What decides it
Who gets named? Three things decide.
We measure how AI builds its “best near me” answers. The pattern holds - and it is not your Maps ranking.
01 · The Google card
Assistants pull their local candidates from the same data Google Maps runs on. Your Business Profile gets you considered - or leaves you invisible before anything else matters.
02 · The review filter
In the categories we’ve measured, the businesses AI names carry review counts several times their category’s median. Reviews decide who survives the cut.
03 · Your own website
Most of what AI actually says - prices, specialties, who you’re “best for” - it quotes from somewhere. Whether that is the businesses’ own sites depends on the trade: in some, nearly every citation we recorded pointed at one; in others, not a single one did. They almost all have a site - of the 34 businesses ChatGPT named that we could match to our Maps sample, 34 run a live site of their own - so having one is not the bar. Having one AI can quote is, in a trade where it reads them at all.
Maps position doesn’t explain it
In our measurements, businesses ranked past #60 in Maps got named while some top-ranked ones were skipped. The baseline shows which of the three factors above is failing you - with the evidence attached. Your own category page says which of the three the measurement found failing there; the catalogue lists them, the research pages publish the readings, and the free scan is where a reading of your own starts.