45% of consumers now use AI to find local businesses, according to BrightLocal's 2026 research — up from 6% just a year earlier. That is the fastest shift in local discovery since mobile search, and it changes what a business website has to be good at: not persuading a person who already arrived, but being readable to the assistant that decides whether to mention you at all.
Read together: usage is mainstream, recommendation is rare, and the crawlers doing the reading see only raw HTML. The bottleneck is not demand — it is what the assistant can read.
The third-party numbers above are their authors' measurements; we cite them and never blend them into ours. What we measure ourselves is the supply side: across 2,528 scanned small-business websites, only 46% had structured business data an assistant can quote, 29% had no meta description at all, and a third scored under 50 overall. The gap between 45% of consumers asking and 1.2% of businesses being recommended is made of exactly these missing building blocks — the full breakdown is in our statistics page.
It is BrightLocal's 2026 figure, and the year-earlier baseline in the same research was 6% — the growth, not the absolute level, is the finding. We cite the number with its source and keep it separate from our own scan data.
Because an assistant can only recommend what it can read. SOCi found 1.2% of 350,000 locations ever recommended by ChatGPT; our own 2,528-site corpus shows why — fewer than half of small-business sites carry structured data, and the major AI crawlers do not run JavaScript.
The consumer and recommendation numbers are from BrightLocal (2026) and SOCi (350,000 locations); the crawler-traffic share is from Vercel (2026). The website-side aggregates are our own, from 2,528 real scans published in the AI-visibility directory.
Treat AI readability as a channel. Check whether your site's facts survive a raw-HTML fetch, whether your robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers, and whether your structured data is populated — the free scan measures all three in about a minute.
Where does your site stand? The scan is free, takes about 60 seconds, and needs no account. It fetches your homepage exactly the way GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do and tells you what they receive.