Does Google Business Profile affect ChatGPT and Gemini recommendations?

The short answer, assistant by assistant

Each assistant gets local business information from a different place. The table sums up what each one's own documentation says and what the independent studies we read measured.

How Gemini and Google's AI use your Business Profile

Google is clear that its own AI reads Maps. The Gemini help centre says Gemini uses public information from Google Maps to find places and to give their addresses, websites, ratings and opening hours. Google's developer tool for grounding Gemini in Maps draws on places, reviews, photos and hours from more than 250 million places, according to its October 2025 launch post, and Ask Maps, the Gemini feature inside Google Maps, analyses over 300 million places, according to Google in March 2026. Your Business Profile is what puts your business into that data: Google's own guidance says claiming a profile is what makes your details show up in Maps and the knowledge panel.

For Search, Google's guide to optimizing for AI features says Business Profiles can help your products and services be visible in AI responses, and its AI features page lists keeping Business Profile information up to date among the basics. Google does not say which fields matter or how much.

What independent research measured is how differently the two Google surfaces behave. In Steady Demand's August 2026 study of 86,645 citations, 79.8% of AI Mode's citations on local queries pointed to Google Maps or Business Profile data, while AI Overviews pointed there only 3.1% of the time and cited the business's own website in 70.7%. So for AI Mode the profile is the main source; for AI Overviews your website does more of the work, which our guide to appearing in Google's AI Overviews covers.

Does ChatGPT use Google Business Profile?

Not as far as OpenAI says. Its ChatGPT search help page says ChatGPT may share your location with trusted third-party providers for local information such as nearby business listings, and names OpenTable, Resy and Yelp for restaurant availability. It does not mention Google, Google Maps or Business Profiles anywhere we could find. Two partners are confirmed from their side: Mapbox supplies the maps in ChatGPT search, and Yelp told its shareholders in February 2026 that it had signed an agreement with OpenAI.

The measurements agree. In Steady Demand's August 2026 study of 2,880 ChatGPT prompts, Yelp data sat behind 95.8% of the business cards ChatGPT showed, and Google was a visible source in 0.07% of runs. In Peekl's own scans of 756 local answers, Google's pages were almost never the cited source: 2 of the 926 ChatGPT citations we counted, and none of the 1,428 counted for Gemini when it answered with web search. One agency study from Ontario in May 2026, before the Yelp rollout, did find ChatGPT citing google.com often, so the picture may vary by country and over time.

For an owner, the practical reading is that ChatGPT meets your business on Yelp, the directories and review sites for your trade, and your own website. Our study of which websites AI trusts for local recommendations shows which ones, trade by trade.

What about Claude?

Anthropic lists Brave Search as the web search provider behind Claude, so Claude's web answers do not come from Google's index. Its help centre says Claude uses a search tool to ground its answers in content from the live web, which means your website, directory listings and reviews on other sites are what it can find. One independent capture in May 2026 saw the Claude app use Google Places data, including Google reviews, when asked about hotels; Anthropic has not documented this, and we could not confirm it for other kinds of business.

Do reviews and ratings decide who AI recommends?

They set a floor more than they pick a winner. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, covering more than 350,000 locations, found that the locations ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars, Gemini's 3.9 and Perplexity's 4.2. Steady Demand's study of 1,487 Gemini queries found Gemini's picks averaged 4.76 stars against 4.82 for a plain Google local search, so Gemini was no pickier about star ratings than an ordinary Google search already is, and 17% of the businesses it recommended had fewer than 50 reviews.

Experts rank the profile lower for AI than for the map pack. In Whitespark's 2026 survey of local search experts, profile signals were given 12% of the weight for AI search visibility, against 32% for Google's local pack, and the top factor for AI was being on curated best-of lists. That is expert opinion, not measurement, but it matches what the citation studies show: outside Google's own surfaces, the lists and reviews about you matter more than the profile itself.

What to do with your Business Profile

Treat the profile as the foundation for Google's assistants and as one listing among several for the rest. In order:

• Make it complete and accurate: the right primary category, your services, hours, address, phone number and website. Gemini reads these fields when it describes you.
• Keep genuine reviews coming. Aim to sit comfortably above 4 stars with recent reviews, because below that you risk being filtered out; above it, more stars alone will not move you up.
• Copy the same name, address, phone number and hours to Yelp and the directories for your trade. That is where ChatGPT looks, and matching details everywhere let every assistant trust that the listings are the same business.
• Make sure your website says plainly what you do and where. It is the main source for Google's AI Overviews and one of the main ones for ChatGPT.
• Check each assistant on its own, because they draw on different data. Ask Gemini and ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, or follow the step-by-step guide to checking Gemini by hand.

What we could not verify

No study we found tested whether changing a Business Profile field, such as photos, posts or extra categories, causes an assistant to recommend a business more. Every figure above is correlational or observational, and Steady Demand says so about its own work. Two claims repeated widely online did not hold up: that Foursquare powers most of ChatGPT's local results, which a larger August 2026 study did not find, and that ChatGPT uses Bing Places, which no OpenAI source says. The deal terms often quoted for the Yelp and OpenAI agreement appear only in secondary coverage, so we have left them out.