If you ask Google, Perplexity and ChatGPT the same question — "best plumber near me" or "good coffee shop in Leeds city centre" — you can get noticeably different answers, from different sources, built in different ways. That's not a glitch. Google Maps, Perplexity and ChatGPT each gather, weigh and present local business information through separate systems, and understanding those differences matters more each year as more people use AI assistants alongside, or instead of, a traditional Google search.
How Google finds and ranks local businesses
Google's own documentation is fairly clear on this point: local ranking in Google Maps and local search results is based on three factors — relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance means how well a business matches what someone searched for. Distance refers to how close the business is to the searcher or the location mentioned in the query. Prominence reflects how well-known and well-regarded a business is, both online and offline, based on signals such as reviews, links and overall web presence.
The primary data source behind this is the Google Business Profile (GBP), which supplies the name, address, phone number, categories, hours and photos that appear on Maps and in local search results. Beyond that, Google also crawls the wider web — your website, directory listings, review platforms and news mentions — to corroborate and reinforce what your profile says.
It's worth separating what Google confirms from what SEO practitioners have observed over time. Google has officially named relevance, distance and prominence as the pillars of local ranking. Things like geotagged photos, keyword-stuffed review replies or posting frequency on your profile are commonly discussed in SEO circles, but Google has not confirmed these as direct ranking factors, so they shouldn't be treated as guaranteed levers.
What AI Overviews mean for local businesses
Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that sometimes appear above standard search results — are a different mechanism to Maps rankings. They draw on Google's search index and attempt to answer a query directly, sometimes referencing businesses or local information within that summary. For local businesses, this means a new layer of visibility exists before someone even scrolls to the map pack or organic results.
However, no single action guarantees inclusion in an AI Overview. Having a complete Google Business Profile, structured data, reviews and solid website content all contribute to Google's general understanding of your business, but none of these are documented as a direct, individual trigger for appearing in an AI-generated summary. Businesses that already perform well in organic and local search tend to be in a stronger position, but this is an observation rather than a confirmed mechanism.
Where Perplexity differs
Perplexity works quite differently from Google Maps. Rather than drawing on a proprietary local database like GBP, it performs real-time web retrieval for each query, reading a selection of web pages and then synthesising an answer with numbered citations pointing back to its sources. There's no direct Perplexity equivalent of Google Business Profile — its picture of your business is assembled from whatever it finds across the open web, which can include your website, review platforms, local directories, news articles, and — notably — Reddit threads and community forum discussions, which Perplexity appears to draw on more readily than Google or ChatGPT do for recommendations such as local tradespeople.
One practical consequence is transparency: because Perplexity shows its sources, you can often see exactly which pages it used to form an answer about your business or your competitors. This also means that inconsistent or outdated information sitting anywhere on the web — an old directory listing, a stale review page — can feed into what Perplexity says about you.
Where ChatGPT differs
ChatGPT's behaviour depends on how it's being used. Its core model draws on training data gathered up to a certain cut-off date, which includes public web content and some partner datasets. When web browsing is switched on, ChatGPT can search the live web, and it does this primarily through Bing's search index rather than Google's.
This has a specific implication for local businesses: ChatGPT does not pull directly from Google Business Profile. Instead, it tends to draw on Bing Places for Business, Foursquare's Places data (via a licensing arrangement with OpenAI), review aggregators, local city guides and Facebook Pages. Even though it uses Bing's index, ChatGPT applies its own processing to interpret and present that information, so its answers can look quite different from a plain Bing search for the same query.
Observational comparisons between the two platforms suggest they can produce very different results for the same question — different businesses recommended, different sources cited, little overlap between them. That's a useful reminder that being visible to one AI assistant doesn't mean you'll be visible to another; each one is, in effect, reading from a different part of the web.
Practical priorities for UK businesses
Given these differences, a sensible approach is to treat Google Maps, Perplexity and ChatGPT as separate channels that happen to share some underlying requirements, rather than one combined system to "win" in a single move.
For Google, the fundamentals remain the same as they always have: keep your Google Business Profile complete, verified and accurate, with correct categories, hours, services and photos. Encourage genuine reviews and respond to them. Build consistent citations — your business name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website, GBP, and UK directories such as Yell, Checkatrade, TrustATrader or Thomson Local. Add `LocalBusiness` schema markup to your website; this doesn't guarantee any particular ranking or AI feature, but it does give search engines a precise, machine-readable summary of your business that reinforces what's stated elsewhere.
For Perplexity and ChatGPT, the same groundwork matters, but with a broader lens. Because both tools stitch together information from across the web, a consistent and well-documented presence — accurate details on your website, your review profiles, relevant directories and social pages — gives them more reliable material to work from. Writing website content that answers real customer questions directly and plainly, rather than burying the answer in marketing copy, makes it easier for an AI system to extract and cite. If a meaningful share of your enquiries come through local tradespeople forums or community discussion, a genuine, non-promotional presence on relevant subreddits or forums may help with Perplexity specifically. For ChatGPT, keeping your Bing Places for Business listing current and your Facebook Page up to date is a reasonable, low-effort step given how heavily it draws on those sources.
It's also worth simply testing. Run a few realistic local searches on Perplexity and ChatGPT for your own services and area, and see what comes back — which businesses are named, which sources are cited, and whether your information appears accurately. This won't give you a ranking formula, but it will show you where the gaps are.
Focus on substance, not tricks
None of these systems — Google Maps, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity or ChatGPT — reward attempts to game them with contrived tactics. They reward businesses with accurate, consistent, well-corroborated information that's genuinely easy to find and verify across the web. A complete Google Business Profile, consistent NAP details, clear website content that answers customer questions, honest reviews and a sensible footprint across relevant directories and platforms will serve you reasonably well across all three systems, even though each one reaches its conclusions in a different way. That combination won't guarantee a particular AI recommends you tomorrow, but it puts your business in a credible position regardless of where someone starts their search.
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