When someone in Miami asks ChatGPT where to go, it names a few businesses and stops there. We asked it 460 questions that people really type, across 56 kinds of local business, and counted who came up and who never did.
local businesses we checked were never named once in ChatGPT's answers.
Out of 577 local businesses, 315 were never named in any answer to the questions people type into ChatGPT about their trade. That is 55 out of every 100. A customer who asks ChatGPT gets a short list, and most businesses are simply not on it.
ChatGPT left out nine of ten plumbers we checked, and the same held for caterers, driving schools and juice bars. Among dentists it left out only one of ten. Massage therapists, personal trainers and pilates studios fell in between, with three of ten left out.
The answers linked to 2,892 sources. Only 794 of them led to the website of a business on that trade's Google Maps list, about 27 in 100. The other 2,098 were pages none of those businesses run, so most of what shapes the answer is out of the owner's hands.
When the question is simply the kind of business and the neighborhood, 36 in 100 sources were the businesses' own sites. When someone asks who the best one is, that falls to 20 in 100, and the rest comes from pages other people wrote.
For caterers, 3 in 100 sources were the caterers' own sites, and for bakeries in Brickell it was 9 in 100. Florists were the opposite case, with 76 in 100. How much your own website counts depends a lot on the trade.
We chose 56 kinds of local business in Miami and, in every trade, as many as ten businesses that appear first on Google Maps, 577 in all. Every question is a phrase people type into ChatGPT, with its monthly volume measured by DataForSEO for the phrase itself, and we then added the neighborhood: Brickell for most trades, and Coral Gables and Wynwood for bakeries as well. That made 58 lists and 460 questions, asked of live ChatGPT on October 22 and 23, 2026, one run per question. We counted which businesses were named and which pages each answer linked to. A source counts as a business's own site when it leads to the website of any business on that trade's Google Maps list. One run is a snapshot, so read these numbers as signals rather than a census.