Only 37.3% of ChatGPT's Local Picks for Cleveland Are Inside the City, vs 93.8% in San Antonio

Someone in Cleveland asks ChatGPT for the best dentist in Cleveland. Every business in the answer is real, most have good reviews, and most of them are not in Cleveland. The same question asked in San Antonio returns a list that almost entirely checks out.

How far you can trust an AI assistant's local advice depends on where you live. For a customer, a recommendation outside the city means a longer drive or a business that does not serve their address. For a local business, it means competitors from the next town over are taking places in answers about your city.

In Cleveland, only 37.3% of ChatGPT's local recommendations are real, open and inside the city, and in Lewiston, Burlington and Detroit it is also fewer than four in ten. In San Antonio the figure is 93.8%, and across all 79 cities it is 72.5%.

On September 23 and 24, 2026 we asked ChatGPT for the best businesses across 20 local services, from dentists and plumbers to restaurants, in each of 79 US cities: 50 large cities and 29 smaller ones. We looked up every business it named on Google Business Profiles, the free listings that show a business's address, hours and reviews in Google Search and Maps. That gave 8,338 recommendations to check, between 75 and 128 per city.

A recommendation counts as fully accurate when three things are true: the business has a Google Business Profile with a matching name, it is not marked as closed, and its address is inside the city in the question. "Found on Google" means the business passed the first test. We then ranked the 79 cities by their share of fully accurate recommendations.

At the bottom of the ranking, Lewiston, Maine scores 35.1%, Burlington, Vermont 35.6%, Cleveland 37.3% and Detroit 38.3%. Five cities fall below 50%. In these places ChatGPT still names real businesses: 95.5% of its Cleveland recommendations are found on Google, and 94.8% in Lewiston. The businesses are simply in the surrounding towns.

Cleveland and Detroit are compact cities surrounded by large suburbs, and many of the best-known businesses in their metro areas have suburban addresses. Lewiston and Burlington are small cities whose neighboring towns hold much of the local trade. ChatGPT answers at the level of the metro area, so a question about the city returns the region. In the median city, 94.8% of recommendations are found on Google, which shows that location, not whether the business exists, is what separates the top of the ranking from the bottom.

San Antonio leads, followed by Albuquerque at 92%, with El Paso (90.2%), Tucson (89.7%) and Austin (89.4%) close behind at about 90%. New York (89%), Houston (87.2%) and Chicago (87.2%) complete the top eight. Six of the ten most accurate cities are in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, and all ten are large cities.

These are cities with wide boundaries that take in most of their metro area, so a business that serves the city usually also has a city address. In each of the ten most accurate cities, more than 92% of ChatGPT's recommendations can be found on Google, and nearly all of them also pass the location test.

Across all 79 cities, 72.5% of ChatGPT's local recommendations are fully accurate, and the median city scores 73.1%. In 24 cities at least 80% of recommendations pass every test.

City size helps, but not by much. Large cities average 74.6% accuracy and smaller cities 68.1%. Large cities fill the whole top ten, yet Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee sit near the bottom next to smaller cities such as Lewiston, Burlington and Natchitoches. How a city's borders are drawn matters more than how many people live in it.

If your city ranks low, your problem is placement, not existence. Make sure your Google Business Profile, website and directory listings state your city clearly and consistently, and name the neighborhoods you serve. That gives ChatGPT a clear signal to place you in the right city's answers, ahead of a suburban competitor.

If you are based in a suburb next to a large city, you are already showing up in that city's AI answers. Treat it as an opportunity: say plainly on your website that you serve the city, list the areas you cover and keep every listing complete. Then ask ChatGPT for the best businesses of your type in your city and in the neighboring city, and see where you appear. An ai seo company can run these city-level checks for you across every AI engine.

Embed this research

Cite this study