AI could describe twelve Kansas City businesses. It picked almost none of them.
Ask an AI about a barbershop in Kansas City with 97 Google reviews and a 4.8 rating, and it will tell you the address, the hours, and that the regulars love the fades. Ask the same AI who the best barber in Kansas City is, and that barbershop never comes up.
Last Tuesday I ended Lefty Notes with a question I could not answer. Take a business with no website at all, just a Google profile and a pile of great reviews. Does AI know them? Does AI pick them? I said we would not ask the AIs that one. We would count it. So we counted it.
We found six businesses like that barbershop, every one with at least 50 Google reviews, 4.5 stars or better, and no website anywhere we could find. A barber, a nail salon, an auto mechanic, a taqueria, a tailor and a shoe repair place. Then we matched each one with a business in the same trade that has a website and about the same number of reviews. Before we asked a single question, we locked in our predictions and the result that would prove us wrong, the same way we run every study.
Then we asked ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI three things about all twelve, using the versions a regular person gets, with memory turned off wherever the app would let us. What is this business, who is the best in this trade in Kansas City, and are they any good. That came to 120 answers.
Google's own Gemini app froze on the very first question, which was about a barber. I have never seen a computer that stumped by a haircut. We moved Google's spot to the AI answer inside regular Google search, and that one worked fine.
Here is what came back.
When we asked what each business was, the AIs knew almost all of them. Perplexity and Google got all twelve right. ChatGPT got eleven, and put the twelfth in the right trade and the right part of town with a different address than its Google profile. Claude got seven, and its misses landed on businesses with and without websites alike. It came down to whether Claude looked in Google's business listings or only searched the web.
When we asked who the best barber, nail salon, auto mechanic, taqueria, tailor and shoe repair place in Kansas City was, our twelve businesses got named eight times in twenty-four answers. Most of the time the AI did not name either business in the pair. The picks went to places with hundreds or thousands of reviews and spots on the best-of lists.
That difference is the reason we measure two things for every client. The first is whether AI knows who you are. That is GEO. The second is whether AI picks you when somebody asks who to hire. That is Pick Rate. These twelve businesses did fine on the first one, and nine of the twelve never got picked by any of the four AIs.
So how did AI know six businesses that do not have a website? It read everything else. The Google listing, Yelp, Birdeye, MapQuest, the Chamber of Commerce. One answer cited a site called No Website Business Leads. Somebody out there keeps a list of exactly these businesses.
I called this part wrong. I bet ChatGPT and Perplexity would not know the no-website six, and they did. It is the same thing our research keeps finding. AI gets you right when it reads a page that is about you, and that page does not have to live on your website. It is why half of what we do happens off your site, on your Google profile, your listings and the directories in your trade.
One thing surprised me before we asked anything. Lawn care companies are known for not having websites. They live on Yelp ads, Angi and a Facebook page. But every lawn company we found with 50 or more Google reviews and 4.5 stars had a website, all fourteen of them.
The other half of what we do is your website, and this study showed where it earns its keep.
The businesses with websites got picked three times as often as the ones without, six to two. The pages that win the question of who to hire tend to be a page on your own site that says what you do and where you do it, and the lists the AI already reads.
The name mattered more than I expected. Our taqueria shares its name with a different taqueria across the state line, and Google's AI picked the other one. Your website is the one page about you that you control, and it is how AI tells you apart from the other business with your name. ChatGPT told me the nail salon's official website was an address that goes nowhere.
It passed out a dead website like a business card.
The third question was the easy one. Every time an AI found the business, it talked about the reviews. Forty-five answers out of forty-five.
It is twelve businesses, one run each, in one city, so I am not calling it a rule. We are going to run it again bigger.
If you run a business, here is the order it happened in. First the AI has to find a page about you. Then your name has to be on the pages it reads when somebody asks who to hire. Then your reviews do the talking.
AI knew the barber. It just did not send anybody to his chair.
Nathan. Lefty Media Co, Kansas City.
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