SEMPITE Research · AI Visibility Index · July 2026 Pilot
57% of Google’s Top-Ranked Local Businesses Are Invisible to ChatGPT
We pulled the top-3 map-pack businesses for 10 category-city combinations, then asked ChatGPT to recommend providers in each market. It named specific businesses every single time — just usually not the ones winning on Google.
Visibility by category
What this means
AI assistants are already answering “who should I hire?” with confident, specific recommendations — and those recommendations are not simply Google’s rankings restated. Businesses that dominate the map pack are being skipped by the fastest-growing recommendation channel on earth, while competitors with clearer entities, stronger citations, and more AI-legible content take their place.
If you’ve invested years in ranking on Google, this is the blind spot worth checking first. The playbook for fixing it is in our AI Search Visibility guide.
Methodology
July 2026 pilot: 10 category–city combinations (plumber, dentist across 5 major U.S. cities). Baseline = top-3 Google Maps results per combination (via DataForSEO). Each market was queried with: “I need a [category] in [city]. Who are the best? Please recommend specific businesses by name.” Engine: ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini). Mentions matched on distinctive business-name tokens. The full monthly index adds more categories, cities, and engines (Claude, Google AI Mode). Data available on request under CC-BY.
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