Original research · 73 studies
Original research, published in the open.
We measure machine readiness at scale, on both sides of the market. On the supply side, we audit how ready real businesses are to be read by the systems that now find and recommend them: six economies, 205,103 businesses, one method. On the demand side, we measure how far buyers have handed those decisions to the machines. The retail and market studies beneath the two capstones trace the same shift, category by category. Every figure is dated, attributed, and tiered for evidence.
First-party audits are measured directly, not modeled. The market studies are built on dated, attributed sources, with every claim tiered established, emerging, or contested. The AI-answer layer has no independent census yet, so readings of it are named as a frontier, never presented as settled.
The capstones
Two studies anchor the program, one for each side
The supply side asks how ready businesses are to be read by machines. The demand side asks how far buyers have handed the machines the decision. Read together, they frame everything else on this page.
The Machine-Readiness Atlas: How the World's Small Businesses Compare
We ran the same audit across six economies, 205,103 independent small businesses in all. The share a machine can fully read ranges about 7.6-fold, from 32.1% in the US to 4.2% in India, and each economy fails in its own way.
205,103 independent small businesses measured across six economies with one fixed method, July 2026 Read the study Demand sideThe Delegated Buyer
How consumers and business buyers are handing discovery and purchase decisions to machines, and how that dependency is deepening. The demand-side companion to the Machine-Readiness Atlas.
68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 Read the studyThe Attention Migration Studies
How the market is moving, and what it does to where attention sits
60 studies across 10 series, each answering the same three questions: how the market is evolving in the US and globally, what that does to how buyers discover and choose, and how it redraws the attention terrain. Grounded in dated, attributed evidence.
Primary Audits
First-party machine-readiness audits of real small businesses, measured economy by economy.
Machine-Readiness Audit: Africa, July 2026
The first Africa edition of a quarterly, multi-region benchmark. We sampled 11,582 independent African small businesses from the map. 41.4% had a real website; the rest reach customers through social and messaging, not a machine-readable page. About 4.5% of all map-listed African businesses are fully machine-readable.
41.4% of 11,582 map-listed independent African businesses had a real website (4,793) Read the study · 20 minMachine-Readiness Audit: Europe, July 2026
The first Europe edition of a quarterly, multi-region benchmark. We sampled 52,076 independent European small businesses from the map. 76.3% had a real website, and among those, 77.9% had no type an engine can read as a local business. About 12.7% of all map-listed European businesses are fully machine-readable.
76.3% of 52,076 map-listed independent European businesses had a real website (39,722) Read the study · 20 minMachine-Readiness Audit: India, July 2026
The truer picture of the Indian market. We measured 110,312 independent Indian businesses in all, the majority across the twenty-two trades that actually make up the high street, kirana grocers, tailors, and more. Only 18.4% of those had a real website, and just 1.2% are fully machine-readable, far below what the Western-professional trades suggest.
18.4% of 66,452 map-listed independent Indian businesses had a real website (12,227) Read the study · 20 minMachine-Readiness Audit: Japan, July 2026
The truer picture of the Japanese market. We measured 60,059 independent Japanese businesses in all, the majority across the eighteen trades that actually make up the high street, izakaya and ramen counters, soba and udon shops, and more. Only 43.4% of those had a real website, and just 2.3% are fully machine-readable, far below what the Western-professional trades suggest.
43.4% of 34,831 map-listed independent Japanese businesses had a real website (15,107) Read the study · 20 minMachine-Readiness Audit: Southeast Asia, July 2026
The truer picture of the Southeast Asian market. We measured 55,020 independent Southeast Asian businesses in all, the majority across the eighteen trades that actually make up the high street, warung and warteg eateries, sari-sari and toko kelontong grocers, and more. Only 11.4% of those had a real website, and just 0.9% are fully machine-readable, far below what the Western-professional trades suggest.
11.4% of 33,664 map-listed independent Southeast Asian businesses had a real website (3,840) Read the study · 20 minMachine-Readiness Audit: US MSMEs, July 2026
The first edition of a quarterly benchmark. We measured 43,362 independent US small businesses; one in four was invisible to a machine reader, a majority had no type an engine can read as a local business, and readiness rose steadily with how established the business was. We will repeat it every quarter, using the same method, to track how the machine-readable web evolves.
43,362 independent small-business homepages read, drawn from Google Business Profile listings across 12 trades and 88 US metros Read the study · 24 minThe Macro Shift
How discovery itself is changing, in the US and worldwide.
Agentic Commerce in 2026: The Rails Are Built, the Trust Is Not
Every major payment network and AI platform has now shipped a way for agents to buy on a shopper's behalf, but the verified data shows trust collapses at the exact moment an agent reaches for a card.
48% of online shoppers used AI to research their most recent purchase Read the study · 12 minThe AI-Answer Adoption Curve
Buyers picked up ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot faster than they picked up the PC or the internet, but the data shows a wide, still-unresolved gap between how many people open the tool and how many actually let it decide.
44% of US adults report using ChatGPT in 2026, up from 18% in 2023 Read the study · 13 minThe Global Divergence
AI-answer reliance is splitting the world in two: flat in the US and major Western European markets, accelerating across parts of Asia, Southern Europe, and Latin America, and still invisible to any independent, non-vendor measurement.
15% vs. 8% Click rate on a traditional search result, no AI summary vs. AI summary present Read the study · 10 minThe Great Unbundling
Since Google's AI Overviews launched in May 2024, a rising share of search sessions now end inside a synthesized answer instead of a click to your website, and the strongest data available says that shift is real, accelerating, and still only partly measured.
2 billion monthly users, 200+ countries Reach of Google's AI Overviews as of Q2 2025, up from 1.5 billion in May 2025 Read the study · 15 minThe MSME Visibility Gap: Why AI Search May Be Widening the Small Business Divide
Search usage is falling as AI answers rise, and the early evidence says structured, corroborated data, not brand size alone, decides who gets cited, which is a harder bar for small businesses to clear than for enterprises.
8% vs 15% Click-through rate to a web link when Google shows an AI summary vs. when it does not Read the study · 11 minZero-Click and the Vanishing Referral
Independent measurements disagree on how much smaller the number is, but they all agree it is smaller: the click from search to your website is disappearing, and nobody has yet measured what that costs a single local business.
8% vs 15% Click-through rate to a traditional search result when an AI summary appears vs. when it does not (tracked browsing, 900 US adults, March 2025) Read the study · 13 minThe Human-Capital Shift
How AI is reshaping jobs, degrees, and the classroom, from the value of a credential to the entry-level ladder.
Skills Over Degrees: The Hiring Shift, Measured Against Reality
Employers are stripping degree language from job postings and states are dropping degree mandates outright. But the best independent outcome study found that removing the requirement changed hiring for fewer than 1 in 700 new hires.
51% → 44% share of US job postings requiring a bachelor's degree, 2017 to 2024; 63% of the underlying occupational resets happened before the pandemic Read the study · 18 minThe Broken Bottom Rung: The Entry-Level Job Market Under AI
Recent college graduates in the United States now face a higher unemployment rate than the country as a whole, the first time that has happened in roughly 45 years of data, while entry-level postings fall and senior postings climb.
5.6-5.7% unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 (late 2025 to mid-2026), above the national rate of about 4.2% for the first time in roughly 45 years of data Read the study · 18 minThe Classroom Meets the Machine: AI and the University
Undergraduate AI use for assessed work climbed from 53% to 94% in two years, take-home essays lost their evidentiary value, and computer-science enrollment fell for the first time in a decade, reversing a decade of "learn to code" advice.
94% of UK undergraduates used AI for assessed work in 2026, up from 53% in 2024 and 88% in 2025 Read the study · 18 minThe Credential Boom: Certificates, Bootcamps, and the Reskilling Economy
Coursera alone reached 197 million learners and $757.5 million in revenue in 2025, but a machine-learning read of 37.7 million resumes finds only a job-relevant certificate actually raises wages. A pile of unrelated badges can pay nothing, or less than nothing.
197 m / $757.5 m Coursera's registered learners and full-year revenue in 2025 (revenue up 9%, growth decelerating from prior years) Read the study · 18 minThe Degree in Question: What a College Credential Is Worth in the AI Era
The average college wage premium sits near a record 80 percent and is still rising, and at the same moment 28 percent of bachelor's programs run a negative financial return. The degree is winning on average and losing at the margins, and generative AI is biting hardest at those margins.
~80% college wage premium (bachelor's-or-higher vs. high-school-only), 2024, and still rising: college earnings grew 6.3% vs. 3.2% for high-school-only, 2004 to 2024 Read the study · 18 minThe Attention Landscape
Where a market's attention sits, surface by surface, and how it is moving.
The Feed Isn't the New Search Bar: How Short Video Actually Changes Local and Product Discovery
Search and Google Maps still lead most local and product discovery. Their lead is eroding fast, and the surface gaining the most ground is AI chat, not TikTok.
71%, down from 83% US consumers who cite Google as a source for finding or evaluating a local business, a one-year drop Read the study · 14 minThe Host-Read Premium: What Podcast Advertising's Trust Effect Actually Proves
Podcast listeners genuinely trust the hosts they choose, and that trust shows up in the data for host-read ads, but no evidence supports the claim that podcast audio beats television, radio, direct mail, or out-of-home advertising.
+26.4% YoY, >$2.4B US podcast ad revenue growth, full-year 2024 Read the study · 11 minThe Living Room Went Local: How Streaming TV Became a Small-Business Ad Channel
Streaming now outdraws broadcast and cable combined, but only about one in six small businesses has actually bought a streaming ad, and the money that has arrived looks like new advertising demand, not a swap from the TV budget they already had.
44.8% Share of total US TV usage streaming reached in the four weeks ending May 25, 2025, the first time it outright passed broadcast and cable combined (44.2%) Read the study · 11 minBuyer Behavior Science
How people decide now, from the shortlist to the click.
Reputation Physics
Buyers now demand fresher, more numerous, and imperfectly rated reviews than they did a year ago, and the businesses AI engines choose to recommend look different from the ones winning on search rank alone.
6% to 45% Share of US consumers using AI tools like ChatGPT to find local business recommendations, in one year Read the study · 9 minThe Consideration-Set Collapse
Buyers were already comparing a handful of options before any engine got involved. What a single synthesized answer removes is the visible list itself, and no one has yet measured what replaces it.
7, plus or minus 2 Human working-memory capacity for holding discrete items in mind at once, the cognitive ceiling behind why shortlists were always short Read the study · 9 minThe Credence-Good Problem in an AI World
When a buyer can't judge your work until it's too late, AI answers aren't closing that old trust gap, they're moving it, and the habit of checking a second source is fading right when it matters most.
49% of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% a year earlier; ChatGPT use specifically rose from 18% to 44% Read the study · 11 minThe Local-Intent Shift
Near-me searches no longer settle on one ranked page: they scatter across classic search, AI answers, and reviews, and the evidence shows that winning one surface is no guarantee you win the others.
8% vs 15% Click-through rate on a traditional search result when an AI summary appears, versus when it does not Read the study · 12 minThe Speed-to-Answer Standard: Four Decades of Delay Data and the AI-Answer Frontier Nobody Has Measured Yet
Every documented increment of delay carries a measurable cost, and the newest instant-answer layer, generative AI, is now the fastest-growing part of that story with the least independent measurement behind it.
0.1s / 1.0s / 10s Nielsen's three response-time thresholds: instant, flow-preserving, and attention-holding Read the study · 13 minTrust in the Machine
Chatbot use jumped from a third of US adults to about half in two years, but the moment a synthesized answer appears on a results page, buyers click and verify less, not more.
49% (up from 33% in 2024) Share of US adults who use AI chatbots Read the study · 14 minDemand & Paid Media
The honest economics of buying attention when you need demand now.
Small Budget, Big Platform: How Automated Bidding Treats Low-Spend SMB Ad Accounts
Google's own reliability floor sits at 30 to 50 conversions a month, and the clearest large-sample data available says a lot of small ad accounts sit right at the edge of it, though not for the reason most owners assume.
30 to 50 conversions Google's own stated floor before Smart Bidding or Target CPA results should be trusted Read the study · 9 minThe ROAS Illusion: Why Your Ad Platform's Return Number Isn't the Real One
Independent incrementality research shows platform-reported ROAS is structurally unreliable, not in the single direction most marketers assume.
5x to 10x Reported inflation of branded search and retargeting ROAS versus measured incremental return Read the study · 11 minThe Zero-Click Tax: What AI-Answer Erosion Is Really Adding to the Cost of a Paid Lead
AI Overviews are cutting click-through by roughly a third to two-thirds on the queries they touch, yet the broadest cost-per-lead data available shows costs are not rising in lockstep, which means the real tax lands unevenly, on whoever isn't cited.
68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click, Jan-Apr 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 Read the study · 11 minVertical Market Evolution
How each kind of business gets found and chosen, on its own terms.
Accounting and Tax: The Credence Gap AI Hasn't Closed
Tax and accounting clients cannot verify the work they are buying, so they lean on reputation and credentials instead of price, and even fast-growing AI adoption for filing has not closed that trust gap.
~2.3% Share of eligible taxpayers who registered for the IRS's free Direct File pilot in the 2025 season; most of those who did register never actually filed through it Read the study · 12 minFitness and Wellness: How Members Actually Find a Gym in a Record Year
US gym and studio membership just hit a record high, but the decision that gets someone through the door still runs through star ratings, short clips, and word of mouth, with the AI-answer layer still too new for anyone to measure.
81 million members, 26.1% penetration US gym, studio, and fitness-facility members in 2025, a record and a quarter of the population age 6+ Read the study · 9 minHome Services and Contractors: Market Evolution
Homeowners still call a local number to book a job, but the road that gets them there now runs through AI-produced summaries and answer engines long before anyone compares a bid.
68.01% (up from 60.45% in 2024) US Google searches that end with no click at all, Jan-Apr 2026 Read the study · 13 minHospitality and Lodging: Where Guest Discovery Is Headed
OTAs still take a growing share of independent-hotel bookings, but the bigger shift is in where travelers start looking, and no one has mapped that terrain for hospitality yet.
63.4% Share of independent-hotel bookings that went through an OTA globally in 2025, up from 61.3% in 2024 Read the study · 11 minHow Diners Actually Decide: Reviews Still Pay, AI Answers Remain Unproven
The restaurant-discovery stack is splitting five ways, but only one channel, the star review, has a proven link to revenue; everything after it, including AI-mediated answers, is still an open bet.
5 to 9% revenue increase Causal effect of a one-star Yelp rating increase on independent-restaurant revenue Read the study · 9 minHow People Find a Lawyer in 2026: Search Is Slipping, AI Answers Are Rising, and the Middle Is Still Unmapped
Google's share of attorney research dropped nearly 15 points in a single year and willingness to ask an AI chatbot the same question has climbed steadily since 2023, but no verified data yet shows how often a legal question actually lands inside the answer an AI engine gives.
79% (2025), up from 57% three years earlier Legal clients who research attorneys online before making contact Read the study · 11 minMed-Spa and Aesthetics: Market Evolution
Patients are moving to search, short video, and AI chat faster than the aesthetics industry is moving credentials onto those same surfaces, and 2026's prosecutions show what that gap costs.
$17B+ US med spa industry annual revenue, confirmed live on the trade association's own statistics page Read the study · 14 minMedical and Healthcare: How Patients Discover and Choose Providers Now
AI chatbots have caught up to social media as a health information source, but Google keeps them out of "near me" searches, so the local pack and online reviews still decide which provider gets the call.
32% of US adults used an AI chatbot for health information in the past year, now roughly matching social media use for the same purpose Read the study · 11 minRecord Reliance, New Rules: How Buyers Find a Real Estate Agent Now
Home buyers and sellers use an agent at record or near-record rates, but the settlement that pulled commissions off listings and the fast rise of AI chatbots as a discovery layer have redrawn how they find, vet, and choose one.
88% of home buyers purchased through a real estate agent or broker (July 2024 to June 2025) Read the study · 9 minThe Agentic Shopper Premium: Measuring the AI-Order Effect in Ecommerce
Shoppers who arrive at your store from an AI answer convert better and spend more than shoppers who arrive from a search result, across every measurement stack that has looked, but the channel is still small and every number so far comes from a vendor grading its own traffic.
~13x YoY order growth, +14% AOV AI-referred order growth and average-order-value lift on Shopify's merchant network, Q1 2026 Read the study · 11 minThe Comparison Paradox: Insurance Shoppers and Recommendation Behavior in the Answer Engine
Insurance shoppers are comparing more than ever and turning to AI to help, but the AI engines they consult often disagree with each other and, on at least one measured question, get the answer wrong more often than right.
3.5 quotes Average number of quotes pulled by US auto insurance shoppers, the highest recorded in J.D. Power's history Read the study · 11 minThe Five-to-One Rule: How AI Research Now Outweighs Sales Contact in Professional-Services Selection
Buyers now spend far more of their time on independent, AI-assisted research than in conversation with any single vendor's sales rep, and agencies and service providers top the list of what they research with AI.
27% of buying time on independent research vs. roughly 5 to 6% with any one vendor's sales rep Independent research vs. time with a single vendor rep Read the study · 12 minThe Local Retail Discovery Split: Map Pack, Marketplace, and the Rise of the AI Answer
Most local retail dollars still cross a physical counter, but the search that decides which counter is increasingly settled by an AI system before a human ever sees a list of choices.
16.9% Share of total US retail sales that happened online in Q1 2026 ($326.7B of $1,929.0B), with e-commerce growing 9.8% year over year against 3.9% for total retail Read the study · 11 minThe Offline Resolve: Why Chiropractic and Physical-Therapy Patients Research Like Buyers but Book Like Patients
Patients now research chiropractic and physical-therapy care like a considered purchase, but the evidence shows they still book it like a phone call to someone they trust.
84% Patients who check online reviews before choosing a healthcare provider Read the study · 10 minThe Parent Funnel Fork: How AI Homework Tools Are Splitting Tutoring Demand
Teens are adopting AI chatbots for homework faster than their parents notice, while the paid, human side of tutoring keeps growing right alongside it.
54% US teens (ages 13-17) who have used an AI chatbot for schoolwork help Read the study · 12 minThe Six-Screen Search for a Dentist
Patients now spread their trust across an average of six discovery sources, including AI answers, while most dental practices still can't see what those sources are saying about them.
$189 billion U.S. national dental expenditure in 2024, up 4% year over year after inflation, driven mainly by a 9% rise in government dental program spending Read the study · 11 minThe Verification Funnel: How AI Search Is Rewiring Auto Repair Discovery
AI answer engines cite businesses far less often than Google's map pack surfaces them, in every category researchers have measured so far. No one has measured the gap for auto repair yet, but the category's math points the same direction.
68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 Read the study · 11 minValidation, Not Discovery: How Beauty and Salon Bookings Really Move Through Search and Social
The "78% of bookings trace to local search" statistic you've probably seen has no real source behind it, but the verified evidence still points somewhere useful: toward reviews and local search as the checkpoint nearly every booking passes through, no matter where discovery started.
97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses Read the study · 9 minVeterinary and Pet Care: Market Evolution
Pet spending keeps climbing while what the average household spends on its own dog or cat has already softened once, and a growing, still-uncounted share of the clinics collecting that spending answer to owners whose names never appear on the sign.
$41.0B → $42.4B (2026 proj.) US veterinary care and product sales, 2024 actual to 2026 projected, within a total pet-industry spend of $158B to $165B Read the study · 11 minGlobal & MSME Commerce
The economics of the small and mid-size business in a global market.
The Cross-Border MSME: Visible to Platforms, Invisible Elsewhere
Small businesses make up 97% of US exporters by count but only a third of export value, and the two forces now carrying most cross-border buyer attention, marketplaces and a still-unmeasured AI-answer layer, have not been shown to close that gap or widen it.
97% of exporters, 34.9% of value Small businesses are 97% of identified US goods exporters by count but only about 35% of total US export value Read the study · 12 minThe Digital Divide 2.0
Buyer attention is verifiably moving from links to synthesized answers, but whether that shift is quietly widening the gap between small and large businesses is a question no public study has yet answered, which is exactly why it matters.
8% vs 15% Click through to a traditional search result when an AI Overview appears, versus when it does not Read the study · 9 minThe Platform Tax and Disintermediation
AI Overviews already send far fewer clicks to source sites than a normal results page does, but nobody, not even the platforms themselves, has yet measured whether marketplaces, OTAs, and lead-generation businesses are winning or losing the answer layer built to replace that click.
8% vs 15% Click-through rate to an outside link when a Google AI summary appears on the results page, versus when it doesn't Read the study · 10 minGlobal & Regional Commerce
How discovery works in the markets that do not run on Google.
China's Parallel Answer Engines: Why DeepSeek, Doubao, and Baidu ERNIE Are a Separate Visibility Game
China's generative-AI users now number in the hundreds of millions, running on apps, under rules, and drawing on sources that the Western AI-visibility playbook was never built for.
602 million generative-AI users in China by end of December 2025, up 141.7% year over year (42.8% national adoption) Read the study · 11 minSold in the DM: What the Evidence Actually Shows About Latin America's Conversational Commerce Edge
The "45 to 60 percent, twelve times a normal store" conversion claim behind Latin America's conversational commerce hype cannot be traced to any real study, but the verified numbers underneath it, a multibillion-dollar WhatsApp business and the world's fastest-growing ecommerce region, tell a real story on their own.
$2B+ WhatsApp business-messaging annual run rate, Q4 2025, up 54% year over year across the wider Family of Apps other revenue line Read the study · 12 minSovereign Search: The Markets Where a Local Engine, Not Google, Answers First
In Russia and South Korea, a home-grown search engine holds more of the market than Google does, and the timing of when each one shipped its own AI answer looks like part of the reason, though it is not the whole story.
71.03% Yandex's share of Russian search, versus Google's 26.53% Read the study · 10 minThe Data-Cost Ceiling: How Mobile Pricing Splits Africa's Attention Map
Mobile data pricing does not gate the whole continent evenly: it draws a hard line between a small set of extreme-cost, text-and-voice-locked markets and a much larger cheap-data majority where video-first platforms are already winning.
$43.75/GB Zimbabwe's mobile data price, the single most expensive market on Earth Read the study · 10 minThe Livestream Loop: How Southeast Asia Collapsed Discovery, Consideration, and Checkout Into One Screen
TikTok Shop's Southeast Asia sales roughly doubled to $45.6 billion in 2025, and a government forced its discovery layer and its checkout layer into two separate companies: the clearest sign yet that browsing and buying have become one screen, even though the exact size of the conversion advantage is still not settled.
$45.6B TikTok Shop Southeast Asia GMV in 2025, roughly double the prior year Read the study · 11 minThe WhatsApp Storefront: How India's MSMEs Are Discovered Without a Search Bar
In India, chat has quietly become the discovery engine: a majority of online adults message businesses every week, and the surface where that happens sits almost entirely outside the web an AI engine can read.
91% of online adults in India chat with a business weekly Read the study · 11 minThe Visibility Corpus
How the attention terrain is redrawn, and where the return sits.
From Corpus to Machine-Readiness Score
Attention now moves across nearly seven platforms a month per person, and the one layer everyone wants a competitive score for, the AI-answer layer, is the one layer nobody has independently measured yet.
54% vs 51% vs 52% Social platforms overtook both news websites/apps and TV as a news source worldwide in 2026, the first time platforms have led both Read the study · 12 minReading the Corpus
Search reach just hit its lowest point on record, and half of Americans now ask a chatbot instead, on a surface nobody is independently measuring yet.
80.3% (-210 bps YoY), lowest on record Monthly search engine use among online adults Read the study · 13 minWhere the ROI Is
Population attention has already moved to short video, streaming audio, and a fast-growing AI-answer layer; advertising dollars, and Meta's outsized share of them in particular, have not caught up.
54% vs. 52% vs. 51% Social/video networks overtook TV and news websites as the most-used way to access news, across 48 markets Read the study · 11 minThe Retail Visibility Study
Who the machine names when a shopper looks to buy
Ten primary-research reports across retail categories and five US metros, measuring who local search, AI Overviews, and the standalone chat engines actually name, and where independent local shops stand.
The headline, in one chart
Independents own the local pack, in every category
What the ten studies found together
Four things that held across every category
Independents own the local pack
Across every category we measured, independent local shops hold the great majority of the Google map three-pack, from roughly three quarters to a clean sweep. On local intent, the big-box and marketplace fear does not hold.
But they lose the layer above it
In the organic results beneath the pack, a directory and marketplace tax takes over. Yelp, Reddit, and city listicles outrank the shops themselves, and the independent share falls sharply. The pack is won; the page is not.
The AI answer splits by engine
Google rarely serves an AI Overview for these local queries, and where it does it cites directories. The standalone chat engines behave differently: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini all name real local independents, but only ChatGPT cites the shops’ own sites, and Gemini masks its sources entirely.
Demand is seasonal, so timing is a lever
Every category has a real demand curve, from a spring peak for nurseries to December for toys and jewelry. Visibility has to be earned before the season, not during it.
Choose a category
The ten studies
When a Shopper Looks for a Boutique, Who Does the Machine Name? Apparel Boutique Visibility Across Five US Metros
Who the Machine Names for the Local Bike Shop: Share of Answer, the Map Pack, and the Service Moat
Who the Machine Names When Flowers Cannot Wait: Order Gatherers, Local Florists, and the Time-Critical Visibility Terrain
Who the Machine Names When a Shopper Looks for a Furniture Store Near Them
When the Machine Recommends a Nursery: Local Visibility for Garden Centers and Plant Nurseries
The Aisle the Machine Skips: Independent Hardware Store Visibility Across Search and AI Answers
Who the Machine Names When a Reader Looks for a Bookstore
Who the Machine Names When a Shopper Looks for a Jeweler: Independent Visibility Across Five US Metros
The Replenishment Blind Spot: Who the Machine Names When Shoppers Look for a Local Pet Store
Who the Machine Names When a Shopper Wants a Toy Store: Local Visibility in a Gift-Driven, Seasonal Category
How each study is built
Four evidence layers, on every report
Share of answer
A dated read of who each surface names, classified independent, chain, marketplace, or directory, across five metros.
Intra-day stability
A k=5 recapture testing how much each surface reshuffles within a single day.
Demand history
Twelve months of real Google search volume, quarter by quarter, with the seasonal peak and trough.
The AI answer engines
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini captured with web search, read for who they name and where they cite from.
The program
Measured on a quarterly cadence
The audits repeat each quarter and the market studies extend as the shift does, so every figure here reflects where the market stands now. The instruments that produced these numbers read a single business as readily as a whole economy. For your own market and your own site, that read is a free Machine-Readiness Score.
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