Half of your customers now ask an AI who to call
In one year, the share of people using AI tools to find a local business went from 6% to 45%. Here is what those tools look at before they say your name.
A year ago, asking ChatGPT for a plumber was a novelty. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey puts the share of people who now use AI tools for local business recommendations at 45%, up from 6% the year before. AI is now the third most used way to find a local business, behind only Google and Facebook.
The trust is there too. 42% of people say they trust an AI recommendation as much as a written review, and more people trust AI for local picks (40%) than distrust it (32%). Google is still the biggest door, but its share dropped from 83% to 71% in the same survey.
How an assistant picks a name
An assistant does not have opinions. It has sources. When someone asks “who should I call for gutter cleaning in Omaha,” the model pulls from a short list of places it can read: your Google Business Profile, your website, and the big review and directory sites, then checks whether they agree with each other.
The signals that carry the most weight look a lot like what a careful customer would check:
- Reviews: how many, how recent, the average, whether the owner replies, and what the reviews actually say about the work.
- Your Google profile: primary category, service area, photo activity, and how often you post.
- Your website: whether it clearly says which services you do in which towns, in plain language a machine can quote.
- Consistency: the same name, phone, and address everywhere. Mismatches read as risk.
Two different Googles
Google’s own AI answers behave differently depending on which one you get. Whitespark’s guide to AI Mode notes that the product passed a billion monthly users in 2026. Steady Demand looked at where the citations go and found that for “near me” style questions, about 8 in 10 of AI Mode’s citations point back to Google’s own Maps data, not to your website. For local intent, the assistant mostly reads your Google Business Profile out loud.
That is good news for a small business, because the profile is free and you control it. It is bad news if the profile has last year’s hours, three photos, and reviews nobody answered.
The practical version
You do not need an AI strategy. You need to be legible. A complete profile, a website that says what you do and where, reviews that keep coming with replies attached, and photos of real work every week. The assistants are reading the same things people are. Give both of them something current to read.