SAN DIEGO, September 24, SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index, released Thursday, reports that 52% of U.S. consumers used an AI tool to find or research a local business in the past 30 days, up from 9% a year earlier and roughly 19% in early 2025. That 43-point jump, an approximately sixfold increase, pushes AI past social media (55% is now the traditional-search runner-up territory) and installs it as the third-most-used local discovery channel behind search engines at 83%.

The survey drew on more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, weighted to the national population, with a median age of 39 and median household income near $81,600. Adoption skews affluent and middle-aged: 76% of consumers earning $100,000 or more are regular AI local-search users, versus 47% under $50,000. By generation, 63% of Millennials qualify as regular users, 49% of Gen Z, 48% of Gen X, and 11% of Boomers. ChatGPT leads the tool mix at 57%, with Gemini at 51%, and 51% of AI users have encountered a Google AI Overview at the top of results.

Trust is another story. Two-thirds (67%) say an AI tool has handed them wrong information about a local business at least once; 30% report a real inconvenience because of it, and 23% say their trust in AI has eroded over the past year. So 81% now verify before acting: 33% check reviews, 20% check social, 16% run an independent search, 12% cross-reference multiple sources. Only 19% contact the business directly.

The visibility gap is where this gets structural. A separate SOCi analysis of roughly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands found those brands appeared in Google’s local 3-pack 35.9% of the time, but were recommended by ChatGPT just 1.2% of the time, Gemini 11%, and Perplexity 7.4%. SOCi calls AI local visibility 3 to 30 times harder than traditional ranking. A Rankability study from August 2026, covering 1,645 query-page observations across ten AI platforms, found top pairwise overlap between any two engines at 24.1% (Brave AI and Claude), and 55.2% of top-10 AI citations had no observed traditional top-10 ranking at all. Google rank no longer implies AI presence.

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