ChatGPT Local Search: Where AI Gets Local Business Data

Ask ChatGPT for the best pizza in Phoenix and the answer comes back with a map, star ratings, phone numbers, opening hours, and a link for directions. Very little of that comes from OpenAI. It comes from outside data providers, some under contract and some not, and the AI companies disclose only part of the arrangement. Yelp signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI in July 2026, Foursquare announced a Places API partnership with ChatGPT search in December 2024, and Google says Gemini draws on Google Maps for signed-in users.

Our analysts put the same 36 local questions to ChatGPT and Gemini on Nov. 3, 2026, covering six business categories in six US cities, without signing in. We opened 101 ChatGPT place cards and recorded where each rating, link, and button came from. Yelp supplied the rating on 64 of the 101 cards (63%), every card linked to Google Maps for directions, and every map ChatGPT drew used Mapbox and OpenStreetMap. Gemini's signed-out answers carried no Google Maps data and cited Reddit in half of them.

In the following sections, we compare what ChatGPT's place cards showed, what each AI company has disclosed about its local data providers, how Gemini and Claude source local answers, and what published local citation studies from BrightLocal, Yext, SOCi, and Steady Demand found at larger scale.

Who Supplies Local Data to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic publish different amounts of detail about their local data. OpenAI's help pages list reservation partners and search partners. Yelp and Foursquare announced their own deals. Google documents the Google services Gemini can draw on. Anthropic lists its web search subprocessors, and outside researchers have documented the rest by capturing Claude's tool calls.

OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT may share a user's general location with "trusted third-party providers that help provide more local information, such as nearby business listings or weather reports," without listing those providers. It also says ChatGPT infers approximate location from the IP address and keeps device location sharing off by default. Yelp's chief executive, Jeremy Stoppelman, told Axios that Yelp branding and links appear when OpenAI uses Yelp content, and that OpenAI controls the design. Yelp already supplies data to Yahoo and Apple Maps, and Search Engine Land reported that Yelp content also powers Alexa+, Microsoft Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

What ChatGPT's Place Cards Showed

ChatGPT listed a median of 7 businesses per answer as clickable place entities. Clicking one opens a place card with a rating, contact details, and buttons. We opened up to three cards per answer, 101 in all, across 35 answers. Only one answer, for auto repair shops in Los Angeles, listed no place entities.

Source: Top GEO Agencies captures of 36 logged-out ChatGPT answers, Nov. 3, 2026.

Yelp's share held between 61% and 83% in five of the six categories. Pizza restaurants and coffee shops had 15 Yelp-rated cards out of 18 each, and auto repair shops had 10 of 13. Hotels were the exception: one of 16 hotel cards carried a Yelp label, and the other 15 showed a rating with no source.

Phoenix had the highest Yelp share, at 15 of 17 cards, and New York City the lowest, at 6 of 17. In New York, none of the six plumber and dentist cards carried a Yelp label. The 35 unlabeled cards averaged 4.77 stars on a median of 578 reviews, against 4.31 stars on a median of 257.5 reviews for the Yelp-rated cards. ChatGPT does not say where the unlabeled ratings come from.

Source: Top GEO Agencies captures of 101 ChatGPT place cards, Nov. 3, 2026.

Every card linked to a Google Maps directions page, even when the rating came from Yelp, and 100 of the 101 linked to the business website. Price levels appeared on 45 cards, all of them pizza restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels. Menu links appeared on 23 cards, and 12 of those pointed to menu pages on Yelp. Phones appeared on 97 cards and opening hours on 89. The 16 Get Quote buttons appeared on plumbers (10), hotels (3), and auto repair shops (3). OpenAI's developer spec says the button shows only when a partner supplies a business feed with the business name, address, coordinates, phone number, and website, and runs a quote-request plugin. The 12 Reserve buttons appeared on pizza restaurants (10) and hotels (2).

Website links on 4 cards carried tracking tags from Yext, the listings management company, such as a hilton.com link tagged seo_id=yextn-amer-wa-chiwawa and a hotel link tagged utm_campaign=yext. Those tags show that some of the business details ChatGPT displays were published through listings feeds that businesses manage themselves.

Maps and Citations in ChatGPT Answers

ChatGPT drew a map in 26 of the 36 answers. All 26 used the Mapbox map library with an OpenStreetMap copyright credit. Pizza restaurants drew maps in all six cities, and plumbers in only two. OpenAI's help page mentions maps on iOS and Android; our captures show them on desktop web as well.

Citations told a different story from the cards. 25 answers cited outside pages, either inline or in a Sources panel, and those citations covered 55 domains. Yelp was not one of them, and no answer mentioned Yelp in the text.

Image carousels credited another set of sources. MapQuest was credited on images in 10 answers, Condé Nast Traveler in 6, The Infatuation and Nextdoor in 5 each, and Yelp in 4.

Steady Demand, the local search agency run by Ben Fisher, found the same split at scale in August 2026. Across 4,607 successful US runs in 12 metros and 12 verticals, Yelp was attached to ChatGPT's structured business cards in 95.83% of runs, from 93.75% for hair salons to 97.92% for plumbers, but was visibly cited in only 1.04%. Tripadvisor was attached to business cards in 28.90% of runs, OpenTable in 16.88%, Resy in 8.96%, and Google in 4.62% (Steady Demand).

The Foursquare Question

Foursquare announced on Dec. 16, 2024, that its Places API, covering more than 100 million points of interest in over 200 countries, was serving real-time location results in ChatGPT search. The partnership circulated for months afterward as the main source of ChatGPT's local data. Steady Demand traced the most-quoted figure, a 60% to 70% match between ChatGPT and Foursquare results, to a May 2025 test of 50 prompts in five Spanish cities that compared only the first result.

Steady Demand's 2026 test found Foursquare in 0.00% of the 2,879 runs on ChatGPT's main surface and in one citation across 1,728 cross-check runs (0.06%). The businesses in ChatGPT's answers averaged 7.5% overlap with Google's ranked results for the same market and category and 5.7% with Foursquare's, a difference Steady Demand found statistically significant. Our 101 cards carried no Foursquare label or link, and the word Foursquare did not appear anywhere in the saved ChatGPT pages.

Where Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode Get Local Data

Google's Gemini Apps Help page lists Google Search, Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Maps, and YouTube as services Gemini uses automatically. It adds a condition: "To use public information from Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Maps, and YouTube, Keep Activity must be on. Gemini can always use public information from Google Search, even if Keep Activity is off or you're signed out."

Our signed-out Gemini answers matched that rule. None of the 36 showed a map, a place card, or a link to Google Maps, and none cited Google Maps or a Google Business Profile. Gemini instead cited web pages: 331 source chips in 35 answers, a median of 9 per answer, pointing to 85 distinct sources. Houston pizza restaurants was the one answer with no sources.

Source: Top GEO Agencies captures of 36 logged-out Gemini answers, Nov. 3, 2026.

Reddit appeared in every category and led three of them: pizza restaurants, coffee shops, and auto repair shops. Category sites took over where they exist: ConsumerAffairs appeared in all six plumber answers, Forbes Travel Guide in all six hotel answers, and TopRatedDentist.com in five of six dentist answers. Gemini cited Yelp in none of the 36 answers and mentioned it in the text of one.

Developers get Google Maps data by default. Google opened Grounding with Google Maps in the Gemini API on Oct. 17, 2025, with data on more than 250 million places, including addresses, hours, ratings, and reviews. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found Gemini's business information 100% accurate, which SOCi attributed to grounding in Google Maps, against about 68% for ChatGPT.

In Google Search, AI Mode and AI Overviews lean on Google Business Profile. BrightLocal's directory study counted 455,123 Business Profile citations out of 861,263 in AI Mode (53%) and 108,018 of 161,094 in AI Overviews (67%). Yelp was the second-largest source on both, with 76,124 citations in AI Mode and 12,194 in AI Overviews. At Google I/O on May 19, 2026, Google said AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users and added agentic booking for local experiences, plus calls to US businesses in home repair, beauty, and pet care.

Where Claude Gets Local Data

Anthropic's subprocessor list lists three providers for web search: Brave Search, Parallel Web Systems, and TurboPuffer, with Parallel added on Oct. 15, 2026. The Claude Help Center says image search runs on Bing, that Claude may use a location inferred from the IP address for local results, and that every web search response includes citations.

For places, outside captures point to Google. Nicolas Sitter logged Claude's tool calls in April 2026 and found that, with no connectors turned on, Claude almost always ran a single places_search call backed by Google Places for hotel searches, then sorted candidates by Google rating and review count. MediaPost reported the finding on May 8, 2026, noting that Google holds a minority stake in Anthropic, and that Claude offers more than 200 connectors, including Tripadvisor, Expedia, and Booking.com. Anthropic has not published a list of local data partners.

Claude's citations lean on reviews more than any other engine's. Yext Research found review platforms made up 20.5% of Anthropic's citations for local questions from February to August 2026, against 1.9% for OpenAI and 1.7% for Gemini. In a separate Yext analysis of 155.5 million citations for 1,623 brands, reviews and social sites made up 19.5% of Anthropic's citations, 7.5 times OpenAI's 2.6%.

What Published Local Citation Studies Found

Four research groups have measured where AI engines source local answers at scale. Their samples run from 4,607 ChatGPT runs to 155.5 million citations, and they agree that Google's own data dominates Google's AI surfaces while Yelp and other directories dominate ChatGPT.

Source: BrightLocal, What 200k Local AI Searches Tell Us, Sept. 16, 2026.

BrightLocal's visibility study shows how far the AI surfaces trail Google Maps. Maps mentioned the tracked business in 66% of localized searches, against 38% for AI Overviews, 33% for ChatGPT, and 32% for AI Mode. AI Mode and AI Overviews shared 29% of the businesses they listed, while ChatGPT overlapped 19% to 20% with either, a sign that ChatGPT draws on a different pool of data.

Source: Yext Research, Four AIs, One Question, February to August 2026 data.

Yext's citation mix separates the three engines clearly. Directories and aggregators made up 40.9% of OpenAI's citations, the largest single class for any engine. Gemini put 41.9% on businesses' own websites. Anthropic split its citations most evenly, with a fifth going to review platforms. In Yext's larger citation count, MapQuest drew 6.0 million citations, Tripadvisor 3.8 million, and Yelp 2.1 million.

SOCi found that ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of the locations it tracked and Gemini 11.0%, against 35.9% in Google's local 3-pack. The locations ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars, against 3.9 for Gemini. In our captures, the three Houston plumbers on ChatGPT's cards carried Yelp ratings of 2.4, 2.0, and 1.6 stars, on 334 to 834 reviews.