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Thinking. By Rodrigo Retamar, 23 October 2026

How ChatGPT and Google choose which local business to recommend

Google's AI answers lean mostly on your Google Business Profile, then Yelp and your own website. ChatGPT leans most on Yelp, which licensed its reviews to OpenAI in July 2026. Both favor businesses with complete profiles, steady reviews, the same details everywhere, and a website whose text they can actually read.

What Google's AI reads

In a study of 1,355 business locations published by BrightLocal in August 2026, Google Business Profile was the single biggest source behind Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, at about 28.6% of all citations, and it was used for virtually every location. Yelp came second. For plumbers, Google profiles made up 54% of citations and Yelp 13.8%.1

So the first job is not new. A complete Google profile with the right categories, services, hours, service area, real photos and a steady flow of reviews is still the foundation. The difference is that it now feeds the AI answer at the top of the page as well as the map.

What ChatGPT reads

ChatGPT works differently. In the same study it drew on far fewer sources, and Yelp was its most common source for local questions by a wide margin, appearing in about 80% of its answers. Google profiles were not a top source for it.1

In July 2026 Yelp agreed to license its reviews, ratings and photos to OpenAI, so that information can appear inside ChatGPT answers with Yelp links. The two companies also plan to bring Yelp's Request a Quote feature into ChatGPT, with no date announced.2 If you sell services and have ignored Yelp, this is the reason to stop.

Your own website still matters

Big platforms take the top spots, but around 93% of the domains cited in the BrightLocal study were individual business websites.1 A site helps when it answers real questions plainly: what a job costs, how long it takes, who does the work, which areas you cover.

There is one technical catch. Many modern website builders draw the page with JavaScript after it loads. Google can usually read those pages. A 2024 analysis by Vercel found that the crawlers used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not run JavaScript, so they may see an empty page.3 A quick test: open your site, choose View Source in your browser, and search for your main headline. If it is not there, AI tools may not be reading your site at all.

I found this problem on my own site and rebuilt it as plain HTML. This page is the result.

Mentions and reviews beyond your own profiles

AI tools also pay attention to what other sites say about you. An Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands, reported in September 2026, found that mentions of a brand across the web tracked AI visibility much more closely than backlinks did.4 That is a correlation, not proof of cause, but it points the same way as common sense: local news, your chamber of commerce, supplier dealer pages and a few short videos about your work all help AI tools connect your name with your trade and your city.

What does not move the needle

You will hear that adding schema markup, a type of hidden code, is the key to AI visibility. The evidence is thin. Google stopped showing FAQ results in search in May 2026, and an Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages that added structured data found no measurable lift in AI citations.4,5 Basic business markup is good housekeeping. It is not a strategy.

Answers also change from one day to the next and between the app and other versions of the same tool. Anyone who promises you a guaranteed position in AI answers is guessing.

What to do this month

  1. Complete your Google Business Profile: categories, services, service area, hours and at least ten recent photos of real work.
  2. Claim your Yelp page and make the name, address and phone match Google exactly.
  3. Ask every happy customer for a review, on Google and on Yelp, within a day of finishing the job.
  4. Run the View Source test on your website.
  5. Add one page that answers the question customers ask most, in plain words, starting with the answer.

Most owners know they should do these things and never find the time, or do them once and stop. If you would rather have it done properly and kept up, that is what I do. If you want to see where you stand first, I will run the questions your customers ask through Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and compare you with three local competitors. The snapshot is free.

Sources

  1. BrightLocal, study of the sources AI search tools cite for local businesses, August 2026. BrightLocal sells listing services.
  2. MarTech, "Yelp brings reviews and local leads to ChatGPT", July 2026, citing Axios.
  3. Vercel, "The rise of the AI crawler", December 2024.
  4. CMSWire, on whether structured data improves AI answer citations, September 2026, reporting Ahrefs studies.
  5. Search Engine Journal, Google drops FAQ rich results from Search, 2026.