What Is AI Search? How People Find Businesses Through ChatGPT and Google AI

Something shifted in how people find businesses. Instead of typing keywords into Google, scrolling through a list of links, and comparing options across multiple tabs, a growing number of people just ask ChatGPT or Google AI a question and act on whatever comes back. “Good Italian restaurant with outdoor seating in Austin.” “Reliable moving company in Brooklyn.” The AI reads the question, pulls together what it knows, and names specific businesses with reasons behind each pick.

That’s AI search, and the key difference from traditional search is who does the choosing. On Google, the person browses and decides. In AI search, the language model evaluates the options and makes a recommendation. The path from question to phone call gets much shorter, and a business that makes it into the AI’s answer captures that customer almost by default.

We tracked AI recommendations across seven industries and six cities and found that three or four businesses typically captured the vast majority of mentions per category, while dozens of qualified competitors never came up at all.

The major AI search platforms each work a little differently. ChatGPT combines its language model with live web search. Google AI Overviews appear at the top of Google’s own search results page, adding an AI summary above the traditional links. Perplexity was built from the ground up as an AI search engine, with inline citations for every claim. Each platform draws on different data and reaches different conclusions, which is why the same question about the same city can produce completely different business recommendations depending on where someone asks.

AI search is still growing and Google still dominates overall volume. But for recommendation-style queries, the shift is already meaningful enough that the businesses showing up in AI answers are getting customers that their competitors don’t even know they’re missing. The set of practices for getting into those answers is called generative engine optimization, and it builds on many of the same fundamentals as traditional SEO.