findloc.ai blog

We ran 41,400 queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini across 690 US local-business markets, then ran them again seven days later. In 57% of markets the AI named a different business as #1. HVAC was worst at 69%; wedding venues most stable at 43%. Nobody has published this before — here is the data, the methodology, and what businesses should actually do about it.

Most GEO products sell you software to "optimise" your site. We do something different: every week we ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini what they recommend across 42+ local markets, and we publish the answers. The database is the asset; the dashboard is just one front-end.

Of 12 AI bots we track in robots.txt and log per request, only 7 have actually crawled findloc.ai. GPTBot alone is 73.8% of all traffic. ChatGPT-User — fired only when a human clicks a link inside a ChatGPT answer — fired 38 times, our cleanest evidence of real citation. Five bots (Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, claude-web, Perplexity-User, Bytespider) have not visited at all.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) makes your business citable by AI search engines. Eight things matter: schema.org markup, FAQ pages, /llms.txt, AI-crawler allowlist in robots.txt, sitemap, server-rendered HTML, consistent NAP data, and fresh content. We rebuilt findloc.ai around these and tracked the result.