What BrightLocal's 2026 survey says about AI and local search
How many people use AI to find local businesses? What BrightLocal's 2026 survey found, what it can't tell you, and what it means for an AI agency's services.
A dentist asks her web designer a question he can't answer. Her teenage son says he found a new barber by asking ChatGPT. "Is that where my patients are going now? Should I be doing something?" He has read three posts that week with three different numbers, none of them with a source he could open.
Here is a finding with a source. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published on 11 February 2026, found that AI tools like ChatGPT have surged into third place among the places people go for local business recommendations, behind only Google and Facebook. The survey asked 1,002 adults in the United States.
That is a real change, and it is also easy to overstate. This post sets out what the survey found, what it can't tell you, and what a local business should still do first.
How many people use AI to find local businesses?
BrightLocal has run its consumer review survey every year for more than fifteen years. The 2026 edition is mostly about reviews, but its biggest single change was AI. The numbers worth knowing:
| What BrightLocal found (2026) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Where AI tools like ChatGPT rank among local recommendation sources | Third, behind Google and Facebook |
| Consumers who trust AI platforms for business recommendations | 40% (32% don't) |
| Consumers who trust AI recommendations as much as traditional reviews | 42% |
| Consumers who read AI-written review summaries | 82% |
| Consumers happy to rely on those summaries alone | 23% |
Two more findings put the AI numbers in context. Google is still far ahead, but its share as a review source fell from 83% in 2025 to 71%. And other sites grew too: BrightLocal reports that Apple Maps nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%. People aren't swapping Google for ChatGPT. They're checking more places before they choose.
The AI review summaries matter even for people who never open ChatGPT. Google and other sites now put a short AI-written summary above a business's reviews. According to the survey, only 18% of consumers skip those summaries.
What the survey doesn't tell you
The headline number is solid, but it answers a narrow question. Read it for what it is.
- It's one country. The panel was 1,002 US adults. If your clients are in Leeds or Melbourne, it's a signal, not a measurement of their town.
- It's what people say. A survey records what people report doing. It doesn't watch them search.
- "Third place" isn't "most searches". Ranking third among recommendation sources doesn't mean most searches for a plumber start in ChatGPT. Google and Facebook were still used more.
- It doesn't say which businesses get named. Nothing in the survey tells you why an AI tool recommends one bakery over another, or how often people follow the suggestion.
This matters when you talk to clients. "All your customers use ChatGPT now" is the kind of claim a sales email might make. The honest version is: "In a survey of US adults, AI tools rose to third place among the places people go for local recommendations, behind Google and Facebook." It's less dramatic, and a careful owner will trust it more.
So what should the web designer tell the dentist? Something like this: "Yes, more people are asking AI tools for recommendations, and your patients may be among them. Those tools draw on what's already written about you online: your website, your listings and your reviews. Let's make sure those are right, then check what the tools say about you once a month."
What still matters most for local search?
The survey's own advice is ordinary, and that's the useful part. BrightLocal tells businesses to keep their website up to date, check their listings for mistakes, and look at the sources AI tools reference, asking for a correction when something is wrong.
In other words: the same basics as before, done more carefully, because more tools now read them.
Google's own help page for Business Profiles says local results depend mainly on three things: relevance (how well a listing matches the search), distance (how far the business is from the person searching) and prominence (how well known the business is). None of that changed because of AI. A complete, correct listing, a clear website and a steady stream of recent reviews still carry the weight. If you're setting up a new site, the local SEO checklist for a new website covers the order to do them in.
Google's guidance on its own AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode, says the same in its own way. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and there are no extra technical requirements. The usual advice applies: let Google crawl the site, keep important content in plain text, and keep the Business Profile up to date.
Why reviews matter even more now
Most of the 2026 survey is about reviews, and the AI findings sit on top of them. When an AI tool describes a business, or writes a summary above its reviews, it draws on what customers have written. Old, thin or missing reviews give it little to work with.
The survey's review numbers are sharp:
- 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses.
- 74% only care about reviews from the last three months.
- 47% won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
- 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% the year before.
For a local business, that points to one steady habit: asking for reviews every week, not in a burst once a year. How to ask customers for Google reviews shows how to do that without breaking the platforms' rules.
What this means for the services your AI agency sells
If you look after websites for local businesses, the survey gives you a fair, sourced reason to talk about AI with clients, and a clear line you shouldn't cross.
What you can honestly offer:
- Fix the basics first. Correct the website, the Google listing and the other listings the business appears on. Make hours, services and prices match everywhere.
- Keep reviews flowing. Build review requests into the monthly routine.
- Check what AI tools say. Ask the questions a customer would ask, write down the date, the tool and the answer, and do it again next month.
- Correct what you can. When an answer is wrong, find the source it came from and fix that.
What you can't offer is a promise. Nobody decides which businesses ChatGPT or Google's AI names, and an honest report says what was seen, on which date, with which questions. Write the service down before you sell it, with what's included and what isn't; a service recipe is a simple format for that. If you mostly sell marketing rather than websites, the page for marketers selling local services shows how this fits beside search work.
Where Volant fits
Volant lets you offer this as a monthly service: you record what AI assistants say about a client, with the date and the questions asked, and ask the same questions again next month to compare. You report what you observe, not rankings. The services page shows it alongside websites, care plans and search work.