The U.S. Local Business AI Readiness Report: Findings From 1,200 Prompts
We benchmarked 500 service companies across major U.S. metro markets on ChatGPT and Perplexity. Over 74% are completely invisible.
Over a 90-day period, AIGroSales’ research team systematically prompted ChatGPT 4.0, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity Pro, and Claude 3.5 with 1,200 real-world commercial intent queries across the United States.
We tested queries spanning Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, and Texas hubs across six high-ticket service verticals: HVAC, plumbing, roofing, dental, aesthetic clinics, and personal injury law.
The findings were striking: 74.2% of established local businesses with 4.5+ star Google ratings failed to appear even once across the tested AI recommendations. Instead, a small cohort (less than 12% of businesses) captured over 68% of all AI mentions.
Why? The top 12% shared three structural advantages: verified state credential linkages, high citation density across regional media, and explicit machine-readable service schemas. The good news: this gap is an immense opportunity for first-movers.
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