surveyed 1,002 US adults for the 2026 edition of their Local Consumer Review Survey. The AI visibility numbers come from SOCi's Local Visibility Index. We didn't run these studies. We just think every practice owner should see what's in them.
6% to 45%, in one year
BrightLocal asked consumers whether they use ChatGPT or similar tools to get local business recommendations. In 2025, 6% said yes. This year it's 45%. Nothing in local search has ever grown that fast. Not social, not even Google in its early years. The patient who used to type "dentist near me" and squint at a results page is now asking a chatbot a full question and getting back two or three names, with reasons attached.
If you've been treating this as a novelty, you have maybe a year of that luxury left. The good news is that most of your competitors are still asleep on it.
Winning Google no longer means the AI names you
You'd assume whoever ranks first on Google gets named by the AI too. Apparently not. SOCi found that fewer than half of the businesses leading Google's local results show up in AI recommendations at all, and they put AI visibility at roughly 30 times harder to earn than a spot in the local pack. The models pull from everywhere at once. Your Business Profile, your reviews, the directories you forgot existed, your website. They recommend whoever they can describe without guessing.
Which means an old address in some directory you haven't touched since 2019 is now arguing with your Google profile, in front of a machine that notices everything.
The bar has a number on it
SOCi also looked at the ratings of the businesses these tools actually recommend. The averages came out to 4.3 stars on ChatGPT, 4.1 on Perplexity, and 3.9 on Gemini. Treat those as cutoffs rather than trivia. A practice sitting at 3.8 isn't slightly behind one at 4.4. On some platforms it might as well not exist.
And averages move slowly. If you're under the line, the time to start collecting reviews was last year. The second best time is this week.
Reviews got more important, not less
The same survey found that 97% of people read reviews before choosing a local business, and 41% now say they always do, up from 29% a year ago. Google slipped from 83% to 71% as the go-to review platform, and the average person checks six different platforms before deciding. Somewhere along the way, reviews stopped being a Google project. They're what the models read when they decide how to describe you.
The AI doesn't browse. It reads everything you've let go stale, all at once.
What we'd do this week
Ask two of the assistants about your practice by name and write down everything they get wrong. Each mistake traces back to a source you can fix. Check your rating against that 4.1 line on the platforms that matter to you. Then pick the three directories you haven't logged into since you opened and make them agree with your Google profile. None of it is glamorous work. All of it is measurable, which is how we like our marketing.