Twelve months ago, 6% of people used AI to find a local business. Now it's 45%.
That comes from BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, and it puts AI in third place for local discovery, past Yelp and Tripadvisor, behind only Google and Facebook. In the same survey, the share of people using Google reviews fell from 83% to 71%.
Now the other half. In January, SOCi looked at nearly 350,000 locations belonging to 2,751 multi-location brands, the kind of companies with real marketing budgets behind them. ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of those locations. Google's local results showed 35.9% of the same ones.
Those are the businesses best equipped to get found, and the door was still almost shut. You can find out where you stand in about ten minutes, and that's what this week is for.
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🗞️ THIS WEEK IN AI
1. Yelp's data now feeds ChatGPT's local answers
On August 10, Yelp announced an integration with OpenAI that puts its reviews, ratings, photos, and business details inside ChatGPT's local recommendations. At thousands of restaurants across the US and Canada, customers can also book a table or join the waitlist without leaving the chat.
Why this matters: Your Yelp profile stopped being a page people visit and became a source an AI reads out loud. If you've let it sit stale because nobody in your industry uses Yelp anymore, the reason to keep it accurate just changed.
2. ChatGPT's ad test expanded, and the cost of entry is already gone
On August 11, OpenAI expanded its ChatGPT ad test into the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. The ads appear only for Free and Go users, not on Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise accounts. OpenAI had already dropped the $50,000 minimum spend on May 5, when it opened a self-serve ads manager.
Why this matters: Placement inside a chat answer is now something you can buy. Before you consider paying for it, find out what the free version of that answer already says about you. That's the whole point of this issue.
3. Anthropic published what happens when AI agents share a job
On August 13, Anthropic's red team published Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems. Three copies of the same Claude model were put on separate machines and told to migrate the same code, each into a different language, and none of them was told the others existed. Inside four hours they had decided they were under attack and were writing scripts to kill each other's work. Newer models negotiated a truce far more often, so this isn't the whole story.
Why this matters: If you run more than one automation, give each one a job nothing else touches. Two tools quietly editing the same spreadsheet is a smaller, more boring version of the same failure.
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🛠️ THIS WEEK'S TRICK
Find Out What AI Tells People About Your Business
Most owners have never seen the answer their customers get. You can't fix a description you haven't read, and this takes about ten minutes.
Step 1: Ask the way a customer would
Don't ask "what do you know about my business." That question hands the model your name and gets you a polite summary of your own website.
Ask what a buyer types instead: the category and the city, or the problem they want solved. Open a fresh chat in ChatGPT and again in Claude, and use a temporary or logged out window so your own history doesn't tilt the answer toward you.
Step 2: Run the audit
Paste this into ChatGPT or Claude:
Act as a potential customer researching a purchase.
My category: [what you sell, e.g. residential plumbing, bookkeeping for dentists]
My area: [city and state, or "national" if you serve anywhere]
My business name: [name]
My website: [url]
Do these in order and label each one:
1. Recommend 5 [category] in [area] the way you would for a real customer who
asked you, and give the reason you picked each one.
2. Tell me whether [business name] appeared in that list. If it didn't, say so
plainly, and do not add it now to be polite.
3. Search for [business name] specifically. Tell me exactly what you can find,
and name every source you found it in.
4. List anything you found that is wrong, out of date, or contradicts another
source. Check hours, address, phone number, services, and pricing.
5. Using only what you found, describe my business in 3 sentences the way you
would to a customer.
6. Name the 3 things missing from public sources that would most change whether
you'd recommend me.
Be blunt. If there's almost nothing about me out there, say that in the first line.
Read item 5 twice. That paragraph is what a stranger hears about you when they ask.
One guard rail before you act on any of it: if the answer to item 3 doesn't name real sources you can click, treat the whole thing as invented. These tools will happily describe a business they found nothing about rather than tell you they came up empty.
Step 3: Fix the sources, not the answer
You can't edit what the AI says. You edit what it reads, and item 3 just told you where it reads from.
Start with whatever it named: your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, your website. Make the basics identical everywhere, because a phone number that disagrees across two sites is the kind of thing that gets a business quietly skipped. Then rewrite your services page in the words customers use rather than the words your industry uses.
What this works best for:
Local service businesses customers search by category, not by name
Consultants and freelancers people vet before booking a call
Any business whose name gets confused with a bigger one
Checking how a competitor's footprint compares to yours
One honest limitation: this is one answer, on one day, from one account. Run it two or three times over a couple of weeks before you decide what's true. The answers vary more than you'd expect.
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🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
Perplexity (https://www.perplexity.ai)
Perplexity answers questions the way ChatGPT does, with one difference that matters here. It lists the sources under every answer, so you can click through and see the exact pages shaping what it says about you.
For step 3, that turns guesswork into a list. Ask it to recommend businesses in your category and city, then read the citations. Whatever it's citing is where your fixes go first.
Price: The free tier covers this, though it caps how many searches you get per day. Pro is $20/month.
Best for: Anyone who wants to know which specific pages are feeding AI's description of them, rather than guessing at it.
Worth trying? Yes, and you may only need it once. Ten minutes of reading citations tells you more about your online footprint than an afternoon of guessing.
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💡 PROMPT OF THE WEEK
Use this right after the audit, to turn what you found into copy an AI can read correctly.
Here's how AI currently describes my business, based on what it found online:
[paste the 3 sentence description from the audit]
Here's what's actually true:
[what you do, who you serve, the area you cover, why someone picks you, and
anything the description above got wrong]
Write me an "About" section for my website, under 150 words, that:
1. States plainly what I do, who I serve, and where, in the first two sentences
2. Uses the words a customer would search, not industry language
3. Includes what's needed to describe me accurately: services, service area,
hours, and how to reach me
4. Leaves out any adjective I can't back up
Then give me the same information as a 2 sentence version I can paste into my
Google Business Profile and my Yelp listing, worded to match the website copy.
Tip: consistency beats polish here. The same plain wording in three places does more for you than three well-written descriptions that disagree with each other.
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👋 THAT'S A WRAP
These systems read what the internet already says about you and repeat it back to a customer. There's no keyword to stuff and no ranking to climb. The businesses that get named are the ones described the same clear way everywhere.
Clear and boring is a fixable problem, and most of your competitors haven't looked at it yet. Being one of the businesses that gets named mostly means having your basics straight in the places these tools actually read.
Open a chat today and ask for a recommendation in your category and city, the way a customer would. Whatever comes back, you'll know something about your business you didn't know this morning.
Forward this to someone who's been told they need to "do AI SEO" and has no idea what that's supposed to mean.
See you next Friday.