Four AI tools almost never pick the same local business
A study of nearly half a million local searches shows each AI engine starts from a different shortlist.
Four big AI assistants asked the same local question almost never name the same business. A study by Yext, shared by Alex Groberman, looked at 491,972 local query-market cases across Gemini, OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic. All four picked the same top business just 4% of the time. In 48% of cases, all four picked a different winner.
The shortlists barely overlap either. The average query produced 23 different businesses across the four lists, with each single engine naming around seven.
Your own site is the common thread
In the rare cases where all four agreed on the same number one business, that business's own website showed up among the cited sources 91% of the time. Those unanimous winners also tended to have deeper profiles and a wider presence across the web than the typical business in the data.
The engines also lean on different kinds of sources. Gemini pulled about 41.9% of its citations from first-party websites, the highest of the four. OpenAI pulled only about 26.9% from first-party sites and about 40.9% from directories and aggregators. Anthropic took around 20.5% of its citations from review platforms, while Gemini was below 2%.
That is why there is no single trick that works everywhere. A business that only looks good on review sites may be invisible to Gemini, and a business with a great website but no directory listings may be invisible to OpenAI.
What moved the needle
Yext also matched business profiles against whether AI named them. Having location pages was associated with a 2.9x higher likelihood of being named. A cover photo was 2.8x, a clear business description 2.3x, a claimed profile 2.3x, recent posts 1.8x and ten or more profile attributes 1.5x. These are associations, not proof that one causes the other.
Groberman frames it as two separate problems. First you have to get considered at all, then you have to win.
If an AI system never identifies your company as a candidate, your review count is not going to save you.
What to do
If you run a local business, stop checking one chatbot and assuming the answer holds everywhere. Ask the same unbranded question in Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity and write down who gets named in each.
Then fix the easy gaps. Claim your business profile, add a cover photo and a plain description of what you do, and give your website a real page for each service and each area you serve, rather than one generic services page. That is the information an AI needs before it can put you on the list at all.
If an AI system never identifies your company as a candidate, your review count is not going to save you.
Be the person who already knew
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