What changes when your client searches ChatGPT before calling.

Before calling a clinic, an office or an HVAC company, some customers already ask an AI assistant who can solve the problem in their city. The answer comes back in a few lines, with two or three names and a reason for each. Businesses that don't show up there don't even make the comparison. This guide brings together what is known, with sources, about how these answers are put together and what a service business can adjust without falling for miracle promises.

The scale of the change, without the hype

AI assistants are already part of how Brazilians search, but they haven't replaced search engines. The Super Panorama survey, by Mobile Time with Opinion Box, interviewed 4,100 Brazilian smartphone users in March 2026. Around 75% said they had used generative AI assistants in the last 12 months, and ChatGPT was the most cited among them (79.7%). At the same time, almost 40% still search only on search engines, one in four uses search engines and AI equally, and only 2.2% use chatbots alone¹.

Usage also leans more toward questions than tasks. In a study of 1.5 million conversations, published in September 2025, OpenAI itself classified 49% of messages as "asking": people seeking information or advice, not a finished piece of text².

For local businesses, the strongest data is from the United States. In BrightLocal's annual survey of 1,002 American consumers, the use of ChatGPT and other AIs to ask for local business recommendations went from 6% to 45% in one year³. We did not find an equivalent number measured in Brazil, but the direction is clear: AI has become another stage of research, and often the first conversation.

How ChatGPT builds an answer about businesses in your city

The OpenAI help center explains the mechanism quite frankly⁴:

• ChatGPT decides on its own when to search the web, whenever the question asks for current information.
• It rewrites the user's question into more targeted searches and sends them to partner search providers. The official example: "good restaurants near me" becomes something like "best restaurants San Francisco".
• It uses the user's approximate location, estimated by IP, and can share it with partners who provide lists of nearby establishments.
• It sorts the results by various factors and warns that the position is "not guaranteed". It also admits that results and citations may be incomplete, outdated or erroneous.

In practice, the question "I need someone to fix air conditioning this afternoon in Campinas" becomes one or more searches, and the assistant reads the pages it finds. It only repeats what is written somewhere it can access.

Which places are these? A BrightLocal test of 20 searches across 10 industries, run on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode, found that businesses' own websites made up the majority of sources. Directories, review sites and social networks also appeared. In an earlier study, from December 2024, ChatGPT used business websites as a source 58% of the time⁵. It's a small, American sample, so it serves as a clue, not a rule.

Google also answers before showing links

Search's AI Mode launched in Portuguese in Brazil on September 8, 2025. Google says it breaks the question into subtopics, runs several searches at once, and that early users ask questions two to three times longer than traditional searches⁶.

This changes how people search. Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: when a Google page included an AI summary, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits; without the summary, in 15%. Clicks on links within the summary itself happened in only 1% of visits⁷. For a business, this means what appears in the answer carries more weight than before, because fewer people go on to click the links.

The same study shows where the summary appears. Short searches, of one or two words, generated a summary in only 8% of cases. Questions that started with "who", "what", "when" or "why" generated a summary in 60%⁷. A short local-service search, such as "dentista Moema" (dentist in Moema), falls on the side that rarely triggers a summary. Long, detailed questions are AI's territory, and they are exactly the ones that most resemble your customer's real questions: "do you take insurance plan X?", "are you open at night?", "do you give quotes without a visit?".

The same shift is happening on Maps. The conversational Q&A feature, Ask Maps, was announced in March 2026 and draws on information from more than 300 million places and reviews from more than 500 million contributors⁸. At Google for Brasil, in June 2026, Google announced its launch in the country, in Portuguese⁹.

What AI needs to find to recommend your business

Google published a guide on how to appear in these AI features, and the main message is unglamorous: SEO best practices still apply, because these features rely on the same ranking and quality systems as Search. There is no need to create special files for AI or rewrite the site "for bots". The guide cites the Google Business Profile as one of the ways to make services visible in both AI answers and regular results, and values content based on first-hand experience that goes beyond what anyone could write¹⁰.

Putting the sources above together, four conditions keep coming up:

1. Be accessible. If your site blocks OpenAI's search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, it will not appear in ChatGPT search answers. This control is separate from GPTBot, the training crawler: you can block training and still appear in search. Changes to the robots.txt file take about 24 hours to take effect¹¹. OpenAI also recommends checking that the site's hosting or CDN doesn't block traffic from its crawler's addresses⁴.
2. Have the facts written out as text. Services, city and neighborhoods served, hours, service options, accepted insurance plans and what's included. Information that exists only in an image, a story or the receptionist's head is unlikely to make it into the answer.
3. Say the same thing everywhere. The same name, address, phone number and hours on the website, the Business Profile and social media. BrightLocal itself recommends keeping the website up to date and correcting wrong data in the sources AIs consult³.
4. Have proof from third parties. Recent reviews with replies carry weight with readers and become part of the material the AI summarizes^5,8. The guide to your Google profile covers this in detail.

What to avoid

• Pay for "first place in ChatGPT". A SparkToro study with 600 volunteers and 2,961 runs on ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI showed that the chance of the same list of recommendations repeating is less than one in a hundred, and of it coming in the same order, close to one in a thousand. The author concludes that any tool promising an "AI ranking position" doesn't hold up; what you can measure is how often a brand appears across many repeated questions¹².
• Buy mentions. Google's guide says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web doesn't help as much as it seems, because the same systems that assess quality also block spam¹⁰.
• Create files "for AI" expecting them to fix Google. The guide states that Search does not use files such as llms.txt or special markup for this¹⁰.

How to test this today in 20 minutes

1. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Ask the five questions on your sheet, always with the city or neighborhood.
2. Note whether your business appears, which competitors appear and which sources are cited.
3. Check if what the AI says about you is correct: hours, address, services.
4. Repeat on another day. Answers vary, so an isolated attempt proves nothing¹².
5. Open seudominio.com.br/robots.txt and check whether it blocks OAI-SearchBot.
6. If you use Search Console, Google already provides a performance report on generative AI capabilities¹⁰.

Checklist

• The main service, city and audience appear on the website's first screen.
• Each important service has its own page, with text, not just images.
• Hours, address, phone number and service options are written as text.
• The same details appear identically on the website, the Business Profile and social media.
• robots.txt does not block OAI-SearchBot or Google's crawlers.
• Real customer FAQs are answered on the website.
• Reviews are recent and responded to.
• The five-question test was done and recorded, with a date.

Where to start

If the test shows that assistants don't know what you do, where you serve or why to trust you, the fix starts with the basics: a clear website, consistent data and real proof. To see this picture more precisely, the free diagnosis from Flowt measures your business's digital presence against fixed criteria and points out where it is losing customers along the way.