AI Search
Where AI assistants actually get local business data
Todd, Founder — Hitman MarketingPublished Updated
AI assistants recommend local businesses from listing data, not from crawling websites at the moment of the question. ChatGPT leans on the Foursquare Places API and the Bing index, Siri on Apple Business Connect, Copilot on Bing Places, and Perplexity on its own web index plus Yelp and Reddit. Google Business Profile is not among their primary sources.
Key takeaways
- ChatGPT names local businesses from the Foursquare Places API and the Bing index. Google Business Profile is not among its primary sources.
- Siri and Apple Maps read Apple Business Connect; Microsoft Copilot reads Bing Places; Perplexity draws on its web index plus Yelp and Reddit.
- Every claimable listing in that data layer is free: business.foursquare.com, businessconnect.apple.com, and bingplaces.com.
- Corrections generally take two to six weeks to propagate into assistant answers, so claim first and schedule the check-back.
- The claim order that covers the most users fastest: Foursquare, then Bing Places, then Apple Business Connect, then a Yelp and Google Business Profile consistency pass.
Where does ChatGPT find local businesses to recommend?
ChatGPT finds local businesses in licensed places data, checked against the Bing index for live lookups — most of the businesses it names first come from the Foursquare Places API. Google Business Profile is not a primary source for those answers, so a strong Google presence is no substitute.
Ask ChatGPT for a plumber in Clearwater and it does not run a Google search on your behalf. It consults places data it licenses — Foursquare first — and confirms details against the Bing index. If a business is absent from that data, or present with a stale category, a dead phone number, or an old address, the assistant either skips it or repeats the error with complete confidence.
About the share, since this page is where the number lives: the widely quoted "60–70% from Foursquare" traces to one 2025 test by the Spanish consultant Natzir Turrado, who read ChatGPT's internal places payload across fifty prompts in five Spanish cities. That is the only attributable measurement of it anyone has published. It is directionally useful and far too small a sample to state as a rate for the United States, so this page names the mechanism as dominant and leaves the percentage to its author.
Foursquare's consumer app faded years ago, and its public listing pages closed with it in April 2025. That has a consequence worth stating plainly: there is no free way left to look up what a Foursquare record says about any business, including your own, short of the business portal's verification step. Anyone telling you how many local records sit untended there — including earlier versions of this post — is guessing.
Which listing feeds each AI assistant?
Every major AI assistant reads its own slice of the listing layer. ChatGPT reads Foursquare and the Bing index; Siri and Apple Maps read Apple Business Connect; Microsoft Copilot reads Bing Places; Perplexity draws on its web index along with Yelp and Reddit; Google's surfaces read Google Business Profile. No single listing covers all of them.
Nothing on that list is exotic. These are ordinary business listings, claimable in an afternoon at no cost. The point is the shape of the coverage map: five rows, and a local SEO engagement that stops at Google leaves the other four untouched.
| Assistant | Primary local data source | Cost to claim |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Foursquare Places API, Bing index | Free |
| Siri / Apple Maps | Apple Business Connect | Free |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing Places | Free |
| Perplexity | Web index, Yelp, Reddit | Yelp is free to claim |
| Gemini / Google AI Overviews / local pack | Google Business Profile | Free |
How do you claim Foursquare, Apple Business Connect, and Bing Places?
Claiming each listing follows the same generic flow: create a free account on the platform's business portal, locate or add the business, complete the verification step, and confirm the name, address, phone, hours, and categories match the website exactly. The three portals are business.foursquare.com, businessconnect.apple.com, and bingplaces.com.
Budget patience after the claim: corrected listing data generally takes two to six weeks to start surfacing in assistant answers, and content and entity work compounds over months, not days. Claim now precisely because the payoff lags.
- Foursquare — business.foursquare.com. Create a free account, search for your business (add it if it is absent), verify ownership, then correct categories, hours, and contact details to match your website.
- Apple Business Connect — businessconnect.apple.com. Sign in with an Apple ID, claim or add your location, complete Apple's verification, and confirm every core fact.
- Bing Places — bingplaces.com. Create an account, claim or add the business, verify, and reconcile the listing with your other profiles.
- In every case the goal is identical facts everywhere. The platforms differ; the data should not.
Why isn't Google Business Profile enough anymore?
Google Business Profile is not the primary source the other assistants read. A program that optimizes it exclusively concentrates on the ecosystem already recommending businesses at a healthy rate, and leaves ChatGPT, Siri, Copilot, and Perplexity reading records that are often present but filed under a category nobody chose. The gap shows up plainly in the recommendation numbers.
The scale of that gap is documented: SOCi's 2026 index, built on more than 350,000 locations, found ChatGPT recommending a little over one local business in a hundred while Google's local pack covers more than a third of them.
Read the gap as scarcity, not irrelevance. An assistant can only recommend a business it can find in the data it reads and whose facts agree — so being among the few it can see is worth a great deal, and the path in runs through the field most owners never revisit after verification: the category their listing is filed under.
None of this argues for abandoning Google Business Profile. The local pack remains the largest single recommendation surface, and the profile deserves ongoing work. The mistake is exclusivity: treating the one listing Google reads as if it were the whole data layer.
Related: The full 2026 numbers, sourced
How many people actually ask AI assistants for local recommendations?
AI assistants now field local-service questions from close to half of consumers, after starting the year before as a rounding error. The traffic volume is still small next to Google's, but assistant-referred visitors convert at a multiple of organic search, because the assistant already made the recommendation before the visit began.
Published studies put that conversion multiple in the high single to low double digits over organic, and the funnel splits behind it are compiled with their sources on our statistics page. Someone who asks an assistant to name a provider is not starting their research. They are ending it, and they tend to contact whoever gets named.
That combination — demand up several-fold in a year, conversion at multiples of organic, and a data layer where a correct category is the exception in every trade we have audited — is the entire case for acting before the window closes.
Related: AI search statistics 2026 — the demand and conversion numbers
What should a local business do this week?
The week-one move is claiming the data layer in coverage order: Foursquare first, then Bing Places, then Apple Business Connect, then a Yelp and Google Business Profile consistency check. Finish by reconciling name, address, phone, hours, and categories so every platform and the website carry identical facts.
Part of the work is verifiable for free, and it is worth knowing which part. Bing Places records are public: search your own business, read the category it is filed under, and compare it against two competitors in your trade. Foursquare's public pages closed in 2025 and Yelp blocks automated checks, so those two can only be inspected from inside their own business portals. Whatever the check shows is what every assistant reading that record sees too.
One honest caveat. Claiming listings makes a business retrievable; it does not guarantee any assistant will name it, and nobody honest promises that. What can be committed to is clean data at every source and visibility measured as a trend across many prompts — the structure of Hitman Marketing's work, from the AI Visibility Teardown, which reports the category Bing Places files you under against the ones your competitors carry, to the search retainers that keep that record and your Google Business Profile normalized in every tier.
- Day 1 — Foursquare: it feeds the assistant with the largest user base. Its public pages closed in 2025, so the business portal is now the only way to see what your record actually says.
- Days 1–2 — Bing Places: it covers Copilot directly and supports the Bing index ChatGPT uses for live lookups.
- Days 2–3 — Apple Business Connect: Siri and Apple Maps read it directly.
- Days 3–4 — Yelp and Google Business Profile: not new claims for most businesses, but a consistency pass — Perplexity reads Yelp, and Google's surfaces read the profile.
- Day 5 — The website: confirm the same name, address, phone, and hours appear in plain HTML, because the listings and the site must confirm each other.
Common questions
- Do I have to pay for Foursquare, Apple Business Connect, or Bing Places?
- No. All three listings are free to claim, and claiming them takes an afternoon. Some listing-management tools bundle these platforms into a monthly subscription, which is convenient but not required — nothing about the claim itself costs money. If an agency quotes a large fee for the claims alone, ask what else the fee covers.
- Which listing matters for Perplexity?
- Perplexity draws on its own web index plus Yelp and Reddit rather than a single listing platform. A claimed, accurate Yelp profile is the direct lever. Reddit presence is earned, not claimed — genuine participation and being recommended by real users in local threads. The web-index component means an accessible, server-rendered website counts here too.
- Will claiming these listings guarantee I show up in ChatGPT?
- No, and anyone who guarantees a specific AI result is not being straight with you — these systems are non-deterministic. What claiming does is put correct, mutually confirming data in front of the assistant, which is the precondition for being surfaced at all. Progress is then measured as share of voice across many prompts over time, never as a single query's result.
- Should I stop working on Google Business Profile?
- No. Google's local pack is still the single largest recommendation surface for local businesses, and Google Business Profile is what feeds it, along with Gemini and AI Overviews. Keep that work. The change is addition, not replacement: three more free listings alongside it, covering the assistants the Google profile never reaches.
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