When Tampa agency Evoke Strategy tested 28,488 local businesses across nine Florida cities this month, running 1,944 searches through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, most of the resulting headlines fixed on a single number: 94% of businesses never appeared at all. Regular readers of this pillar won’t be shocked. We’ve covered before how rarely AI mentions local businesses by name, and how often it gets basic details wrong when it does.
The more useful number sits one layer down, inside the 5.9% of businesses that did appear somewhere. Among that lucky minority, 58.7% showed up on only one of the four AI tools tested. Just 5.7% appeared across all four. Being findable to ChatGPT turned out to say almost nothing about whether Gemini, Claude or Google’s AI Overviews had ever heard of the same business.
That reframes the problem. AI visibility isn’t a single hurdle to clear. It’s four separate, barely correlated contests running at once, and most owners who think they’ve solved it have only won one of them.
1. Why the models don’t agree with each other
It helps to remember that these tools aren’t built the same way underneath. ChatGPT blends what it learned during training with live web browsing when it chooses to use it. Google’s AI Overviews sit on top of Google’s own search index and Business Profile data, giving it a natural home advantage for anything already well organised there. Gemini draws on a related but distinct mix of Google’s index and its own training data. Claude leans more heavily on web search results fetched at the moment of the question.
Each of those pipelines pulls from a different slice of the internet, weighted differently, refreshed on a different schedule. A business that has spent a year tidying its Google Business Profile has done real work, but that work speaks fluently to Google’s AI Overviews and only faintly, if at all, to the other three. There is no single lever that moves all four at once.
2. This isn’t only a Florida problem
It’s tempting to file this under American local SEO news and move on, but the underlying behaviour is the same in the UK. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of US consumers now use an AI tool to find a local business, up from 6% a year earlier, a sevenfold jump that has pushed AI ahead of Yelp and TripAdvisor as a discovery channel. ChatGPT accounts for 31% of that usage, Google AI Mode 23%, with Gemini and Claude some way behind but rising.
Crucially, people don’t stick to one tool. A customer might ask ChatGPT for a shortlist on their phone, then get a different answer from the Google AI Overview that appears when they search the same thing a minute later. Each of those moments is a separate roll of the dice for the business being asked about, and most owners have only ever checked one.
3. The platform lottery, by the numbers
Here is how Evoke Strategy’s coverage broke down among the businesses that appeared anywhere at all. The pattern is clear: partial coverage is the norm, and full coverage is rare.
| Platforms appeared on | Share of visible businesses |
|---|---|
| 1 platform only | 58.7% |
| 2 platforms | 24.3% |
| 3 platforms | 11.3% |
| All 4 platforms | 5.7% |
A business sitting in that top row, visible on one platform only, is in exactly the position that feels most deceptive to run. Everything might look fine when the owner checks the one AI tool they’ve heard of, while three other tools their customers are increasingly using return nothing at all.
4. What actually closes the gap between platforms
None of the four models is working from nothing. Each is looking for the same underlying signal in different places: consistent, specific, recent information about a business that it can find, trust and repeat with confidence. A review profile that is thin, contradictory across platforms, or months out of date gives every one of the four models less to work with, not just one.
The businesses in Evoke Strategy’s all-four-platforms group almost certainly share the boring, unglamorous traits that make a business legible to any retrieval system: matching name, address and opening hours everywhere they’re listed, a steady drip of recent and specific reviews rather than a pile from three years ago, and a presence that shows up in more than one place online. None of that is exotic. Most of it is simply neglected.
What this means right now
If you’ve only ever checked one AI tool for what it says about your business, you’ve checked a quarter of the picture at best. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews the same question a customer would type, in the same session, and compare the answers side by side.
Given that even the businesses doing everything right only had a 5.7% chance of showing up everywhere this month, don’t expect four identical answers. Expect to learn exactly where the gaps are, which is the only way to start closing them.
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