Which AI Do Consumers Really Trust With Their Buying Decisions? (And what it means for local businesses.)
I use Perplexity for a lot of personal decisions, including purchase choices. It's so easy to open the app in a store and check. The other day I was looking for a hose reel for the garden hose. There was a wall of them and I had no idea which one to pick. Out came the Perplexity app on my phone. Decision made. Purchase done. Easy peasy.
I trust Perplexity because it gives me real citations on every answer. Links I can actually click, a research-feel that makes it easy to trust.
So when I started wondering yesterday which AI assistants are gaining ground and which are losing it, my gut said Perplexity must be doing well. It's so obviously the best tool for the job I'm using it for.
Then I checked the numbers.
Perplexity sits around 5% of the generative AI chatbot market in the US. Not 15. Not 20. Five. ChatGPT is still the top dog by a wide margin at about 60%. Gemini is the one quietly eating ChatGPT's lunch, nearly quadrupling its share in the last twelve months from 5.7% to roughly 15%. Claude and Perplexity are both hovering around 5%. Everything else combined is rounding error.
I was off by a factor of three on the platform I use the most. That's not a small mistake. That's a gut punch. I let my own bias get in the way of the truth.
The number business owners need to see
In one year, the share of US consumers using AI to find local businesses jumped from 6% to 45%.
That's BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, a 1,002-person panel. The same survey shows Google review usage dropping from 83% to 71% over the same window. AI is now the third most-used channel for finding local businesses, behind only Google and Facebook. It passed Yelp. It passed Tripadvisor. It did this in twelve months.
This is no longer a "nerds and techies" thing. Regular people — the homeowner looking for a plumber, the parent picking a dentist, the guy whose truck just broke down looking for a diesel shop — are typing into ChatGPT and Gemini and acting on what comes back.
If you own a business and you're not paying attention to this, you're losing market share. You probably don't even know it yet.
Where the AI assistants stand right now
I went to five different AI assistants and asked them all the same question: who's winning, who's losing, what's changed in the last six months. They gave five different answers. (That's a post for another day.)
The verified picture, pulling from First Page Sage's April 2026 report and the BrightLocal data:
PlatformUS chatbot shareYoY directionChatGPT~60%Down from 87% a year agoGemini~15%Up from 5.7%, fastest growerPerplexity~5%Flat to slightly downClaude~5%Slightly upEveryone else~15% combinedMixed
ChatGPT is losing share but still dominating. Gemini is the real story — Google has Search, Maps, Android, and AI Overviews all feeding into it. That's distribution most companies will never have.
What this means if you run a local business
The platform split matters less than the headline number. Almost half of US consumers are now using AI to find local businesses. A year ago, almost none of them were.
Here's how the new game actually works:
When someone in your city types "best [your service] near me" into ChatGPT or Gemini, one of two things happens. Your business shows up in the answer, or someone else's does. There's no middle outcome. AI doesn't show ten options the way Google does. It picks two or three and recommends them.
And here's the part nobody's saying out loud: there are no paid search options. A business with deeper pockets can't game the results the way they can with Google Ads. It's merit-based.
But you can control the story. You can build the merit. The rules for who gets picked aren't the rules you learned for traditional SEO. AI doesn't pick you because your website looks good. It picks you because your website tells the truth in a way it can quickly understand.
If you've been guessing about where your business shows up in AI search — or assuming it's not relevant yet — the data says guessing isn't safe anymore. The behaviour change already happened.
If you want to see what your own business actually looks like across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overview, I run a free audit. You'll get the real queries, the real results, the competitors that showed up instead of you, and a prioritized list of what to fix. No guessing.
— Chris Small,
Smartech Marketing Systems
