AIGROW study finds AI recommendations work like a lottery for local businesses in 20 countries

AI assistants are becoming the new word of mouth. An AIGROW experiment in 11 languages and 88 cities found that four out of five local businesses recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini were recommended by only one of the three.

Sheridan, United States, October 6, 2026 -- SHERIDAN, Wyoming, October 6, 2026. Someone who asks ChatGPT to recommend a dentist in Paris gets a few names. Claude gives mostly different ones, and Gemini suggests others again. Asked four simple questions about dentists in Paris, the three assistants named 59 different practices between them, and only four were named by all three. The example comes from an experiment by AIGROW, which put the questions customers ask to artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in 88 cities and 20 countries, to find out which local businesses they recommend.

Asking an AI assistant is fast becoming the new word of mouth. In the United States, 45% of consumers now ask AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, according to BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey. OpenAI says ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people every week. A search engine shows a page of results. An assistant names a handful of businesses, and the rest are never mentioned.

AIGROW, which helps businesses get recommended by AI assistants, set out to measure what the assistants actually tell people. In September it asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the questions customers ask before choosing a business, such as which plumber to call in London or where to eat in Rome. Every question was written in the local language, in 88 cities across 20 countries, and every question was asked more than once. Together with AIGROW's October research, the experiment has now recorded more than 100,000 AI answers.

For local businesses, the results looked like a lottery:

• Four out of five local businesses the assistants recommended were recommended by only one of the three. Fewer than one in ten was recommended by all three.

• Asked the same question three times, the same assistant changed the business it put first more than half the time.

• Software brands had it easier. A software product was more than four times as likely as a local business to be recommended by all three assistants.

For the person asking, the advice depends on which app they open, and on when they open it. For a plumber or a family restaurant, being recommended can come down to which assistant a customer happens to use, and the owner may never find out.

"If AI is becoming the new word of mouth, someone has to keep a record of what it says," said Guglielmo Paesano, founder of AIGROW. "A plumber in Lyon has as much right as any big brand to know what ChatGPT tells customers about them. That is why we publish our data openly, and why any business can check what the assistants say about it for free."

The AI Visibility Index is built so that anyone can check it. Each question goes to several assistants and is asked more than once, because a single answer can mislead. The September edition is published as open data under a Creative Commons licence, with a permanent identifier (DOI) on Zenodo, the research repository run by CERN, and copies on Kaggle and Hugging Face. Anyone can download it and test the findings.

AIGROW repeats the experiment every month. Its October research also tracks which websites the assistants read before they answer. ChatGPT read Reddit in nearly nine out of ten of its answers that used web search. Claude did not read it once.

The findings, the method and the data for each city are at aigrow.gg/research/ai-recommendations-2026. Any business can see what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok say about it with AIGROW's free scan at aigrow.gg.

About AIGROW

AIGROW helps businesses get recommended by AI assistants. It shows a business what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok say about it, works to correct what they get wrong and builds AI agents and automations for everyday work. It publishes open research on how AI assistants choose businesses, including the AI Visibility Index and the AI Source Map. AIGROW works in 11 languages and is operated by PeakCore LLC.

Contact Info:
Name: Guglielmo Paesano
Email: Send Email
Organization: AIGROW
Website: https://aigrow.gg

Release ID: 89205251

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