The State of AI Visibility for Local Business
Customers are starting to ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI "who's the best [business] near me?" instead of scrolling search results. So we scanned 113 real local businesses across 11 industries to measure a simple question: when someone asks an AI, how well can it actually understand and recommend them?
Each site was run through a tool that reads a homepage the way an AI assistant does and scores it from 0 to 100 across the signals a model needs to recommend a business, what it does, where it serves, its services, structured data, contact details, pricing, hours, answers to common questions, and trust. The businesses were local companies in Austin, TX and Columbus, OH. Here is what AI sees.
The ranking, by industry
No industry averaged above a B. The best-performing niche was the one you might least expect, and the worst was the one that spends the most on how its sites look.
| Industry | Scanned | Invisible | A's | Avg (readable) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hair salons | 9 | 0 | 3 | 77 |
| Chiropractors | 8 | 2 | 0 | 76 |
| HVAC | 10 | 1 | 0 | 76 |
| Personal injury law | 9 | 1 | 0 | 75 |
| Auto repair | 9 | 1 | 1 | 75 |
| Gyms | 8 | 1 | 0 | 75 |
| Dentists | 16 | 3 | 3 | 73 |
| Plumbers | 18 | 1 | 1 | 71 |
| Roofers | 10 | 1 | 0 | 70 |
| Med spas | 8 | 2 | 1 | 69 |
| Real estate | 8 | 1 | 0 | 60 |
Four things we learned
1. Most are findable. Almost none are the one AI picks. Across every industry, the bulk of sites clustered in the B/C range, good enough for an AI to list them, not good enough for it to confidently recommend them. Only 9 of 99 readable sites (9%) reached an A. Being in the index is the old bar; being the business the model names is the new one, and few have cleared it.
2. Roughly 1 in 8 businesses is invisible. Fourteen of the 113 couldn't be read at all, the crawl loaded the page and found nothing usable, almost always heavy JavaScript or bot-protection. These businesses aren't scoring low; they're absent. When a customer asks an AI, they simply never come up, and their owners usually have no idea, because the site looks fine to a human.
3. Structured data is the single biggest differentiator. In every industry, the lowest scorers were the sites missing JSON-LD (schema.org) structured data. In auto repair, the shop without it landed 34 points below the leader in the same town. Schema is the machine-readable summary that hands an AI your facts instead of making it guess, and most owners have never heard of it.
4. Looking good and being legible are two different jobs. The clearest lesson came from comparing med spas (average 69, a quarter invisible) with hair salons (average 77, none invisible). The niche with the most cinematic, animation-heavy websites scored the worst; the one with simpler, text-forward sites scored the best. To an AI, a plain site that spells things out in words beats a gorgeous one that hides them in graphics.
The pattern under all of it: AI can almost always tell what a business does and roughly where. What it can't tell, and what decides who it recommends, is the specifics: pricing, hours, service area, and plain answers to the questions customers ask before they buy. When those live in readable text with structured data, the model quotes you. When they don't, it names a competitor it understood better.
What to do about it
None of the fixes are a rebuild. Make sure your site is readable text, not just images and scripts. Add JSON-LD structured data so AI reads your name, services, area, hours and reviews as facts. Answer your customers' real questions in plain language on the page. State your service area, services and pricing signals clearly. The gap between a B and an A, in every industry we checked, was a weekend of clearer content, not a new website.
Get your 0-100 AI-visibility score →The individual studies: plumbers, dentists, HVAC, personal injury law, med spas, roofers, auto repair, hair salons, realtors, chiropractors, and gyms. Related: why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business and how to show up in AI search.
Method: 113 local business homepages across Austin, TX and Columbus, OH, scanned in September 2026 with BotDesk's AI Visibility Checker. A spot-check across 11 industries, not a census; individual businesses are not named. "Invisible" means the page returned too little machine-readable content to score. "Readable average" excludes invisible sites.