A buyer asks ChatGPT who to hire. Does it name you?

A buyer asks, and the assistant answers

Say you run a wedding photography studio in Ballarat. A couple, engaged last month, opens ChatGPT on the couch and types: "We're getting married at a winery near Ballarat next autumn. Who should we look at for a small, relaxed wedding?"

The assistant looks for pages that seem to answer that question and reads them. It writes back a short reply with three or four names and a line on each. The couple opens one or two of the sites. Then they ask a follow-up: "Which of those shoots on film?"

If your site says plainly that you photograph small winery weddings around Ballarat, the assistant has a sentence to work with. If the homepage is a slideshow with "capturing timeless moments" over the top, it has very little to go on. Your work could be the best in the region and still miss the list.

The list also shifts from one asking to the next. An Australian digital agency put the same "find me a [trade]" questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude more than once. It asked across the capitals plus Geelong, Ballarat and Newcastle. On ChatGPT, the recommended businesses stayed the same only 8% of the time^[4]. The samples were small and the authors call the pattern directional. Still, it suggests a mention has to be earned again each time someone asks.

How many Australians now ask AI

Of those 13.6 million, 10.5 million used ChatGPT^[1].

Google itself began rolling out AI Mode to Australians on 8 October 2025^[8], so an answer-first results page is now part of ordinary search here.

The longest-running numbers come from the US. Pew found 18% of American adults had used ChatGPT in 2023, 23% in 2024, 34% in 2025 and 44% in 2026^[9]. The 2026 question was worded differently.

People use it, and they still check

Use has run ahead of trust.

Most people also look in more than one place. In 2026 US surveys by BrightLocal, a vendor, 45% of consumers had used AI tools to find local businesses, up from 6% in 2025^[11]. But only 8% chose AI as their first channel for a local search, 52% started with Google Search, and 75% used more than one channel^[11].

So the assistant's answer, your Google listing, your reviews and your own site end up being read side by side. When they disagree on what you do or where you work, a buyer has a reason to doubt you.

Fewer people click through to a site

A US study of 68,879 Google searches from March 2025 counted how often people clicked through, with and without an AI summary on the page^[2].

Some quick-answer visits are going, and that is the honest answer to whether AI search will cut your website traffic. Google says the clicks that come from results with AI Overviews are "higher quality", though it publishes no figures to show it^[3]. Either way, a buyer who does click through arrives with questions, and your site is where they get answered.

Many local businesses are left out

There is no published Australian count of how often assistants name local businesses. The closest data comes from North America. In August 2026, Zarla, a company that sells website building, asked ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for the "best [trade] in [city]" across 10 trades in 10 US cities^[12].

Those listings were already the top 20 Google Places results in each city, so they were visible to begin with. Zarla says the rate for small businesses overall is probably lower. Named businesses had a median of 444 reviews, against 192 for those left out^[12].

A Canadian study by Clixera, an AI analytics firm, reported in October 2026 that ChatGPT named about 44% of independent main-street businesses on average. Chains appeared more often^[13]. The news coverage gives no exact sample size, and we could not find the full study to check it.

Nobody can promise a ranking or a mention. The answers change between runs, and even the businesses that were already easy to find were confirmably named less than half the time.

How does a business get recommended by ChatGPT?

Start with what Google says about its own AI features: "There are no additional technical requirements." A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet^[3].

A 2026 study of 158,099 answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity points the same way^[14]. It is a preprint, not yet peer reviewed. What each engine retrieved explained 32% of the variation in which pages were cited. The properties of the pages explained 2.8%, and brands the model already knew were favoured^[14].

In practice that comes down to a few things:

• Plain answers to the questions buyers ask: what you do, who it suits, where you work, how booking runs and what happens after they get in touch.
• The same business name, location and contact details on your site, your Google listing and every directory you appear in.
• Reviews that keep arriving. In the US test, the businesses that were named had more of them, which is a correlation rather than a cause.
• Your own name on your own site, if people hire you as a person. A 2026 European preprint found assistants named an individual professional in at least 25.8% of buyer-intent answers. Those answers cited the person's own website a little more often^[15].