More people now ask a chatbot where to get their car fixed or their dog groomed. According to SOCi's 2026 Local Discovery Index, published October 5, 52% of U.S. consumers used an AI tool to find or research a local business in the last 30 days, up from 9% a year earlier. AI local search has gone from a curiosity to a normal first step in about twelve months.
The same survey shows the trust has not kept up. Among AI users, 67% say they have been given wrong information about a local business at least once, and only 27% say their trust in AI grew over the past year. So people check. As eMarketer summarized it, 81% take a verification step after an AI recommendation, usually reviews, the business's own social pages or a regular search, before they call. Only 19% go straight from the AI answer to contacting the business.
AI local search is a moving target
The answers themselves are unstable. AI Syndicate's October report put the same local questions to 12 AI assistants and found that the business named first changed in 52% of markets between September and October. Only 22% of markets had one consistent top pick across three ways of asking. Chasing a single ranking in that environment is mostly guesswork, and anyone promising a guaranteed spot in AI answers is selling more certainty than exists.
What a business can control is the material the assistants and the customers both check. Keep your name, address, phone number and hours identical across Google, Bing, Yelp and Apple Maps. Put your services, service area and price ranges in plain text on your site, not inside an image. Turn the questions you answer every week into a simple Q&A page. Respond to reviews, since 72% of SOCi's respondents said they favor businesses that do. None of this is new advice. AI simply raised the cost of skipping it, because the customer now cross-checks you within minutes.
It is also worth asking a few assistants about your own business every month or so and writing down what they get wrong. That is a small, human-reviewed habit, and it tells you exactly which facts need fixing. We are curious what owners are seeing: when you ask an AI about your business, is it right?