Answer engine optimization · Research
You're #1 on Google Maps. Google's own AI still might skip you.
A study put out this year ran 1,120 searches across seven service industries and thirteen US cities. It then compared the two things Google shows you for a single query: the classic local pack of three map pins and the newer AI Mode answer that sits right above it. The working assumption was that these would line up pretty much perfectly, since they're both from Google and both pulling from the same map data.
They lined up about seventy percent of the time. The other 28.5% of businesses that cracked the local pack were completely absent from the AI answer, for the very same search, run just minutes apart.
Same map data, different shortlist
The team behind this research, a group called Local SEO Data, ran these searches back in May. They looked at plumbers, dentists, HVAC contractors, chiropractors, lawyers, restaurants, and medical specialists. The total overlap landed at 71.5%, with a pretty tight confidence interval, so this isn't some weird fluke from one city or one trade. And the overlap gets even worse when it matters most: narrow it down to just the top three names on each list, and the agreement falls to just 48%. The businesses that win the traditional map pack are only slightly more likely to also win the AI answer than they are to lose it.
That's the part that should give you pause if you've ever checked your Google Business Profile ranking and considered the job done. Ranking high in the map pack used to be the whole ball game. Now it's just one factor feeding into a separate decision, one that disagrees with the map pack about as often as a coin toss when you're only looking at the winners.
What makes a business AI-only
The study found 999 businesses that popped up in the AI answer but never once appeared in the traditional local pack for that same search. Something is pulling those businesses into the AI shortlist that the map pack's ranking system doesn't value in the same way, and the researchers pinpointed a clear suspect: review volume.
Across the consumer service trades they studied, businesses that showed up only in AI Mode had a median of 49% more reviews than businesses that appeared only in the local pack. For plumbers, the gap was just massive: a median of 546 reviews for the AI-only group versus 125 for the local-pack-only group, a difference of 337%.
Read that for what it is. This is a correlation from one study rather than iron-clad proof that stuffing more reviews flips some switch. But the sheer size of that gap, especially for plumbers, matches something we've talked about on this blog before: AI models rely heavily on review volume and recency as a trust signal in a way that old-school local ranking doesn't even come close to. A business with 120 solid reviews from three years ago and a business that's adding fresh ones every month can rank identically on Google Maps and end up in totally different places once an AI model decides who gets mentioned.
The other lever, and it's a five-minute one
The study tested something almost ridiculously simple: what happens when you search for a bare keyword like "divorce lawyer" versus searching the same thing with "near me" tacked on. Adding "near me" brought back the missing business listings in all thirty-eight test cases, every single one of them.
That points to something very specific about how the AI answer figures out if a search is actually local. A bare category keyword without a location signal seems to get handled more cautiously, or answered more generically, than the same question with an explicit "near me" or a city name attached. For a business owner, this doesn't change what you put on your own website, but it absolutely changes what you should be testing when you check your own visibility. If you type "plumber" into ChatGPT and get nothing local back, that might say more about the question you asked than about your business. Test the exact way your customers actually ask it, location and all, before you decide you've been left out in the cold.
What this changes about how you check yourself
The real takeaway here is more specific than "AI is unpredictable, good luck." It's that the map pack and the AI answer are now two separate exams, and a business can ace one and flunk the other without doing a single thing differently in between. If you've only ever checked your Google Business Profile ranking, you've only checked half the test.
The fix isn't some big mystery; it's just an extra step. Run your own "near me" search the way an actual customer would type it, rather than the clean keyword version. Look at how your review count and recency stack up against whoever does show up, and don't just focus on your star rating. And don't assume that winning the map pack means you've already won the version that actually appears when someone opens ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode instead of just scrolling past it.
If you want to see precisely where your own business stands on that second exam, that's what our free check does in about thirty seconds.
Sources: Local SEO Data, "Local SEO Data Study Finds 28.5% of Local Pack Businesses Are Invisible in Google AI Mode" (May 2026, 1,120 queries across 7 verticals and 13 US cities).