ChatGPT names about 3 businesses. Is yours one?

When someone asks ChatGPT for a local business, it usually names about three. We counted. Across 733 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude in 11 Australian areas, ChatGPT named 3.2 businesses per answer on average. If yours isn't on that short list, the customer never hears your name.

We ran the test on 5 October 2026 for 12 local businesses: five dentists, four physiotherapists and three hair salons in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. We asked the questions people in each suburb ask, with each assistant's location set to that suburb, and recorded every business named and every source cited.

Three things stood out. The list is short, it is lopsided, and it leans on information the business itself controls.

Three names, not ten links

A Google search gives you a page of results to scroll. An AI assistant gives you an answer, and the answer is a short list. Per answer, ChatGPT named 3.2 businesses on average, Perplexity 3.6, Gemini 5.2 and Claude 6.8. The fewer names an assistant gives, the harder each place on its list is to win.

The places are not shared evenly either. In each area, the business AI named most came up in a median of 48% of all answers, from 33% in the most open area to 79% in the least. AI named a median of 49 different businesses per area, but most of them appeared only once or twice. One business takes about half the answers, and everyone else splits the rest.

The assistants don't agree with each other

Being named by ChatGPT does not mean Gemini or Claude will name you too. When we compared any two assistants' five most-named businesses in an area, they shared a median of three of the five. Each assistant reads the web its own way and builds its own short list.

So if you only check ChatGPT, you see a quarter of the picture. Ask all four.

What the assistants actually read

Every answer came with sources, 4,657 citations in all. Here is where they pointed:

• 60% to business websites, yours and your competitors'
• 18% to Google Maps and Google business profiles
• 8% to directories such as Fresha, Healthdirect and Yellow Pages
• the rest to news sites, social media and other pages

Your own website is the biggest single input, and that is good news: it is the one source you fully control. Reviews show up too. The three businesses AI named most in each area had a median of 220 Google reviews, while the other businesses it named had a median of 82. Reviews are not the only reason a business gets picked, but they are a visible one.

When your details don't match

When the assistants stated a fact about a business, such as its address, phone, opening hours, services or prices, they were right 94% of the time. The most common error was opening hours, wrong for 5 of the 12 businesses. An answer only counted as wrong if it matched neither the business's website nor its Google profile as we recorded them. For two of those five we only had the hours from one of the two, so some of their wrong answers may simply repeat the other.

Seven of the 12 businesses had a website and a Google profile that disagreed on a detail, most often the opening hours. One showed different Monday hours on each, another a different postcode. Where they disagreed, the assistants usually passed on one version or the other, and different assistants sometimes gave different ones. So some customers can be told the outdated version before they ever pick up the phone.

What you can do this week

1. Ask the questions yourself. Type "best [your service] in [your suburb]" into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Note who is named, in what order, and whether you appear at all.
2. Make your website and Google profile agree. Check opening hours (including Saturday and public holidays), the address with its postcode, and the phone number. Fix whichever one is out of date.
3. Put the facts on your site in plain text. Services, starting prices, hours, the suburbs you serve and the languages you speak. Text inside an image or a PDF is easy for people to read and hard for an assistant to quote.
4. Ask for reviews steadily. A few each month from happy customers beats a burst once a year.
5. Be listed where assistants look for your trade. For health practices, that means places like Healthdirect; for salons, booking platforms like Fresha. Use the same name, address, phone and hours everywhere.

None of this is new advice for Google. What is new is how small the prize has become: three names, sometimes fewer, and one business taking half of them.

How we measured

We used the same method as our AI Recommendation Report. Questions were written from local search terms and each was asked twice in each assistant with web search on, plus questions about each business's own services. The businesses named in each answer were extracted and checked by code, and the facts were compared with each business's website and Google profile, with an answer counted as right if it matched either one. It is a small sample from one day, so read the numbers as a first look. The full findings, method included, are at score.sbw.studio/findings.

If you want to do a quick check first, our guide on how to see whether you show up in AI search walks you through it, and what GEO is explains how this differs from SEO.

Want to know where your own business stands? The AI Recommendation Report runs this test for your suburb and your competitors, and tells you what to fix first.