Have you ever asked ChatGPT about your own business? Most practice owners have not. They are optimizing their Google presence, running ads, and managing reviews - but they have never checked whether the fastest-growing search channel even knows they exist.
We have run thousands of AEO scans. Here is what we have learned about how ChatGPT talks about local businesses.
Most businesses are invisible
The average local business scores below 40 out of 100 on our AI visibility scale. That means when someone asks ChatGPT “best [service] in [city],” those businesses are not mentioned. Not ranked low. Not mentioned at all.
This is fundamentally different from Google, where you might be on page 2 or 3. In AI search, there is no page 2. You are either in the answer or you are not.
AI gets details wrong
When ChatGPT does mention a business, it often gets details wrong. Wrong address. Wrong specialties. Outdated hours. Services you do not offer. This happens because AI engines are synthesizing information from multiple sources, and when those sources conflict, the AI makes its best guess.
Structured data is the fix. When your website includes machine-readable schema markup with your correct information, AI engines have an authoritative source to pull from instead of guessing.
AI recommends the same few businesses
In any given category and city, ChatGPT tends to recommend the same 3-5 businesses repeatedly. These are typically the businesses with the strongest combination of review volume, directory presence, and structured data - not necessarily the ones with the best Google rankings.
If your competitor is in that top 3-5 and you are not, they are getting AI referrals that you do not even know about.
Each AI engine has different blind spots
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity each pull from different data sources and weight different signals. A business might be well-known to Gemini (which has access to Google's data) but completely unknown to ChatGPT.
This is why we scan across all four engines. Your visibility on one platform does not predict your visibility on another.
Check what AI says about you
The easiest way to find out is to run a free AEO scan. We query all four major AI engines with 60 real prompts about your practice - the same questions your potential clients are asking. You get a score, a breakdown by engine, and specific recommendations for what to fix first.
Takes 60 seconds. No account required. And the results are usually surprising - most practice owners had no idea what AI was saying about them until they checked.