Customers have moved. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT to find local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% the year before. The businesses have not moved with them, and how badly depends on the engine: SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of local brand locations, against 11% for Gemini and 7.4% for Perplexity. This post pulls together the largest public citation studies, millions of logged AI citations, to answer the question every contractor should be asking: when someone asks AI who to hire, who gets named, and why?
45%
of consumers used AI for local business recommendations in the past year (BrightLocal, 2026)
1.2%
of local brand locations ChatGPT recommended, versus 11% for Gemini (SOCi, 2026)
6.8M
AI citations analyzed in the largest public study of where answers come from (Yext, 2025)
How does AI decide which contractors to recommend?
For a local hiring question, the engine runs a live web search, retrieves a handful of pages it trusts, and writes an answer grounded in them. Ahrefs' 2025 study of 1.4 million prompts found that 88% of the URLs ChatGPT cites come from its general web-search retrieval rather than from its news, Reddit, YouTube, or academic sources. So every recommendation is really two decisions: which pages get retrieved, and which companies those pages support. A contractor can lose at either step: invisible to the retrieval, or present in the sources but not convincing enough to be named.
Which sources do the engines cite for local hiring questions?
Directories and review platforms dominate. Yext's October 2025 study of 6.8 million citations found that 48.73% of ChatGPT's citations point at third-party sites like Yelp and MapQuest, and for subjective questions like "best plumber near me" the directory share rises to 46.3%. Local Dominator's analysis of 267,280 citations from local-business campaigns puts names on that pattern: Yelp leads with 71,512 citations, then Google with 55,977, Reddit with 36,678, Facebook with 24,012, Angi with 17,360, and BBB with 10,713.
Your own website plays a different role. It rarely tops the citation counts, but it is the one source you fully control, and it is where the engines look for the specifics a recommendation needs: prices, service areas, license details, real project descriptions. The directories prove you exist; your pages give the answer its substance.
Do different engines recommend different companies?
Yes. Each engine keeps its own list, because each trusts different sources. Profound found Reddit made up about 46.7% of Perplexity's top cited domains on commercial queries in 2025, a share that had fallen to roughly 24% by January 2026. ChatGPT leans on general directories like Yelp (Yext), and Ahrefs found 88% of ChatGPT's cited URLs come from its general web-search retrieval rather than from news, Reddit, YouTube, or academic sources. Gemini and Google's AI Overviews draw on Google's local graph: Business Profiles, Maps, review volume. A company can be a fixture on one engine and absent from another for the same question, which is why checking a single engine tells you very little about your real coverage.
Who actually gets named, and who doesn't?
The 5W AI Visibility Index ran 320+ consumer-intent prompts across 10 US metros and six local-service categories, including plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, in early 2026. The finding: AI answers structurally favor national chains and platform aggregators like Yelp, Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor, while independent local operators are largely absent. Combine that with SOCi's 1.2% figure and the shape of the market is clear. AI search is a winner-take-most channel where a small set of well-evidenced companies absorbs the recommendations and everyone else goes unmentioned.
Why can't you just test yourself with one search?
Because AI answers are generated, not looked up. The same question, asked on the same engine an hour apart, can produce a different set of names in a different order. A single search that happens to include you is one draw from a distribution, not a standing. Visibility in this channel is a frequency, the share of repeated answers that name you, and it has to be measured per engine, because the engines disagree with each other about who to trust.
“One search proves nothing. Visibility in AI search is the share of answers that name you, and it can only be measured by asking the same question many times, on every engine your customers use.”
What separates the companies that get named?
- Strong directory and review presence. The most-cited sources for local recommendations are Yelp, Google, Reddit, Facebook, and Angi (Local Dominator). Complete, active, consistent profiles on those platforms are the raw material of a recommendation.
- Fresh review velocity. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 82% of consumers read AI-generated review summaries; engines weight recent activity, so a solid rating with fresh reviews beats a higher one that went quiet.
- A citable website. Priced cost guides, specific service pages, and project write-ups with local detail give the engines the substance a recommendation needs, and they're the one source you control end to end.
- Consistent identity. The same name, phone, and service area across your site, Google Business Profile, and directories. Mismatches read as uncertainty, and engines skip uncertain candidates.
What should a contractor do with these numbers?
Three moves cover most of the value. First, fix the trust layer the engines actually cite: claim and complete your Yelp, Google, Angi, and BBB profiles, and keep review velocity up. Second, publish the pages that make you quotable: a priced cost guide for each major service in each city you serve. Third, measure the way the channel works: the same buying questions, asked repeatedly, on every engine your customers use, tracked as your share of answers over time.
Where do these figures come from?
Every number above is from public research: BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults), SOCi's 2026 Local Intelligence Report, Yext's October 2025 citation study (6.8 million citations across 1.6 million AI responses), Local Dominator's analysis of 267,280 local-business citations, Ahrefs' 2025 study of 1.4 million prompts, Profound's 30-million-citation analysis, and the 5W AI Visibility Index (Q1 2026). Attribute figures to their original sources when citing this page.
