ChatGPT says it can't see reviews, then says what customers love

Short answer: asked for the best garages, hairdressers or locksmiths in Britain, ChatGPT tells the customer what other customers say about a named business in 112 of its 488 answers: "Customers appreciate their knowledgeable staff who provide tailored security advice." Not one of the 176 praise sentences in those answers names a review site or gives a rating. In 29 of them, the same answer says: "I can't provide real-time recommendations or reviews". Gemini reports customer praise in 72 of its 488 answers, and says where it comes from - Google, Checkatrade, Facebook or Trustpilot - in 4.

It says it cannot read the reviews. Then it tells you what they say.

What was measured

The British study (collected July 31, 2026) put the same buyer questions ("What are the best garages in Leeds?") to ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini) and Gemini for 20 trades in up to 13 cities, through their APIs, without web search and without any location: 976 answers. Neither engine read a review page to answer. We extracted every sentence that attributes praise to customers - "patients praise", "guests appreciate", "clients rave about", "praised by local homeowners", "rave reviews" - with a pattern tested on 24 sentences first. That gave 351 sentences, and all 351 were read by hand: 262 attribute praise to a specific business; 89 are advice ("Look for brokers with positive reviews") or general statements, and were set aside. A sentence counts as anchored only if it names a review platform or gives a rating; the automatic marker also flagged "Google Ads", an advertising service, which we did not count. In the same answers we then looked for ChatGPT's own warning that it has no live data, and read all 69. On September 27 we measured what that warning usually comes before: it says it cannot recommend, then names eight businesses.

Hotels and salons for ChatGPT, dentists for Gemini

ChatGPT reports customer praise most often for garages (16 of 26 answers), hairdressers, beauty salons and driving schools (12 each) and hotels (10), where it writes in the guests' voice: "Guests love the contemporary rooms and the relaxing atmosphere." It never does so for a dentist. Gemini does the opposite on that trade: 8 of its 26 dentist answers carry what patients supposedly say - "Patients consistently praise them for being gentle and thorough." - and none of its hotel answers do. In 69 of the 112 answers where ChatGPT reports praise, it also warns that it has no live data or quotes its knowledge cutoff. In 29, reviews are named among what it cannot provide: "I can't provide real-time recommendations or reviews", followed in the same answer, about a Nottingham hairdresser, by "Customers often praise the personalized consultation and the attention to detail." The compliments repeat from one business to the next: "attention to detail" is the praise in 15 of ChatGPT's 112 answers. Gemini's 4 anchored sentences are all of one kind, a volume of reviews on a platform: "They have a massive volume of positive reviews across Google and Checkatrade.", said of a gas engineer in Leeds. We did not check whether those reviews exist.

What it means if you are the business

When ChatGPT speaks for your customers, it works from memory: "customers appreciate their transparency" comes with no review to check, and the same few compliments come back for business after business. A model can only repeat what has been written about you in words, somewhere it could have read: your own pages, and the reviews your customers leave. Ask a happy customer to say in a sentence what they valued, not only to leave stars, and quote them on your site with their permission. That is a reasonable step, not a lever with a known effect: we did not measure what makes a model pass praise on, and 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 switched on, an assistant can read real reviews; here it could not.
• Only the British study was read by hand. An automatic count over our seven other studies (United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, France, Brazil), not read sentence by sentence, finds the same order in each - ChatGPT ahead of Gemini - narrowly in Brazil.
• We did not check whether the praise is true, nor whether the reviews Gemini mentions exist.
• Each question was asked once, on July 31, 2026.