We ran a first-look AI visibility check on 12,535 real local business domains. The average result: 8.24%. That’s the share of AI engines that mentioned the business at all, out of the six major engines Local Dominator’s AI Tracker monitors. Most businesses in the dataset were confirmed invisible across the majority of them.
That number comes from our own product usage data, not a survey. A local business owner or agency ran an AI Tracker quick check, and in the typical case, the AI engines simply had nothing to say about that business. Ask ChatGPT for “a reliable plumber in Austin” or Gemini for “the best dentist near me,” and a handful of businesses get named. Everyone else doesn’t exist for that answer, regardless of how they rank on Google.
The numbers, at a glance:
Local Dominator's AI Tracker is built to measure exactly this gap. It checks a business against six leading AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok) and scores how often the business is actually named. That score is what we're reporting on here, at scale, for the first time.
The Data: What 12,535 Audits and 398,507 Scans Show
Three numbers anchor this report.
Average Dominator Score: 8.24%. Across 12,535 unique domains, each measured on its first completed AI Tracker quick check, the average score (mentioned engines divided by engines checked, times 100) was 8.24%. This is a first-look number, not a ceiling. Scores improve as businesses take action on AI visibility, and we're now tracking that improvement curve separately. But as a baseline read on where the average local business stands before doing anything about AI search, 8.24% is a stark starting point.
Share of Voice: 19.15% pooled, 18.74% per campaign. Being mentioned isn't the same as owning the answer. Share of Voice measures how much of an AI response a business's mentions account for relative to every other business named. Pooled across all 398,507 individual scan results, average Share of Voice was 19.15%. Averaged per campaign instead (giving a small business the same weight as a large multi-location brand, across 1,071 campaigns) it was 18.74%. The two methods land within half a point of each other, which is itself a useful check: the pattern holds whether you look at raw scan volume or at the average business's individual experience. Either way, a business that does get mentioned is typically splitting the answer with four or five competitors, not owning it.
One methodology note worth stating plainly: this Share of Voice figure counts text mentions only. A business named in the AI's actual written answer counts. A business listed only as a source link, never named in the prose, doesn't. That's a deliberate choice: a buried source link doesn't move a customer to pick up the phone the way being named in the answer does. It's a similar distinction to the citation share versus mention rate split among AI visibility KPIs, where whether AI links to your own content or just names your brand from a third-party source changes what that visibility is actually worth. It makes this a conservative "did the AI actually recommend you" read, not an inflated "were you referenced anywhere" read.
How Big Is This Data Set, and Can You Trust It?
12,535 unique domains, spanning a wide range of industries and metro areas, is the sample behind the 8.24% average. That’s large enough that a handful of unusual accounts can’t skew the number, since these are real businesses running real AI Tracker checks, not a small pilot group.
The Share of Voice numbers back this up from a second angle. Calculating that figure two different ways, pooling all 398,507 scan results together versus averaging each of the 1,071 campaigns independently so a small business counts the same as a large multi-location brand, produces almost the same result: 19.15% versus 18.74%. If the underlying pattern were an artifact of a few outlier accounts skewing one calculation method, these two numbers would diverge by more than half a point. They don’t.
None of this means every business scores exactly 8.24%. Some score far higher, some score zero. What it means is that the average across a genuinely large, unfiltered dataset sits close to invisible, and that’s the finding this report is built on.
Why This Matters More for Local Businesses
A national ecommerce brand losing an AI mention has other channels to fall back on. A single-location dentist or a five-location HVAC company doesn’t. Three things make this gap especially costly for local and multi-location businesses specifically.
Local intent is exactly the kind of query AI engines are best at intercepting before a click. "Near me" and "best [service] in [city]" queries are conversational by design, which is precisely the query type AI chat interfaces are built to answer directly, without sending the user to a results page at all.
The businesses with the least marketing capacity are the ones most exposed. SMBs and independent local operators rarely have a dedicated content or PR function feeding the web mentions, citations, and structured data that AI models draw from. Multi-location brands have more resources but a harder coordination problem: nothing about how AI models select who to mention guarantees that consistency carries automatically from one location to the next, so every location needs its own check.
Legal, medical, home services, and restaurant categories carry the most exposure. These are the categories where a missed recommendation tends to carry the highest dollar value per lead, which makes an 8.24% average visibility score especially costly if a business happens to fall in one of them.
Why Your Rank Tracker Can't See This
A traditional rank tracker tells you where a page sits in Google’s results, built from the relevance, distance, and prominence signals Google itself uses to rank local businesses. It has no way to tell you whether your business is showing up in how ChatGPT selects sources to cite in a search-backed answer, monitored in Gemini, or surfaced by Perplexity, because that’s a different layer of visibility, built from how consistently and clearly a business is described across the web, not the structured citation and proximity data that drives a Google Maps ranking.
That means a business can hold a legitimate top-3 Google Maps position and still be functionally invisible the moment a customer asks an AI assistant instead of typing into a search box. You can be steady at #2 in the map pack with your AI visibility trending toward zero, and a rank tracker alone will never surface that. We compared eight AI visibility trackers on exactly this question, and the ability to see mentions Google-only tools miss entirely was the deciding factor. The same gap shows up one layer down: tracking your ChatGPT brand mentions specifically takes a different setup than tracking aggregate visibility across all six engines at once.
What to Do About a Low Score
The right next step depends on where a business is starting from.
If your Dominator Score is near zero, start with the basics AI models actually cite: consistent name, address, and phone data across the web, a Google Business Profile that's complete and active, and content that directly answers the questions your customers are asking AI tools. Ranking a website in ChatGPT search starts with the same structured, direct-answer content that ranks well anywhere else, just written for a model instead of a search results page.
If you're already visible but your Share of Voice is thin, the fix is less about getting mentioned and more about being named first. That usually means tightening the specific language, reviews, and differentiators that show up in local content, not adding more of it.
If you operate in legal, medical, home services, or restaurants, treat AI visibility as a standing line item, not a one-time check. These are high-value-per-lead categories, and the businesses that check once and move on are the ones still invisible a year from now.
If you manage multiple locations, don't assume visibility at one location predicts visibility at another. Check each one individually. A strong signal at one location says nothing about the next until it's actually measured.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Dominator Score?
Dominator Score is a simple read on whether AI engines like ChatGPT and Gemini actually know your business exists. It shows how many of them mention you when someone asks for a business like yours, so instead of guessing, you can see at a glance whether you’re part of the conversation or invisible to it, and track that number over time as you work to improve it.
Why is my business not showing up in ChatGPT or Gemini?
You’re not alone. Most businesses aren’t showing up yet. On average, the businesses we’ve checked are mentioned by fewer than 1 in 10 AI engines asked, so the typical business is missing from most AI answers entirely. That’s because AI tools decide who to mention based on how a business is talked about across the web, not the same things that get you ranked on Google Maps, so a strong local ranking doesn’t automatically mean AI knows you exist.
Does ranking well on Google mean I'll also show up in AI search?
Not necessarily. Google Maps rankings and AI mentions are built on different things: Maps looks at distance, relevance, and reputation signals, while AI tools look at how consistently your business is talked about across the web. Plenty of businesses in our data rank well on Google but still barely show up when someone asks AI for a recommendation, so the two need to be managed separately.
What's the difference between AI visibility and Share of Voice?
AI visibility (Dominator Score) tells you whether AI mentions your business at all. Share of Voice goes a step further and tells you how much of the spotlight you get when you are mentioned, since AI often names several businesses in the same answer. You can technically be visible but still get overlooked if you’re just one name in a crowd, and that’s the gap Share of Voice catches.
I run an agency. How do I explain AI visibility to clients who only ask about Google rankings?
Think of it as a second scoreboard next to their Google ranking, not a replacement for it. Show clients that ranking well on Google doesn’t guarantee AI tools are recommending them too, and that gap stays invisible until someone actually measures it. Framing it as an extra layer of protection most competitors aren’t watching yet tends to land better than presenting it as a whole new metric to learn.
How often should local businesses check their AI visibility?
Check it at least once a quarter, since AI visibility can shift without warning. If you’re in a fast-moving category like legal, medical, home services, or restaurants, check monthly instead. Those industries tend to see the biggest swings.
The Bottom Line
The average local business is not losing the AI visibility fight. It hasn’t entered it yet. An 8.24% average score across 12,535 businesses means most of the market is still unmeasured and unmanaged on this front. The businesses that check where they stand now, before AI search captures more of the “near me” query volume than it already has, are the ones that get to fix it while it’s still a first-mover advantage rather than a catch-up game.
Methodology: Dominator Score reflects the percentage of AI engines that mentioned a domain on its first completed quick-check scan, measured across 12,535 unique audited domains as of July 2026. Share of Voice reflects text-mention share only (source-only citations excluded), reported two ways: pooled across all 398,507 scan-result rows, and averaged per campaign across 1,071 campaigns. All figures are Local Dominator’s own product usage data, verified against internal reporting as of July 27, 2026.
