How ChatGPT decides which local business to recommend.

What just happened, and why this week matters

On 3 September 2026 GPT-6 Astra went out to approved organisations, with general availability on 4 September and a staged rollout to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise over the days after. Five weeks earlier, on 31 July 2026, OpenAI confirmed ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly active users, up from 900 million in February 2026 and 400 million in February 2025.

What matters to a barber or a tour operator is what those users ask. A summary of Ofcom's media use tracker found 54% of UK adults now use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024. aivisible.co.uk reports that 45% of consumers had used an AI tool to find a local business in the past year, up from 6% the year before.

The question is whether ChatGPT names you when someone asks for a plumber or a brewery tour. Right now, while most local sites are still built for Google alone, is the cheap moment to fix that.

How does ChatGPT choose which local business to recommend?

Not with Google. When Search Engine Land asked ChatGPT to describe its own local search process in May 2025, it said it searches Microsoft Bing's index and "does not have direct access to Google". The workflow it described:

1. Run a Bing search and gather the top 20 to 30 results.
2. Scan them for business websites, review aggregators, local guides and directories.
3. Read the 5 to 8 most promising sources.
4. Cite 3 to 5 with visible star ratings, no paywall and a linkable page, favouring pages that show hours and addresses and trusted domains such as Yelp, Facebook and local news.

That is ChatGPT's own account, not an audit, though the landing-page data below is consistent with it. One detail matters most: in that test, the business second in ChatGPT's answer was 14th on Bing. Bing's index gets you into the pool. Clear facts, visible reviews and a readable page are what ChatGPT says it looks for when it picks the final five.

Consistency is the other lever. SparkToro tested 2,961 AI queries and, as reported by cited.so, found less than a 1% chance that ChatGPT gives identical brand recommendations twice. In the examples cited.so reports, well-optimised businesses still appeared in 89% to 97% of answers. Any single answer is close to random. Being in almost all of them is not.

Where does ChatGPT get its business listings from?

Not from your Google profile. According to Local Falcon's November 2025 breakdown, ChatGPT has no direct integration with Google Business Profile. Its business details come from Bing Places for Business, which Local Falcon calls one of its biggest data sources, plus business websites, Yelp, Tripadvisor, booking sites, local publications and Facebook pages. There are no paid placements, and changes to your site can show up almost immediately.

According to cited.so, Foursquare is an OpenAI data partner, and industry estimates put over 70% of ChatGPT's local business results on Foursquare's Places API, with Yelp cited in roughly a third of local answers and Bing Places and web pages filling the rest. Foursquare's consumer app reportedly shut in 2025, so many listings are stale. Claiming and fixing yours is an open goal.

OpenAI's own help centre adds that ChatGPT may share your location with trusted third-party providers to return nearby business listings. OpenAI does not name those providers, and nothing in Local Falcon's breakdown points to Google Business Profile.

How much traffic does ChatGPT send a local business?

On 9 September 2026 we pulled Google Analytics 4 data for the 12 websites we own or look after. AI-assistant visits are sessions referred from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Grok.

• Last 90 days, 11 June to 8 September 2026: 483 AI-assistant sessions. ChatGPT sent about 420 of them, 87%. Grok sent none.
• Last 30 days: 274 AI-assistant sessions out of 18,309, 1.5% of all visits.
• August 2026: 207 AI sessions against 90 in August 2025, 2.3 times year on year. Share of all visits up from 0.29% in June 2025 to 1.29%, about four and a half times.

August was the strongest month on both brewery sites: UK Brewery Tours took 58 AI-assistant sessions, and London Brewery Tour took 27 ChatGPT sessions, up from 8 in July. Two honest notes: the share is still small, and April 2026 dipped to 100 sessions. But a channel growing four and a half times as a share of all visits is what the start of a curve looks like. Nobody researching the history of brewing lands on a gift-voucher page. That is someone who asked for a recommendation and clicked through to a page that sells. Similarweb found that since a May 2026 change about six in ten ChatGPT-referred visits land on a homepage.

What does this mean for a UK barber, plumber or tour operator?

On a real high street:

• Barber. ChatGPT does not read your Google reviews directly, so put your rating where it can see it: your website, Facebook page and Yelp listing, with the same name, address and hours on each.
• Plumber. No shopfront, so listings do the work. A plumber with a perfect Google profile and an unclaimed Bing Places entry showing an old phone number is, to ChatGPT, a business with an old phone number.
• Tour operator. Travel answers carry a source far more often than professional services do: in US data, Similarweb found about 23% of travel and hospitality answers carry a source, against under 4% for professional services. Tripadvisor is on its list. Gift vouchers were a top landing page on both brewery-tour sites above, so put the price and how to book on that page's first screen.
• Energy assessor. The prompt is "find me an EPC assessor in" a named town, which is what EPC Near Me's Hemel Hempstead listing answered. One factual page per town.
• Holiday let. Booking sites are on ChatGPT's source list, so your listing there needs the same name, address and guest count as your own site. The site itself has to be readable in one pass, as with Field Cottage Peterstow: static, fast, structured data from day one.

What we're doing about it for our clients

1. Build the site so a machine can read it in one pass. Fast static sites with FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and business schema and clean URLs from day one, as for London Brewery Tour and EPC Near Me.
2. Answer the question in the first line. Daily, AI-assisted, human-edited publishing around the questions people actually ask, running for London Brewery Tour since May 2025.
3. Keep the Google Business Profile complete, active and consistent, with reviews encouraged and answered, as for The P2 Collective. It still drives Google's map pack, even though ChatGPT cannot see it.
4. Count it. From this week we pull AI-assistant referral sessions from GA4 for every site we look after, and they appear in client reports from September 2026.
5. This month we are claiming and matching Bing Places for Business, Apple Business Connect, Yelp and Foursquare to each local client's Google profile, so name, address, phone, hours and categories are identical everywhere.
6. This month we are starting a fixed set of prompts of the "recommend me a plumber in Sevenoaks" kind, run monthly in ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok for each local client, logging who gets named.
7. This month we are adding FAQ blocks with FAQPage schema that answer the questions owners hear on the phone, and opening the new Search Console generative AI report for every client.

Would you rather we did it? See what we do. No discovery calls, no decks.

What you should do this week

1. Ask ChatGPT yourself. Type the prompt your customer would: "recommend a plumber in Sevenoaks". Note who is named and which sites it cites. Ask twice, because the answers will differ.
2. Claim Bing Places for Business. Copy your Google Business Profile details exactly: name, address, phone, hours and categories.
3. Find and fix your Foursquare and Yelp listings, then check Tripadvisor and Facebook. Match every field to your website.
4. Put the facts on the first screen of your homepage. What you do, where, opening hours, a starting price, phone number, how to book. Statements, not slogans.
5. Ask for reviews and reply to every one. ChatGPT cites pages with visible star ratings, and aivisible.co.uk reports that 88% of people fact-check an AI recommendation against reviews.
6. Check your own GA4. In Traffic acquisition, filter session source for chatgpt.com and chat.openai.com. Zero is your baseline. Anything above it is the channel showing up. One caveat: 1 September 2026 showed zero for many accounts because of a reported GA4 processing bug, not a real drop.

Common objections, answered

"It's 1.5% of my traffic. Why would I bother?" Direction and intent. The AI share of our visits grew about four and a half times between June 2025 and August 2026, and August was 2.3 times the year before. Those visits land on homepages and gift-voucher pages, not blog posts, and that is worth an afternoon of listing work.

"I'm on page 1 of Google. Surely that covers it." For Google, yes. For ChatGPT, no. It has no direct access to Google and no Google Business Profile integration. It sees your Bing Places listing, your Foursquare entry, your Yelp page and your website. If those say different things, or nothing at all, your Google profile does not rescue you.

"Nobody in my town asks ChatGPT for a barber." Somebody looking for a barber in Tunbridge Wells does: one shop in the table above took 43 ChatGPT sessions in 90 days. With 54% of UK adults using AI tools, "nobody" is a hope, not a number.

The verdict

ChatGPT is a recommendation engine with more than a billion weekly users, a new flagship model as of last week, and a data pipeline built on Bing, Foursquare and Yelp rather than Google. Foursquare's consumer app shut in 2025, so by industry accounts many of the listings it reads have not been touched in years. That is why the slots are cheap right now, and why they will not stay cheap.

Do not abandon Google. Around 30% of UK Google searches now show an AI summary and Google has just given you a report to measure it. Keep half an eye on Grok, which sent our sites nothing in 90 days. This week, the job is matching your Bing, Foursquare and Yelp listings to your Google profile and putting the facts on your homepage. We have seen what ChatGPT sends. Go and get your share.

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