ChatGPT says ask people you know, 596 times. Gemini, 13

Short answer: asked for the best plumbers, dentists or estate agents, ChatGPT tells the customer to go and ask the people they know in 596 of its 2,016 answers: "Ask friends, family, or neighbors for recommendations." Gemini says it in 13 of 2,015. Instead, Gemini does the asking for them: in 133 answers it names a business and says its reputation comes from neighbourhood forums, "frequently cited in local neighborhood forums (like Nextdoor)". One engine hands the customer back to word of mouth. The other reports what word of mouth supposedly says, about a business it has just named.

ChatGPT says: ask your neighbours. Gemini says: your neighbours already said.

What was measured

Six studies asked in English: the United States (collected September 13, 2026), the United Kingdom (July 31) and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore (October 16). The same buyer questions ("What are the best plumbers in Leeds?") were put to ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini) and Gemini through their APIs, without web search and without any location; the British study also asked Perplexity. We removed the cities answered for another place of the same name, which leaves 4,519 answers. Each sentence was classed: it sends the customer to people they know ("Ask friends, family, or neighbors for recommendations"), it sends them to a neighbourhood forum (Nextdoor, a local Facebook group, Reddit), or it credits a named business's reputation to such a forum ("frequently cited on local forums (like Reddit’s r/Philadelphia) as the go-to shop"). The classifier was tested on sentences before any count, then corrected twice after reading what it got wrong: "they rely heavily on word-of-mouth" describes a business and tells the customer nothing, and "outdoor/indoor" is not a subreddit. In the final pass, 25 ChatGPT sentences drawn at random, all 13 Gemini sentences and 30 reputation sentences drawn at random were read: all were correctly classed. On September 27 we looked at what precedes much of this advice: it says it cannot recommend, then it names eight businesses.

The trades where the AI hands the customer back to their neighbours

The split holds in all six countries, and it follows the trade. ChatGPT tells the customer to ask people they know in 69 of its 90 answers about estate agents, 45 of 64 about lawyers and 75 of 116 about dentists, and never for a hotel, a restaurant or a bakery. It also sends them to Nextdoor or a local Facebook group in 274 answers. Gemini almost never says "ask around". When neighbours appear in its answers, they have already spoken, and about a named business: a plumber "often cited in neighborhood forums (like Nextdoor) as a go-to for standard plumbing repairs", an electrician "frequently mentioned in local community groups (like Nextdoor) for being honest", a garage "frequently cited on local forums (like Reddit Bristol and Nextdoor)", aircon servicing "frequently cited in local forums (like HardwareZone and neighborhood Facebook groups)" in Singapore. It does so 26 times for plumbers and 24 for electricians, the trades where ChatGPT sends customers to their neighbours most. ChatGPT never credits a business's reputation to a forum. Perplexity, asked only in the British study, does it once in 488 answers and never tells the customer to ask people they know.

What it means if you are the business

If you are a plumber, an electrician, a dentist or an estate agent, the answer often ends by sending your next customer to the people around them, and those people decide. Make it easy for a happy customer to pass your name on: the same business name on the van, the invoice, the website and the Google profile, so that "ask the plumber we used" leads to one findable name. Where neighbourhood groups exist, be the one who answers a question in your trade under your own name, and never post as a customer: Gemini credits these groups with a business's reputation, and a reputation built by fake posts is the kind that gets found out. Nothing here guarantees being named.

What this does not prove

• These are the models' answers through their APIs, without web search and without the user's location: the way our audit asks. With search, Gemini may read real forum pages; here it cannot have.
• We did not check whether the forums Gemini cites actually mention the businesses it names. Some of them, such as Nextdoor or private Facebook groups, are not public pages.
• The classifier was checked by reading samples, not every sentence; a sentence written in an unusual way can be misclassed.
• Each question was asked once, between July and October 2026.