BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published February 11, 2026, found that 45% of consumers had asked a generative AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year. BrightLocal puts the change in one sentence:
Use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations has grown rapidly, rising from 6% last year to 45%
Read that as self-reported survey behavior rather than measured sessions. Forty-five percent of people trying AI once does not mean 45% of service calls now start in a chatbot. It does mean a multi-location brand should be able to answer one question without guessing: when a homeowner asks ChatGPT who to call for a dead AC unit in Phoenix, does the right branch come back?
Across the Cheers panel, 28 days ending September 2, 2026, 119 home-services organizations, aggregate only, the median organization appeared in 27.4% of its tracked AI answers and was cited in 21.3%. The cuts by trade, engine, and prompt shape sit in AI visibility statistics, and the sampling rules are in the methodology.
Run the Cheers AI Visibility Grader if you want your own number instead of a panel median.
How consumers use AI to find local businesses
The age group with the highest reported use was 30 to 44, at 64%. That group includes many home-services buyers, but the survey does not show that every respondent replaced Google or received a single-business answer. The operating implications are covered in How Home Services Brands Get Recommended by AI.
Nobody publishes AI market share for local search specifically. What does get published is raw scale on both sides. Sam Altman put ChatGPT at 800 million weekly active users at OpenAI DevDay on October 6, 2025, roughly double the count reported in early 2025. Google's I/O 2026 Search post, published May 19, 2026, gave the other half:
Just one year after its debut, AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch.
Both counts cover homework, code, and recipes alongside anything local, so they set a ceiling and nothing more. Neither tells you what share of furnace calls began in a chatbot. For the broader channel analysis, read How AI Is Changing Local Search.
Audience scale
The channel got big fast
TechCrunch, October 2025: Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users. Weekly active users, all uses, not local search only.
| Measure | Early 2025 | Oct 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly active users | 400M | 800M |
What public sources can establish
OpenAI confirms that ChatGPT search can use third-party search providers, including Bing, and can cite web sources. It does not publish a fixed local-business sequence involving Google reviews, Foursquare, Yelp, BBB, directories, or the business website.
Separate local tests have observed some of those sources in particular answers. Treat the observations as examples to verify in your own market, not as ChatGPT's permanent retrieval architecture.
In March 2026, LocalFalcon analyzed 189,905 ChatGPT search results against local Google results and found 83% of restaurants completely invisible on ChatGPT, against 14% invisible on Google. Restaurants are a different category with different data sources, so treat that gap as a warning about how thin AI local coverage can get, not as your trade's number.
Google reviews remain useful customer evidence and part of Google's local ecosystem. Whether another AI product retrieves or cites that evidence is a separate measurement question.
What to inspect around AI recommendations
Each product can retrieve a different source mix, and no public source exposes a universal local recommendation formula. For the source-by-source breakdown, read What Sources Do ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity Use for Local Businesses?. The Reddit citation shift analysis adds a time-series view of how one major source can move across providers.
Review presence on relevant platforms. Review pages can appear in cited results and give customers first-hand context. Maintain legitimate profiles where customers in the category actually look, but do not assume that spreading reviews across four platforms will outperform a stronger profile on one.
Business-information accuracy. Compare the website, profiles, and directories for wrong phone numbers, old addresses, conflicting hours, or different service claims. Harmless formatting differences are less urgent than facts that could send a customer to the wrong place.
Structured data. Applicable JSON-LD can describe visible business facts in a machine-readable format. Google says structured data is not required for AI features, and no public source makes it a universal recommendation factor.
Useful owned pages. Service and location pages should answer real buyer questions and expose accurate business facts. A small website is not automatically ineligible, and publishing more pages does not guarantee a recommendation.
Third-party context. Yext analyzed more than 6.8 million citations across 1.6 million responses in October 2025 and found the engines disagree about what counts as a source: 52.15% of Gemini citations came from brand-owned websites, while 48.73% of ChatGPT citations came from third-party sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and MapQuest. Local reporting, trade associations, and customer discussions show up too. Track the sources in the answer you actually tested instead of treating any mention as a universal trust signal.
Next step
Is AI recommending your business?
Find out how visible you are across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
The trust factor
BrightLocal's AI trust research, published March 10, 2026, found that 63% of active AI users trust the recommendations they get, against 10% who say they distrust them. The Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 separately found that AI recommendations are trusted as much as traditional reviews by 42% of consumers.
Trust does not mean acceptance. BrightLocal is blunt about the checking that follows:
Most AI users are careful to fact-check sources, with 88% of AI users checking to see if a review is legitimate (51%) or to see the source (37%).
97% of AI users double-check AI recommendations against real reviews at least sometimes.
For many respondents, AI was one step in a broader decision process rather than the final word. A recommendation may lead to a source check, a review check, a website visit, or another search.
Measure both layers where they apply: whether the business appeared in the tested answer and whether the customer-facing sources were accurate and useful when respondents said they fact-checked.
What to do about it
Follow each review platform's policy. Google allows neutral review requests under its rules; Yelp prohibits businesses from asking customers for reviews. Maintain accurate profiles where customers use them, earn feedback according to each platform's policy, and do not create a multi-platform review footprint for an assumed AI benefit.
Audit public business facts. Search for the business across Bing, Foursquare, Yelp, BBB, and relevant directories. Fix wrong addresses, disconnected phone numbers, conflicting hours, inaccurate services, and old destination URLs. Harmless punctuation and address abbreviations are lower priority.
Use structured data where appropriate. LocalBusiness markup can describe services, service areas, hours, contact information, and verified profiles when those facts are visible on the page. Google does not require structured data for AI features.
Check the answers directly. Test the providers, prompts, and markets that matter. Save the answer, cited sources, competitors, and date so the team can distinguish an actual source problem from a one-off response.
Publish pages that earn their URL. A service or location page should answer a distinct buyer question with accurate local detail. Do not create one page per keyword variation or claim that more pages guarantee an AI recommendation.
Establish a baseline now
The useful reason to check now is measurement. A dated baseline lets the team compare future answers, cited sources, and competitors after it fixes a page, profile, directory record, or review workflow.
Do not turn the separate 6% and 45% survey findings into a single adoption curve. Do use the current evidence to justify monitoring the channel alongside Search, Maps, reviews, and booked demand.
Check where your business appears today with the free Cheers AI Visibility Score.
Sources
Every link below was opened and checked on September 2, 2026.
- Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. BrightLocal, February 2026.
- Nearly Half of Consumers are Asking AI for Business Recommendations. BrightLocal, March 2026.
- The AI Visibility Crisis: Why 83% of Restaurants Do Not Exist in ChatGPT. Local Falcon, March 2026.
- AI Visibility in 2025: How Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity Cite Brands. Yext, October 2025.
- Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users. TechCrunch, October 2025.
- A new era for AI in Search. Google, May 2026.
- Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google Search Central, last updated July 2026.
- AI local visibility is up to 30x harder than ranking in Google. Search Engine Land, January 2026.
- Cheers panel, 28 days ending September 2, 2026. 119 home-services organizations, aggregate only. Methodology.
Dylan Allen-Arnegård is the CEO of Cheers, the local search platform for service businesses.