45% of People Now Use AI to Find Local Businesses. A Year Ago It Was 6%.
In one year, the share of people who use AI to find a local service went from 6 percent to 45 percent. That single number, from BrightLocal's 2026 consumer research, is the clearest signal yet that how customers find a business near them has fundamentally changed. AI is now the third-largest local-discovery channel, behind search engines and maps, and ahead of social media and the printed directories that used to own this job.
If you run a business in Las Vegas, that is not a trend to watch. It is a change that already happened, and the question is whether your business shows up when someone asks an AI for a recommendation.
How big is the shift, exactly?
It is a roughly seven-fold increase in twelve months. BrightLocal's 2026 data puts AI usage for finding local services at 45 percent, up from 6 percent a year earlier, which moves AI into third place among all the ways people discover local businesses.
To put scale behind it: OpenAI has reported around 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and Google has reported more than 2 billion monthly users of AI Overviews, the AI answers that now sit at the top of most searches. When a behavior moves that fast across audiences that large, it stops being early-adopter behavior and becomes normal behavior.
A note on honesty, because it matters in this space: the two anchor facts above are the well-sourced ones. The BrightLocal jump and the official ChatGPT and AI Overviews user counts are reliable. The exact market-share split between ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and the rest is harder to pin down, and any precise percentage you see for those should be read as an estimate. I would rather give you two numbers you can trust than ten you cannot.
What does this mean for a local business?
It means you now have to be findable in two places at the same time. The old job was ranking on Google. The new job is ranking on Google and being the business the AI names when a customer asks it directly.
Those are related but not identical. A customer who types "best AI consultant near me" into Google sees a map and a list. A customer who asks ChatGPT or Google AI Mode the same question gets a short answer that names one to three businesses and moves on. If you are not one of the names, you do not get a second look, because there is no page two in a conversation.
Why being cited is harder than ranking
When Google shows ten links, being number seven still gets you seen. When an AI gives an answer, it quotes a handful of sources and omits everyone else. There is no scrolling. The visibility is more concentrated and the competition for it is sharper.
The mechanics underneath are encouraging, though. The pages AI engines quote are overwhelmingly the pages that already rank well organically, because the AI reads the top results before it writes. Strong local SEO is no longer just about the click. It is the price of admission to be quoted at all.
What to do this quarter
You do not need a new strategy. You need your existing presence shaped so an AI can read it, trust it, and repeat it.
- Make every key page answer-first. Put the customer's real question as a heading, then a short, factual answer directly beneath it. That is the exact shape an AI lifts into its response.
- Add structured data. LocalBusiness and FAQ schema tell the AI who you are, where you operate, and what you answer, in a format it can parse without guessing.
- Keep your Google Business Profile and reviews current. Maps is still the number one local channel, and review signals feed both the map and the AI.
- Earn listings on the directories AI tends to cite. When an AI answers a category question, it frequently pulls from established directories. Being listed on them puts you in the citation pool.
- Stop blocking the AI crawlers. A surprising number of sites quietly tell ChatGPT, Claude, and Google not to read them. If that is you, none of the above can work. Check first.
The honest bottom line
AI did not slowly become a local-search channel. It became one in a single year, and it is still climbing. The businesses that get named by these tools over the next year will not be the ones with the biggest budgets. They will be the ones whose pages were built so an AI could understand them and felt safe repeating them.
That is the work I do, and it is the work I run on my own site in public. If you want to know whether an AI would recommend your Las Vegas business today, that is a question worth answering before your competitor does.