If you've ever wondered why a competitor keeps coming up when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation nearby, and your business doesn't, a new study just answered that question with real numbers instead of guesswork.
What the Study Looked At
Uberall analyzed over 120,000 AI mentions across nearly 3,800 business locations, spanning five different AI models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity. They looked at how these tools recommend dentists, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, and banks, and what separated the businesses that got mentioned from the ones that didn't. Each model behaved differently: Gemini surfaced far more unique businesses than ChatGPT, Perplexity pulled live search results, and Claude tended to avoid naming specific healthcare providers at all. But underneath those quirks, four consistent signals kept determining who showed up.
The Four Signals That Actually Move the Needle
First, complete business data. Restaurants with a fully filled-out Google Business Profile description and attributes saw mention rates jump 40 to 60 percentage points higher than thin profiles, and hotels with more attributes filled in went from a 22% mention probability to 94%. Second, authority signals: press coverage and third-party recognition had an outsized effect, with banks that had 30-plus news mentions seeing a fifteen-fold jump in how often they came up. Third, review volume mattered more than review score. Grocery chains with more reviews but a lower average rating were mentioned far more often than chains with fewer, higher-rated reviews. Fourth, social activity: an active Instagram presence made restaurants roughly seven times more likely to be mentioned.
The businesses getting recommended aren't necessarily the biggest or the best-reviewed, they're the ones that gave the AI the most complete picture to work from.
Putting the Four Signals to Work
Fill out every field on your Google Business Profile: description, attributes, services, and hours. Thin profiles were consistently mentioned less across every category in the study.
Focus on collecting more reviews, not just better ones. Volume outperformed star rating in most of the categories tested.
Add photos regularly. The top-mentioned businesses in the study averaged three times more photos than the rest.
Look for chances to earn press coverage or third-party recognition, even local write-ups. Authority signals like these had one of the largest effects on mention frequency.
Stay active on Instagram and Facebook. Social signals correlated with noticeably higher mention rates across the businesses studied.
AI tools are quickly becoming a real referral source for local businesses, and this study is one of the clearest looks yet at what actually earns a mention. None of the fixes are complicated: a complete profile, a steady flow of reviews, current photos, and some visibility outside your own website. The businesses doing those basics well are the ones showing up when it counts.
Further reading: Why AI Tools Recommend Some Local Businesses 6 to 7 Times More Often
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