Study Shows 84% of Local Merchants Are Never Mentioned in ChatGPT and Gemini Recommendations

In November 2026, a study on how AI tools recommend local businesses in the United States was carried out and then published, originally appearing on Cited Lens and later covered by DEV Community. The research team focused on 4 local service categories across 8 US metros. For each category, they pulled every business that Google Maps returned, then asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews the kinds of questions a customer would typically type, and checked every answer against the full business listings.

The findings showed that recommendations from these engines are highly concentrated. Of the local businesses examined, 84% were never mentioned in any answer, meaning only a small group of businesses repeatedly appeared in the results. The report used the example of asking ChatGPT for the best dentist in Austin to illustrate the pattern: a handful of practices get named while everyone else stays invisible to the model.

At this point, the study has only released the results from this single round of testing across the 8 metros and 4 local categories. No follow-up data, updated figures, or further developments have been reported since the initial publication.