The AI recommends you. It does not say how to reach you.

Google has just added links to its AI answers. A "Further Exploration" section, labels for publications you subscribe to, context around in-text links: five changes announced this summer, under pressure from an estimated 58% drop in click-through rate, antitrust suits and European investigations.

That whole debate is about publishers - the sites whose articles the AI summarises. Nobody is asking the question from the other side of the counter: when an assistant recommends a business, does it give the customer any way to reach it?

We have the data to answer, and it needed no new calls: the three national studies we published this summer - France on 5 August, United Kingdom on 31 July, Brazil on 6 August - total 4,092 real answers, across 39 cities and some sixty trade-city pairs, split evenly between ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity (1,364 each).

The result, engine by engine

For every answer we looked for three things: a link, a phone number, a postal address.

The most used assistant in the world names businesses in nearly every answer - and never says how to reach them.

We must be precise about what that zero means, or it misleads. ChatGPT names plenty of businesses: asked about restaurants in Lyon it cites Paul Bocuse, La Mère Brazier, Le Café des Fédérations. What it never does is give an address, a phone number or a link. The customer leaves with a name to type in somewhere else.

We checked that zero rather than believing it. A deliberately very loose pattern - any run of digits that could look like a number - finds only 19 answers out of 4,092, and the first three are price ranges ("15-100"), not phone numbers. Phone numbers are simply absent from AI answers.

And when there is a link, where does it lead?

Perplexity is the only one of the three that publishes its sources. Across the 4,092 answers it cited a page 21,571 times, spread over 5,774 different domains.

To tell a business from a platform without guessing, we use a simple signal: a domain cited in five or more different sectors no longer describes a trade - one site cannot be a plumber, a dentist and a baker at once. There are 84 of them. Between them they carry 24% of all citations.

In other words: one link in four leads not to a business but to the place where it is listed. The click Google is trying to give back to publishers, the assistant gives first to a forum and a directory.

What this changes for a business

The practical consequence is unwelcome and worth stating plainly: being cited is not enough. On the two engines that almost never give contact details, your name has to be distinctive enough to survive a second search - the one the customer will run to find you. A common name is lost at that step, and we have measured that mechanism another way.

On the third, the one that always gives a link, the question becomes: does that link point at you, or at the directory that lists you? In one case in four, it is the directory.

What to do on Monday morning

The limits, as always

These answers were collected in late July and early August 2026: they describe that state, and we have shown elsewhere that AI answers move from one day to the next. Address detection is a floor, not an exact count - it misses British street names with no type word ("25 Deansgate") and the Brazilian order where the number follows the street. Perplexity's real rate is therefore at least 8%, not exactly 8%.

Finally, the domain analysis covers Perplexity only, the sole engine of the three that publishes its sources - which is information in itself. On the other two, nobody can check where the answer came from, and they do not say.