How assistants find a local business. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, side by side.

OpenAI documents three crawlers in its crawler overview. OAI-SearchBot collects pages for ChatGPT's search features. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot is not shown in ChatGPT search answers. ChatGPT-User opens a page when a person's question needs it, and OpenAI says it is not used to decide what appears in search. GPTBot collects training data and is a separate choice.

OpenAI's help page on search says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers". ChatGPT rewrites the question into one or more search queries and may add the person's general location. The page links to the privacy policies of Microsoft and Shopify. It also says ChatGPT may share location with third-party providers for "nearby business listings". OpenAI does not name those listing providers.

Yelp told Axios in July 2026 that it licenses reviews, photos and other business information to OpenAI for ChatGPT's answers. That is a press report, not OpenAI documentation.

Field tests show business websites matter. BrightLocal ran 800 local searches in ChatGPT in November 2024 and found that 58% of the cited sources were business websites. BrightLocal sells local marketing tools, and the test is two years old. A side-by-side test by Search Engine Land in May 2025 found ChatGPT's local results only partly matched Bing's.

Google's guide to its AI features says AI Overviews and AI Mode are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems". They retrieve pages from the Google Search index. To be eligible, a page must be indexed and able to show with a snippet.

The same guide says AI responses can include "information about local businesses", and that a Google Business Profile can help a business be visible in AI responses and in other Google results.

For the Gemini model, Google documents two tools: Grounding with Google Search and Grounding with Google Maps. The Maps tool draws on places, reviews, photos, addresses and opening hours. Google does not publish how the Gemini app mixes the two for a given question.

Google ranks local results by relevance, distance and how well known the business is, according to its local ranking help page. The same page says: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

Anthropic documents three crawlers. Claude-SearchBot indexes pages to improve search results. Claude-User fetches a page when a person asks Claude about it. ClaudeBot collects training data. Anthropic says all three follow robots.txt.

Claude's help page on web search says Claude calls a search tool when a question needs current information, and adds: "Every response includes citations".

Anthropic's subprocessor list names Brave Search, TurboPuffer and Parallel Web Systems under web search. Anthropic does not say how the work is split between them. TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that Claude's citations matched Brave's results.

We found no Anthropic documentation of a business listings database, like Google Maps, behind Claude. Our inference: for Claude, a local business exists as the web pages about it (its own page, directories, local articles).

No. SparkToro and Gumshoe had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI in late 2025. The chance of getting the same list of brands twice was under 1 in 100. Gumshoe sells an AI tracking tool, and the study was not peer reviewed.

A smaller field test by Ryan Doser, a marketer, in October 2026 asked four assistants for the best home service business in two US cities (250 recommendations, one day). The assistants never all named the same business first, and 22.8% of the picks were in Google's top three local results.

• How any of the three ranks one business above another. None of them publishes it.
• How much of ChatGPT's local information comes from each provider. Figures that give Foursquare or any other source a fixed share have no primary source that we could find. Treat them as unverified.
• Whether Claude uses any listings data beyond web pages.
• How the Gemini app weighs Google Maps data against web pages.

An OnMap page is a web page: the kind of source all three assistants can crawl and cite. It does not replace a Google Business Profile, which feeds Google Maps. See how it works.