Key takeaways
- AI assistants recommend far fewer locations than Google's local pack does. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommended only 1.2% of the nearly 350,000 locations it analyzed, Gemini 11%, Perplexity 7.4%, versus 35.9% local-pack appearance rate for the same businesses.
- Business profile accuracy on AI platforms is inconsistent by design. The same SOCi study found only about 68% accuracy for ChatGPT and Perplexity compared to 100% for Gemini, because Gemini is grounded directly in Google Maps data and the others are not.
- AI Overviews now show up in 68% of local-business queries versus 39% for local packs, per Whitespark's analysis reported by Search Engine Journal, meaning your location pages need to be structured for AI extraction, not just map ranking.
- Google's Business Profile API caps edits at 10 per minute per profile with no override, so any platform promising