What decides it
Who gets named? Three things decide.
We measure how AI builds its “best near me” answers. The pattern holds – and it is not your Maps ranking.
01 · The Google card
Assistants pull their local candidates from the same data Google Maps runs on. Your Business Profile gets you considered – or leaves you invisible before anything else matters.
02 · The review filter
In the categories we’ve measured, the businesses AI names carry review counts several times their category’s median. Reviews decide who survives the cut.
03 · Your own website
Most of what AI actually says – prices, specialties, who you’re “best for” – it quotes from somewhere. Whether that is the businesses’ own sites depends on the trade: in some, nearly every citation we recorded pointed at one; in others, not a single one did. They all have a site – across all the trades we measured, of the 34 businesses ChatGPT named that we could match to our Maps sample, 34 run a live site of their own – so having one is not the bar. Having one AI can quote is, in a trade where it reads them at all.
Maps position doesn’t explain it
In our measurements, businesses ranked past #60 in Maps got named while some top-ranked ones were skipped. The report shows which of the three looks weakest for you – with the evidence attached. Your own category page says which of the three the measurement found failing there; the catalog lists them, the research pages publish the readings, and the free scan is where a reading of your own starts.