Imagine a potential customer pulls out their phone, opens ChatGPT, and types: "Who is a good plumber near me?"
Three businesses come up. Yours isn't one of them.
Not because you're not good at what you do. Not because your reviews are bad. But because ChatGPT doesn't know how to confidently recommend you and it would rather say nothing than guess wrong.
This is happening right now, in every industry, in every city. And most business owners have no idea.
People are searching differently and it happened fast
A few years ago, finding a local business meant Googling it. You'd see a list of results, maybe click a few, and make a call.
That's changing. More and more people are skipping Google entirely and just asking an AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, or Perplexity to tell them who to hire.
The AI gives one answer. Maybe two or three. Then the conversation ends.
There's no page 2. There's no scrolling through options. Either your business gets named, or it doesn't come up at all.
How big is the gap?
Earlier this year, a research firm called SOCi studied nearly 350,000 business locations to see how often they actually showed up in AI recommendations. What they found was eye-opening.
On Google, businesses appeared in local results about 36% of the time. On ChatGPT, that number dropped to just 1.2%.
That's not a typo. One point two percent.
That means 98 out of 100 businesses are completely invisible when a customer asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. The businesses showing up aren't necessarily the best ones in their market. They're just the ones AI had enough information to feel confident about.
You can read the full findings at Search Engine Land.
Here is the thing: Google rankings don't transfer
This is the part that surprises most business owners.
You might rank well on Google. You might have a clean website, solid reviews, and years of experience. None of that automatically carries over to AI search.
Google and AI work differently. Google ranks websites. AI recommends businesses it trusts and that trust comes from a different set of signals than the ones Google uses.
Think of it like this: Google is a librarian who finds you the most relevant book. AI is a friend who recommends someone they know and trust. Your friend isn't pulling up a database. They're drawing on what they already know about you.
If AI doesn't know your business well, if your information is incomplete, inconsistent, or hard for AI to read, it won't recommend you. Even if you have great reviews. Even if you've been in business for 20 years.
Reviews matter more than you might think
The SOCi study found one signal that shows up consistently in businesses AI does recommend: reviews.
Businesses that ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars. Businesses with lower ratings or too few reviews often didn't make the cut at all.
This doesn't mean reviews are the whole picture. But it does mean that AI is using your reputation as a filter. If you're not above a certain threshold, you might not even be in the running.
So what can you actually do?
The honest answer is: start by knowing where you stand.
Most business owners are working on their website, managing their Google profile, and responding to reviews without any clear picture of how they actually show up when someone asks an AI to make a recommendation.
That's the gap AIMention was built to close. You enter your website, we scan ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and show you exactly where you show up and where you don't. The report takes two minutes and costs $30.
If you've ever wondered why a competitor keeps getting recommended while your business stays quiet, this is where you start.