A measurement study of how consistently ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity agree on local business recommendations, across 12 US cities, 12 service industries, and 5,760 individual searches.
Consumers increasingly ask AI assistants directly for local business recommendations rather than browsing a search results page. This report measures how often four major AI platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, agree when asked the identical local business question. Across 1,440 unique search questions run against all four platforms (5,760 total individual searches), only 4.6 percent of recommended businesses were named by every platform, and only 3.5 percent of the 144 markets studied produced a business all four platforms agreed was the top recommendation. The data indicates that a business's visibility to one AI platform provides little information about its visibility elsewhere.
All four platforms were asked the identical question: which HVAC contractors are good for a smaller job in Denver, Colorado. Each platform returned three different businesses. Across all twelve names given between them, not one business was named by more than one platform.
| Platform | Top recommendation |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Business 1 |
| Gemini | Business 2 |
| Claude | Business 3 |
| Perplexity | Business 4 |
Agreement is not uniform across platform pairs. Gemini and Perplexity showed the closest alignment (19.6% overlap); ChatGPT and Claude showed the least (7.4% overlap, with zero shared recommendations for the same search roughly half the time).
12 cities × 12 industries × 10 standardized buyer-intent prompts = 1,440 unique search questions, each run identically across all four platforms using default automatic search behavior, for 5,760 total individual searches. Businesses were matched across platforms by domain and name. Platform overlap was measured using Jaccard similarity. Full methodology, platform configuration, entity matching rules, and failure handling are documented in the appendix of the full report.
12 pages. Executive summary, full methodology appendix, charts, and limitations.
Download PDF (Version 1.0)The Local AI Visibility Index is a recurring research program from VisibilityIndex.ai tracking AI recommendation consistency across US markets and industries over time. This is the first release. For the full underlying dataset, additional market and industry level detail, or press inquiries, contact [email protected].