We checked what AI says about 10 real local businesses. The average score was 20 out of 100.

Finding 1: Average AI Visibility Score — 20/100

Scores ranged from 13 to 28 on our 0–100 scale. Not one of the ten cleared 30. On average these businesses appeared in just 38% of AI answers about their own specialty in their own city — meaning most of the time a potential customer asks AI about their market, they simply aren't in the answer.

Finding 2: In 6 of 10 markets, AI recommended a competitor more often than the business itself

This is the expensive part. The engines don't return empty answers — they recommend someone:

• In 6 of 10 audits, a single competing business was named more often than the business we audited. In 9 of 10, at least one competitor was named at least as often.
• The worst case: a business mentioned in 2 of 6 answers while one rival was named in 4 — twice the visibility, same market, same questions.
• Across just the ten audits' top-five competitor lists, the engines named 49 distinct competing businesses. The recommendations are specific, confident, and going to your rivals by name.

Finding 3: Google rank didn't predict AI visibility

Several of the audited businesses rank on Google's first page for their core keyword — exact-match domains, decades of SEO investment. Their scores: still 13–28. AI engines synthesize answers from directories, “best {service} in {city}” listicles, review consensus across platforms, and editorial mentions. That's a different — and largely unmonitored — surface than the one local SEO optimizes.

Finding 4: Visibility within a market is winner-take-most

In several cities one business dominated the AI answers — named in 4 of 6 runs while everyone else flickered in and out. The engines appear to converge on one or two “consensus picks” per local market and distribute the remaining mentions thinly. If the consensus pick isn't you, every AI-assisted buyer in your city is being steered to the same competitor, every day.

Methodology

10 US businesses (5 personal-injury law firms, 5 med spas), 9 metro areas, audited 2026-06-12 via the AskedAbout production pipeline: buyer-intent questions per business submitted to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude; answers parsed for business and competitor mentions by a judge model; score combines mention rate, prominence, and consistency. Audited businesses anonymized — this is benchmark data, not a callout. n=10 and we'll say so; we'll re-publish as the sample grows.

Check your own number

The average is 20/100, but the spread (13–28) means the only number that matters is yours — and whether the competitor AI keeps naming is who you think it is.

More from the same corpus: which AI engine recommends a business least (ChatGPT, by a wide margin) and why AI answers change every time you ask. Deciding which tool should monitor this for you? See the AI visibility tools compared — most are monthly subscriptions; ours is a one-time $79 audit.