Jamie Spurrell
Table of Contents
Yes, and no, and the split is the useful part. For Google's own AI answers, your Business Profile is close to the source of truth: Google owns that data, and it feeds directly into what AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini say about your business. For everyone else's AI, your profile is invisible. ChatGPT cannot read it. Claude cannot read it. Perplexity cannot read it. When those tools recommend a local business, they are working from licensed review data and whatever they can crawl on the open web, and none of that comes from the profile you have been keeping tidy.
So the answer to "should I keep maintaining it" is yes, without hesitation. The answer to "is that enough now" is no, and the second half of this piece is what fills the gap.
This is the sixth piece in our AI search optimization series. Earlier entries covered the AEO and GEO hype generally, whether an llms.txt file is worth building, how AI search actually finds and cites content, whether AI Overviews will cost you traffic, and how to tell if your site shows up at all. Those are all website questions. This one is for the local service business whose most valuable search asset was never the website.
If you have not read what your Google Business Profile actually controls in local search, start there. It covers Google's relevance, distance and prominence framework and the profile work itself. This piece assumes that groundwork and only covers what AI changes.
Where your profile genuinely is the source of truth
Inside Google's world, place data and Business Profile data are the same thing. Your profile is how you edit your Maps listing, so anything Google builds that reads Maps is reading you.
Google has been wiring that connection in openly. In September 2025 it made Grounding with Google Maps generally available, a tool that lets any developer connect a Gemini model to "over 250 million businesses and places worldwide," using daily-updated Google Maps information and Google Maps user reviews as grounding sources. Google's stated example is exactly the thing an owner worries about: giving an AI application access to a restaurant's current hours, or whether a shop is temporarily closed.
That is a developer API rather than a statement about how AI Overviews rank anybody, and it is worth keeping those separate. But it settles the underlying question. Your hours, your category, your services, your description and your reviews are not just listing fields any more. They are model inputs, and they can end up spoken back to a customer inside an app that never shows them a map at all.
The relationship runs the other way too. Google now lets owners connect a Business Profile to the Gemini app to update hours and contact details, draft review replies and summarize customer feedback. And Google is using Gemini models to police Maps edits, catching policy-violating suggestions before they go live and emailing verified owners about important edits to their profiles. Your profile is being read, written and moderated by models on both sides now.
None of that changes the work. Google's own guidance on AI features and your website still says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary. It is the same profile, doing the same job, with a wider audience of machines reading it.
Where your profile cannot reach
Here is the part almost nobody tells small business owners.
Your Google Business Profile is Google's asset. OpenAI does not get a feed of it. Neither does Anthropic or Perplexity. When someone asks ChatGPT for a good plumber in Orangeville, every fact in that answer arrives from somewhere other than the profile you spent a Saturday filling in.
Where does it arrive from? For ChatGPT specifically, we now have a documented answer. On July 23, 2026, Yelp and OpenAI announced a data licensing deal that pipes Yelp's reviews, ratings, photos and business information into ChatGPT's local answers, with Yelp branding and links appearing when its content is used. Search Engine Land's coverage adds that a "Request a Quote" flow for contacting local service providers is part of it, and Yelp has since brought reservations and waitlists into ChatGPT as well. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal does not stop Yelp signing similar ones with other AI companies.
Everything else comes from the open web: your own website, directories, chamber of commerce listings, industry associations, local news, and the "best of" roundups somebody else wrote about your town. That is the raw material. If your business is thin or inconsistent across those, the answer a model gives is thin or inconsistent, no matter how immaculate your Google profile is.
A note for Canadian businesses before you go and spend a weekend on Yelp. Yelp's coverage and everyday use here are meaningfully thinner than in the United States, so the return is smaller than a US-focused article would tell you. Claiming your page and making sure the name, address, phone number and category are correct is still worth the twenty minutes, because it is free and it is now feeding a system that talks to customers. Building a Yelp review strategy on top of that is a much harder sell in most Ontario markets.
What actually carries weight in an AI answer
Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report scored AI search visibility for the first time, alongside its long-running local pack and local organic columns. The comparison is the most useful thing published on this question so far.
| Signal group | Local pack / Maps | AI search visibility |
|---|---|---|
| Citation signals | ~16% | ~25% |
| On-page signals | ~6% | ~22% |
| Review signals | ~22% | ~18% |
| Link signals | ~15% | ~15% |
| Google Business Profile signals | ~18% | ~12% |
| Behavioral signals | ~20% | ~4% |
Read the direction, not the decimals. Profile signals carry real weight in AI answers and less of it than they do in the map pack. Citations, meaning your business details listed consistently across other sites, roughly move up a notch. On-page content, the thing your website actually says, goes from nearly irrelevant to nearly the largest factor on the board.
The individual factors the panel scored highest for AI visibility tell the same story: being on expert-curated "best of" lists, having a dedicated page for each service you offer, prominence on industry-relevant domains, quality unstructured citations, and the authority of the third-party review sites you appear on.
Two caveats travel with those numbers, and the authors state both. This is 47 local search experts scoring 187 factors on a questionnaire, so it is informed opinion rather than measured data, and as Whitespark puts it, none of the experts have special access to the internal workings of Google's local search algorithm. The author also flagged that the AI column was the hardest to score, because experts were not sure whether they were rating ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, which are different systems with different inputs. Treat the table as a well-informed consensus about direction and not as arithmetic.
Is anyone actually asking AI for a local recommendation?
Enough to matter, and less decisively than the headlines suggest.
BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45% of consumers had used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, with ChatGPT at 31% and Google's AI Mode at 23%. That is a survey of 1,002 US adults, with the AI-specific questions answered by the 455 who had actually used AI that way in the past year. It is self-reported and it is American, so read it as a signal about direction rather than a measurement of your own market.
The more interesting number in that survey is what people do next. 88% of AI users fact-check what they are told, and 97% double-check the recommendation against a traditional review platform before acting on it. BrightLocal's own conclusion is that AI is functioning as a starting point for discovery rather than a replacement for it.
That reframes the whole exercise. Getting named in an AI answer does not win you the customer. It gets you onto a shortlist that the customer then goes and verifies, usually by looking at your reviews and your website. The AI answer is the introduction. Everything that closed the deal before still closes it now, which is why the reviews on your Google profile and the trust signals on your site have not lost any value.
Worth adding: "near me" and "[service] + [city]" searches on Google still tend to return the map pack rather than an AI Overview. You will find confident percentages online for how often AI Overviews appear on local queries. We are not going to repeat one, because the figures published in the same year range from about 7% to about 68%, and they cannot all be right. The pattern most people can observe for themselves is that transactional local searches still lean on the map pack, and that is the part your profile has always owned.
What to actually do about the gap
None of this is a new discipline. It is the local SEO you already knew, reordered, plus one genuinely new item.
- Keep the profile accurate, especially hours. Wrong hours on a listing annoy someone. Wrong hours quoted confidently by an assistant that never shows a map sends them to a locked door with no way to notice the mistake first.
- Pick the most specific primary category and fill out the services list properly. These are the machine-readable parts of the profile, and they are what a model matches against when someone describes what they need in their own words.
- Keep earning and answering reviews. Reviews are the third-largest AI signal in the Whitespark table and models quote review text directly, which means what your customers say about you is being repeated to strangers verbatim.
- Make your details identical everywhere. Same business name, address, phone and category on your website, Yelp, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, your chamber of commerce, and any industry directory that covers your trade. This is the biggest AI signal on the board and the one most small businesses have never audited. Inconsistency reads as uncertainty, and an uncertain model names your competitor instead.
- Give every service its own page on your own website. A single "Services" page listing nine things is nearly invisible to a system trying to answer a specific question. Nine real pages, each answering the question a customer would actually ask, is the on-page 22%. This is the same conclusion the rest of this series keeps arriving at from other directions.
- Get onto genuine local lists and into local press. The highest-scoring individual AI factor in the report was presence on expert-curated "best of" lists. There is no shortcut here, and buying your way onto a list farm is worse than doing nothing, because those are exactly the low-quality sources everyone is trying to filter out.
- Claim your Yelp page. Twenty minutes, free, and it is now a licensed input to the most-used assistant. Set expectations accordingly in Canada.
And a short list of what not to do. Do not buy an "AI local visibility" package that turns out to be a citation blast to 300 directories nobody reads. Do not keyword-stuff your business name to game an assistant, which violates Google's guidelines, risks suspension, and now runs into Gemini-powered edit moderation as well. Do not buy reviews. Do not let anyone tell you your website has been replaced by your profile, when on-page content is the single biggest thing separating the businesses that get named from the ones that do not.
The honest summary
Your Google Business Profile still matters, and it matters most for the search surface it always owned. What has changed is that it is no longer the whole answer, because the fastest-growing places people ask for recommendations cannot see it at all. The work that fills that gap is not new or exotic. It is consistency across the open web and a website that actually answers questions, which is the same conclusion every piece in this series has landed on from a different starting point.
If you want to see what an assistant currently says when someone asks for a business like yours, our free AI Visibility Grader asks the question three times and shows you all three answers, including who got named instead of you. And if you would rather hand the work over, that is what our AI search visibility service covers.
Curious what an assistant actually says about your business right now? Our free AI Visibility Grader asks a real customer question three times and shows you exactly what came back, including the five things holding your page down. No account, no credit card.
And because most of what decides an AI answer turns out to be ordinary website quality, our Website Grader checks the fundamentals underneath.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Google Business Profile data belongs to Google and is not shared with OpenAI. ChatGPT's local answers draw on licensed data, most notably a Yelp deal announced in July 2026 covering reviews, ratings, photos and business information, plus whatever it can retrieve from the open web including your own website and third-party directories.
Yes. Those run on Google's own place data, which is the same data you manage through your profile. Google's guidance is still that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI features, so the profile work itself is unchanged.
Slightly less, in relative terms, and not less useful. Whitespark's 2026 expert panel put profile signals at roughly 18% of local pack ranking weight but roughly 12% for AI search visibility, with citations and on-page content picking up the difference. That is a survey of 47 experts rather than measured data, so read it as direction.
More than before. On-page content jumps from roughly 6% of local pack weight to roughly 22% for AI search visibility in the same report. The profile answers who and where. Your website is what answers the actual question, and it is what most consumers check before they call.
Yes, in two ways. Review signals score highly for AI visibility, and models quote review text directly, so the specific wording customers use gets repeated back to prospective customers. Google Maps user reviews are also named as a grounding source in Google's own Maps grounding documentation.
Claim the page and make sure the details are right, because it is free and it is now feeding ChatGPT's local answers under a licensing deal. Do not build a review-generation strategy around it. Yelp's coverage and consumer use in Canada are much thinner than in the United States, so the effort is better spent on your Google reviews and your own site.
Ask buyer-style questions rather than questions about your business by name, logged out or in a private window, across more than one assistant, and repeat them. We covered the full method in [how to tell if your website shows up in AI search results](/blog/how-to-tell-if-website-shows-up-in-ai-search), and our free [AI Visibility Grader](/ai-visibility-grader) automates a version of it.
For most transactional local searches, yes. You will see wildly different published figures for how often AI Overviews replace local results, ranging from single digits to two-thirds within the same year, which is a good reason not to plan around any of them. The map pack has not gone anywhere, and your profile is still what wins it.
