If you run more than one location, AI search tools usually don't recommend your brand. They recommend a specific place, and each of your locations has to earn that on its own. In a large study of multi-location brands, most locations never did.
Key takeaway: AI assistants answer local questions with a specific location, and they are far more selective than Google's local results. Multi-location businesses struggle when their locations aren't built as separate, consistent, verifiable places: one profile, one page, and matching details for each one.
Why AI Is Harder on Locations Than Google Is
SOCi, a software company that serves multi-location brands, studied roughly 350,000 locations across 2,751 brands in its 2026 Local Visibility Index. On average, a location appeared in Google's local 3-pack 35.9% of the time. ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of them, and Gemini recommended 11.0%. That makes ChatGPT roughly 30 times more selective than Google's local results. The study comes from a vendor, so treat the exact figures as directional, but the gap is wide.
Part of the reason is where the answers come from. According to Localogy's coverage of the report, ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from multiple sources rather than one central location database, and the study found accuracy flaws such as incorrect hours and addresses. Gemini relies on Google Maps alone. When an assistant cross-checks several sources, a location whose details disagree gives it more reason to skip that location.
A multi-location brand doesn't get recommended once. Every location has to earn it.
Does Each Location Need Its Own Google Business Profile?
Yes. Google's guidelines tell businesses not to create more than one page for each location, and they treat each physical location as its own profile. Chains are expected to keep names and categories consistent across locations. So multi-location Google Business Profile management means a separate, verified profile for every physical location, kept consistent, and typically grouped under one account so you can manage them together. Meta's Locations feature for Facebook follows the same pattern, with a page per location managed from a parent page.
The same logic applies on your website. Each location needs its own page and its own LocalBusiness schema, with the address, phone number, and hours matching that location's profile. A single page listing every address leaves a machine guessing which details belong to which place. To an AI system, each location is its own entity: a distinct, real-world place it has to understand and verify before recommending.
How Problems Multiply as You Add Locations
Every detail you maintain is multiplied by the number of locations. A new phone number, a holiday schedule, a change of manager: each has to be made everywhere it lives. Profile drift sets in when some locations get updated and others don't, and data aggregators can keep pushing the old record back out to directories. Each new location is another chance for the details to fall out of step.
Here's how that can look. It's an illustrative scenario, not a specific client.
The business: A veterinary group with offices in Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs.
What went wrong: The group has one Google profile under the brand name with the Denver address. The Boulder and Colorado Springs offices were added later by staff as separate profiles with slightly different business names, and one still shows an old phone number. Only Boulder's hours were updated after the holidays.
Why it matters: An assistant cross-checking sources finds three versions of the same brand that don't match. A customer asking about the Boulder clinic could get the wrong hours or call the wrong number.
How to fix it: One verified profile per office with a single naming convention, all in one business group; a page and schema for each office; and one person responsible for sending every change to all three.
A Checklist for Each Location
These steps apply to every location, however many you have:
One verified Google Business Profile for each physical location, kept in a business group under one account.
A dedicated page on your site for each location, with its own LocalBusiness schema matching that profile's name, address, phone number, and hours.
One naming and category convention used on every profile and platform, so the locations read as one brand.
One place where changes get made, and a routine that applies each change to every location, including holiday hours.
A spot check of each location, not just the brand: ask an AI assistant about a specific location by neighborhood or city, and see whether the details come back correct.
Multi-location visibility comes down to treating each location as its own place that has to be easy to verify. That is ordinary discipline, repeated for every location.
Further reading: AI Search Isn't Giving Customers a List Anymore: It's Picking 3 to 5 Businesses For Them, AI Search Can't Tell Which Version of Your Business Info Is Right
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