How AI assistants find local businesses: five front doors, not one

When someone asks ChatGPT for a good plumber near them, the answer takes about two seconds. Those two seconds feel like magic, and a whole industry has grown up around treating them that way. But OpenAI has published a plain description of what happens inside them, and it is worth reading slowly.

By OpenAI’s own account, ChatGPT’s search sometimes partners with outside search providers, and a search provider is simply the search engine an assistant quietly asks on your behalf. When it does, it typically rewrites your question into one or more plain search queries, the short phrases you would type into a search box yourself. OpenAI’s example is a local one: type “What are some good restaurants near me?” and, if your internet address places you in San Francisco, ChatGPT may turn that into the search “top restaurants San Francisco.” The same page names the providers it works with, and Microsoft’s Bing is one of them.

Hold on to that picture. At the exact moment an AI assistant decides which local businesses to mention, it is often behaving like a person typing a very ordinary search into a very ordinary search engine. Which means there is no single “the AI” for your business to impress. There are several assistants, each one a different front door onto a search system, and most of those systems are places a Houston business can already be found. The machinery is more knowable, and more reachable, than the hype suggests.

How each AI assistant finds local businesses

The differences between the assistants are not trade secrets. Each company documents its own machinery, and the short version reads like a plumbing diagram.

ChatGPT partners with outside search engines, as above. OpenAI names Bing and Shopify among its search providers, alongside content that partners supply directly. When ChatGPT names a business, there is a fair chance a Bing search sat underneath the answer.

Microsoft Copilot is Bing end to end. Microsoft’s own documentation describes the flow: your question becomes a Bing search, Bing returns results, and the assistant writes its answer from what came back.

Perplexity built its own index, which is a search engine’s saved catalog of the pages it has read. The catalog is filled by Perplexity’s own bot, a program that opens web pages and takes in what they say, with no person at the screen. Perplexity states plainly that this bot exists to surface and link websites in search results, and is not used to train its AI models. Reading your pages to recommend you and reading them to train on are different jobs, and Perplexity separates them on purpose.

Claude rides a search system its maker operates. Anthropic documents a search bot of its own that reads the web to improve the results Claude’s answers draw from, separate from anything to do with training.

Brave, the search engine inside the Brave browser and its AI answers, keeps an independent catalog of the web. Its bot is the odd one out: by Brave’s own description it does not announce itself under a name of its own, and it will not read any page that Google’s bot is not allowed to read. A site that shuts Google out shuts Brave out with it, usually without knowing.

Google’s AI answers are not a separate system at all. Google’s guidance says AI is built into Search and integral to how it functions, so there is no separate door and no separate way to allow or refuse the AI features. Whatever Google search can see of your site, its AI answers see too.

Notice what falls out of that list. The newer companies give a site owner more say than the old giant does, not less: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity each run a separately controllable search bot and post the exact addresses it visits from, so anyone can verify who is really at the door. Google offers one switch for everything. Five different plumbing systems, and most of them are inspectable.

Why Bing quietly matters again

For years, most local businesses treated Bing as the search engine nobody uses. The list above says otherwise: Copilot is built on Bing, and OpenAI names Bing among ChatGPT’s search providers. Two of the biggest assistant front doors lead back to the same place.

One small early study points the same direction. In February 2025, Seer Interactive, a search marketing firm, compared 100 searches run through ChatGPT’s search against Bing’s own listings and found that more than 87% of the sources ChatGPT named matched Bing’s top regular results. That was 100 searches, more than a year ago, on machinery that keeps changing, so treat it as a direction rather than a law. But the direction agrees with what the vendors themselves publish. Being easy to find in Bing puts a local business in front of two major AI assistants at once.

The answers differ because the plumbing differs

Ask three assistants the same question about your trade in your neighborhood and you will usually get three different lists of names. That is not the machines being moody. Copilot is reading Bing’s catalog, Perplexity is reading its own, Brave is reading a third, and Google is reading Google. Different catalogs, different results.

What makes an assistant pick one business over another once it is looking, the matching facts, the complete pages, the reviews, is its own subject. The point here sits one step earlier: the assistants are not one audience. They are several audiences that do not all read the same sources, which is why “are we visible to AI?” has no single answer, only several smaller, checkable ones.

Three checks worth doing this week

Search for your business on Bing. Most owners have watched their Google results for years and have never once looked at Bing. Type in your business name, then your trade plus your part of Houston, and see what comes back. If your business is hard to find there, you now know two assistant doors it is missing from, and the unglamorous work of being findable in ordinary search is where that gets fixed.

Ask more than one assistant about your trade. Not just ChatGPT. Put the same question to Copilot and Perplexity too, phrased the way a customer would ask it, and write down who gets named where. You are not looking for a score; you are looking at several different front doors, one at a time.

Retire the phrase “the AI.” There is no single machine deciding your fate, so there is no single verdict to chase. There are a handful of search systems, most of them documented by the companies that run them, each reachable on its own terms.

None of those checks costs a dollar, and together they replace a vague worry with a map. The map also shows why the work is coordination work: a business has to be findable, and stay findable, through every door at once. That coordination is the job of generative engine optimization, the practice of keeping one business visible at every door. The assistants will keep changing their machinery, but they are plumbing, not magic: pipes with documented ends, most of them running through search engines that have been findable all along. If you would rather walk those doors with a guide than alone, tell us about your business and we will map where it stands at each one.

Frequently asked questions

Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing for search?

OpenAI names Microsoft’s Bing as one of ChatGPT’s outside search providers, along with content supplied directly by partners. It does not name Google. For a local question, ChatGPT typically rewrites what you asked into an ordinary city-scoped search and sends it to a provider, so a business that is easy to find in Bing is easier for ChatGPT to mention.

How do AI assistants find local businesses?

Most AI assistants answer local questions by running a search behind the scenes. ChatGPT rewrites your question into a plain search query and sends it to an outside search engine. Copilot searches Bing. Perplexity and Brave search catalogs of the web they built themselves. The assistant then writes its answer from whatever that search returns.

Do all AI assistants use the same search results?

No. Each assistant rides a different search system. Copilot reads Bing, Perplexity reads its own catalog of the web, Brave reads another independent catalog, and Google’s AI answers come out of Google search itself. That is why the same question, asked in the same city, gets different business names from different assistants.

How can I check if my business shows up in AI search?

Ask the assistants directly. Put your trade and your neighborhood into ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity, and note which businesses each one names. Then search for your business on Bing, because two of the biggest assistants lean on Bing’s results. Ten minutes of checking tells you more than any headline about AI.