19,561 business names, two phone numbers

Short answer: across 3,600 answers from ChatGPT and Gemini in four countries, the assistants named 19,561 businesses and gave a phone number twice. Seven answers gave a street address. Fewer than one named business in fifty came with a link to its own site. The AI hands your customer a name, not a way to reach you: the next step is a second search, for your name, and that is the search you have to win.

The answer ends with your name. The sale starts with the next search.

What was measured

Our four studies, re-read on September 28, 2026: the same buyer questions ("the best plumbers in Austin", "a good dentist in Lyon") put to ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini) and Gemini through their APIs, without web search, in the United States (collected September 13, 2026), the United Kingdom (July 31), France (July 30) and Brazil (August 6). 3,600 answers in all, 3,374 of which name at least one business: 19,561 names, counted with the cleaning rules of the previous editions. In each answer we looked for anything that lets a customer reach a business: a phone number (any run of nine digits or more, in national and international formats), a street address written the way each country writes it, and a link. The detectors were tested on real formats from all four countries before counting. The first version missed French numbers, written in five pairs, and was corrected before this edition.

The links point to registries more often than to businesses

Links do appear, in 934 answers out of 3,600, and almost all of them are Gemini's: 869 of its 1,800 answers carry one, against 65 of ChatGPT's. But a link is not a way to reach the business named. At most 212 of those 934 answers link to the site of a business they name; the other 722 send the reader to a register, a directory or a regulator. In the United Kingdom, the Gas Safe Register is linked in 50 answers and NICEIC in 20. In France, societe.com appears in 28 answers and Orias, the register of insurance intermediaries, in 17. For lawyers, Chambers and Legal 500. The generous matching behind the 212 also counts platforms such as Zocdoc and Super Lawyers, so the true figure is lower.

What it means if you are the business

The assistant's answer ends with your name. Whatever comes next, a call, a visit, a booking, starts with your customer typing that name into a search engine or a map, usually with the city. That second search is where you are won or lost, and three things decide it. Your name has to be findable on its own: a business that shares its name with others loses the customer at the exact moment the AI sent them (when your business name is not unique). Your page title and your map listing have to carry the name and the city together, and only 30% of home pages write their city in the title (the door is open, nobody says where). And when the answer does give a link, it is often your trade's official register: being listed there, under the exact name you use everywhere else, is part of being found (what AI tells customers to check).

What this does not prove

• These are the models' answers through their APIs, without web search: the way our audit asks, not what the consumer apps always show. ChatGPT or Gemini with search switched on can attach map cards with phone numbers and addresses. What we measure is what the model says from its own knowledge, which is also what the reader gets when no card is shown.
• Four studies collected between July 30 and September 13, 2026, one pass per question. The model versions have moved since, and nothing here measures that drift.
• The detectors look for an absence, so they were built wide and tested on real formats: seven phone formats and eight address formats across the four countries. A number written out in words, or in an unusual layout, would still escape them.
• The "at most 212 answers" and "≤ 1.8%" figures come from a generous match between a domain and a business name. They include platforms and a few false matches: they are ceilings, not estimates.
• Nothing here says the missing number costs a sale. A customer may find you in one search; the measurement only shows that the answer does not do it for them.