The share of U.S. consumers who used an AI tool to find a local business in the past 30 days climbed from 9% in 2025 to 52% in 2026, according to SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index, published September 24. Overall monthly AI use among consumers rose from roughly 19% to 60% over the same stretch, after sitting at effectively zero in 2024.

The third annual edition surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, weighted to the national population with a median age of 39 and a median household income of about $81,600. It lands with a companion dataset, the 2026 Local Visibility Index, measuring roughly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands.

The adoption curve isn’t the whole story. 67% of AI users reported being handed wrong information about a local business at least once, and only 27% say their trust in AI grew over the past year. 81% take a verification step before making contact: 33% check reviews, 20% check social profiles, 16% run a confirming search, 12% consult multiple sources.

That’s the loop local businesses now live inside.

The visibility math is unforgiving. ChatGPT recommends listed locations just 1.2% of the time, Perplexity 7.4%, and Gemini 11.0%, against Google’s 3-Pack appearance rate of 35.9%. AI now ranks third as a local discovery channel, narrowing the gap with social (55%) and search (83%), as SOCi reported last month on this wire. The index, now in its third annual edition, is positioning itself as the Nielsen rating of a channel still deciding what it’s.

Sources