How AI Search decides which Local Business to recommend
Someone opens ChatGPT and types: "find me an electrician near me" No links to click through, no page of ten results — just a name, given with a straight face, as if it's obvious.
It isn't obvious. Behind that single answer, the AI model has cross-referenced what your website says about your business against what it finds everywhere else — your Google Business Profile, your reviews, mentions of you across the web. It's checking whether your claims and your reputation say the same thing.
That mechanism isn't new. Google's search algorithm has worked this way for years, deciding what to show based on how consistent and trustworthy a business looks across everything it can see. What's changed is that ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and similar tools now do the same cross-referencing and then act on it directly — recommending one business by name, instead of listing ten links and letting you choose.
We call this consistency check Entity Authority: your website, your Google profile and your reviews all telling the same story. When they do, Google and AI tools know exactly who you are and what to recommend you for. When they don't — a different name here, reviews on Google but not on the site, a service the website doesn't mention — the model can't be confident enough to recommend you, so it doesn't.
This isn't a small shift. In the UK, visits to ChatGPT went from 368 million in the first eight months of 2024 to 1.8 billion over the same period in 2025 — nearly a five-fold increase in a year (Ofcom). In the US, the share of consumers using an AI tool to get recommended a local business rose from 6% to 45% in a year (BrightLocal).
As Roberto Serra puts it, the shift is from being visible everywhere to being understood clearly — by people and by machines, in that order.
None of it rewards manipulation. It rewards being the same business, described the same way, everywhere someone — or something — might look for you.
If you don't know whether your website, your Google profile and your reviews are telling the same story, get a free audit and find out.
Source: Roberto Serra Link
