What an AI answer says about businesses near you

Pick a question a customer might ask when looking for your service, with the service and the town in it. Open a fresh conversation, don’t mention your firm, and ask it.

Save the exact question, the date, the tool, and the answer. Note whether your business is named, what is said about it, and which pages the answer links to. Open those pages and see whether they support what was said.

Ask the same question in a second service — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini. In Google, keep the ordinary results separate from the AI answer at the top; they are different observations.

Answers vary, and one answer does not tell you what every customer sees. A fresh conversation does not remove every influence from location or account settings. Not being named does not mean the service has nothing on you.

We ran this at scale on September 9, 2026: 34 Beaufort questions across real estate, property management and the trades, asked of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, with Google’s ordinary results and its AI answer recorded separately. We asked through each service’s search-enabled programming interface rather than the app — reproducible, though not identical to what you would see typing. Three things held across all three kinds of business. Questions that name a service and a town — “best HVAC company in Beaufort SC” — got a named firm every time from the four chat services. Questions that ask for advice — “how do I find an HVAC contractor I can trust” — got no local firm from any of them. And Google’s AI answer named a firm in 19 of the 34 questions, far less often than the others, so being absent there means less. What the exercise gives you is a record of particular answers on a particular day — a useful thing to keep, and a specific thing to fix if a cited page describes you wrongly. It does not tell you how the service chooses, or whether a citation ever became a phone call. Those are separate questions.