You rank first on Google. The AI assistants do not name you.

A figure has been circulating for a few days, and it deserves a close look. SOCi's 2026 local visibility index, reported by Search Engine Land, measured nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 brands. The result: ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of them, Gemini 11%, Perplexity 7.4% - against 35.9% for Google's local pack. Hence the line that went around the industry: AI visibility is three to thirty times harder to earn than local ranking.

The same body of work puts at 45% the share of consumers who used an AI tool to find a local business this year, against 6% last year. A channel multiplied by seven, in which almost nobody is named.

A national average tells a tradesperson nothing about what to do on Monday. So we asked the question at the scale they live it: on their query, in their town, are the names that win Google the ones the AI cites?

The protocol, this morning

Five queries, three markets, two trades: plumber in Lyon, bakery in Bordeaux, plumber in Manchester, bakery in Bristol, plumber in São Paulo. For each we read Google's first page and noted the businesses it surfaces. Then, the same morning, we put the same question word for word to the three assistants.

First surprise: Google's page one holds almost no businesses

Before AI even enters the picture, one finding changes how you read all the rest. Across the 36 results of those five first pages, three are a business's own site. Three.

"Ranking first on Google" for these queries is not something a business achieves. It is a directory that ranks first.

Second surprise: what Google surfaces, the AI does not pick up

Those directories do name businesses. Twenty-two of them across the four markets where page one surfaces any. Here is how many each assistant names:

The detail matters. In Bordeaux, Gemini gets a clean sweep - Maison Lamour, Blé en Herbe, Grain, De la Farine et des Mains, all four. In Bristol it finds three of six, Perplexity two. In Lyon, Gemini finds only one, Blicko, and Perplexity none.

Manchester: nobody agrees with anybody

The sharpest case is British. Of the five plumbers Google's first page surfaces, all three assistants name zero. It is not that they stay silent: they name other companies.

Gemini offers Manchester Plumbing and Heating, JB7, Bumblebee, CC Plumbing, PlumbServNW, Monton. Perplexity offers Bee Heated MCR, LT Builders, SR Plumbing, Nelson Plumbing & Heating, HEY Group. Two lists of five or six names, nothing in common with each other, nothing in common with Google. Three rankings of the same trade in the same city, and three separate worlds.

São Paulo: the market where the platform IS the answer

The Brazilian case deserves separating out, because it does not read like the others. On Google's first page for "melhor encanador São Paulo" there is not one independent plumber - only matchmaking platforms: oHub, GetNinjas, Encanador SP.

And the assistants? They name the same ones. Gemini gives GetNinjas, Triider, oHub; Perplexity gives Triider, GetNinjas, oHub, Solutudo. In that market, "how do I get cited" has a simple and unwelcome answer: rank well on the platform everybody cites.

One necessary note about ChatGPT

ChatGPT's zero needs an honest explanation, without which it is unfair. We query it through its programming interface, without web search: it answers from memory. That is exactly the distinction we measured on 10 August - an engine that does not search describes what it retained months ago, not today's market.

Across our five queries it barely named a business at all: it answers with criteria - "where to look", "check the registration", "ask for a written quote" - and on Bristol it returned nothing whatsoever. That is consistent with the 1.2% in the SOCi index, and it is information in itself: if your customers go through the ChatGPT app, they see something an API does not. Test it yourself in the app.

What to do on Monday morning

The limits, as always

Five queries, three markets, a single morning: a sounding, not a census. Our "Google page one" comes from a web search interface rather than the Maps local pack, and that interface is hosted in the United States - so geography may weigh on the results. Name matches were re-read by hand, one by one.

What remains, though, depends on none of those caveats: of twenty-two businesses Google puts forward, one assistant names eight, another three, the third none. The ranking you paid for does not travel into the answer by itself. You can check it on your own name in sixty seconds, free, no account.