The short version: A new study ran ChatGPT’s local panel across 216 U.S. markets and found businesses with an address in the queried city showed up at roughly 14.4x the odds of businesses without one — ahead of reviews, ahead of ratings. That’s a descriptive finding, not a causal one. But if you’re a service-area contractor whose shop sits in a suburb and whose customers live in the big city, the direction of it should get your attention. Google tells you to hide your address. ChatGPT appears to reward having one. That’s the squeeze, and there’s an honest way through it.
Your shop is in Tukwila. Your trucks spend their days in Seattle. When a homeowner in Ballard asks ChatGPT “who is the best restoration contractor in Seattle,” the business that gets named probably has a Seattle address on its card — and yours doesn’t.
That’s not a hunch anymore. This week, the local-search research team at Spearleaf published a study that put ChatGPT’s local business panel under a microscope: 216 markets (12 services across 18 cities), two waves of captures 4–9 days apart, August 18–28, 2026. They pulled 1,946 displayed business cards apart and compared them against 4,086 observed candidates that never made the panel. What separated the shown from the not-shown, more than anything else, was the address line.
Businesses with an in-city address appeared at 14.4 times the odds of businesses without one (95% CI [10.3, 21.5]). For context, that’s bigger than the review-volume effect (1.81x per doubling of reviews) and bigger than the rating effect (1.36x per tenth of a star). 92.0% of displayed cards carried an in-city address, versus 73.9% of the candidates that didn’t get displayed.
Read that carefully, because the study’s authors do: this is descriptive, not causal. ChatGPT isn’t necessarily deciding on the address. The address may be riding along with other things — stronger local citation profiles, more location pages, deeper review footprints. Correlation with a megaphone. But megaphone or not, the pattern is the pattern, and it repeats at every layer of the data.
The part that should worry a service-area business
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for contractors. Google’s own guidelines for service-area businesses say: if customers don’t come to your location, you must hide your address. One profile per service area. Up to 20 named service areas. Roughly a two-hour driving-time boundary.
So the honest Tukwila shop does exactly what Google asks — hides the address, lists Seattle as a service area — and walks into an AI search environment where the single strongest observed correlate of being shown is having a visible in-city address.
Nobody is telling you to fake one. Virtual offices, PO boxes, and mailbox addresses violate Google’s guidelines and can get your profile suspended — the trade press is unambiguous on this, and a suspension costs you the map pack too, not just the AI panel. Don’t trade a real asset for a maybe. But understand the structural disadvantage: the rules of the old game and the observed patterns of the new game point in opposite directions, and you’re standing in the middle.
What the survivors had
The study didn’t just measure the address effect. It measured what the businesses that kept their panel spots across both waves looked like, and that’s the actionable part:
- Reviews are the bench you sit on. Survivors had a median of 226 reviews versus 164 for businesses that dropped out between waves. The median rating was 4.9 in both groups — rating gets you in the room, volume keeps you in the chair. And the panel-minimum rating held at 4.8 across every city tier. Below that floor, you’re not in the conversation.
- Almost half the panel turns over. Only 48.2% of businesses shown in wave one appeared again in wave two. The same business held #1 in both waves in just 34.1% of markets. Compare that to Google’s local pack, which held 0.82 overlap wave-to-wave against ChatGPT’s 0.36. The AI panel is volatile — which is bad news if you’re ranked, and good news if you’re not yet, because the door keeps swinging open.
- Yelp matters more than you’d guess. 17.4% of resolved rating cards showed Yelp ratings rather than Google’s. If your Yelp profile is a ghost town, that’s a gap in a place ChatGPT demonstrably looks.
- ChatGPT reads the review sites, not just Google. The most-retrieved domain across the study was reviews.birdeye.com (37.7% of markets). Roofers skewed toward expertise.com, plumbers toward bestprosintown.com, HVAC toward consumeraffairs.com. Your reputation footprint needs to live where the model actually goes, and that’s not only your Google profile.
- The prompt’s city is the city. All 447 resolved cards matched the city named in the prompt, not the searcher’s location. Geography in AI search is declared, not detected. That cuts both ways: you can’t coast on proximity, but a well-built Seattle service page is a declared claim on Seattle queries.
The honest playbook
So what does the Tukwila shop do — the one that won’t fake an address and shouldn’t?
- Build the review bench like it’s the job. 226 reviews is the median of the survivors, and the 4.8 floor is non-negotiable. This is unglamorous and it’s the whole game. Every finished job is a review request. No exceptions, no “we’ll ask the happy ones.”
- Fix Yelp. A dead Yelp profile is a hole in exactly the place showing up on nearly one panel card in five. Claim it, fill it, feed it reviews.
- Be present on the domains the model retrieves. Birdeye, and whatever the vertical leaders are for your trade. These are citation surfaces now, not just review sites.
- Build real city pages for the cities you serve. The study’s authors note this as inference, not finding — but the mechanism is clean: the panel keys off the prompt’s city, and a genuine, substantive Seattle service page is a legitimate claim that you serve Seattle. Not a doorway page. A real page with real job photos, real service detail, real local proof.
- Treat the panel as volatile and act like it. Half the names change between waves. That means a competitor’s spot is never safe — and neither is yours. The shops that keep showing up will be the ones whose fundamentals (reviews, ratings, citation depth) don’t depend on any single week’s panel.
And the thing you don’t do: don’t rent a fake Seattle address. The study describes what correlates with display; it doesn’t prescribe cheating, and Google’s enforcement is real. A suspended profile loses you the map pack, the AI panel, and the trust of the next customer who looks you up. Play the long game — it’s the only one with compounding returns.
Why this matters now
AI search is still young enough that its patterns are being mapped in public, by independent researchers, in real time. That window doesn’t stay open. The businesses that understand the panel’s observed preferences while they’re still forming — address signals, review depth, citation breadth — get to build for them deliberately instead of discovering them after a competitor does.
Your shop’s in Tukwila. That’s fine. Just make sure that when Ballard asks, ChatGPT has every honest reason to name you anyway.
Related on Tygart Media: Zero SEO value for restoration contractors, local AEO and featured snippets, and AI prompts for plumbing contractors.
Sources: Spearleaf’s full report, How ChatGPT Picks a Local Business (published September 25, 2026), and the accompanying press release. Google’s service-area business guidelines: GBP guidelines and address management.
Caveats, stated plainly: Spearleaf is a local-SEO/GEO agency — they sell the remedy this research points at. The study is self-published, not peer-reviewed, with no independent replication yet. Every odds ratio above is descriptive, not causal. The Tukwila/Seattle framing is illustrative — the study didn’t break out service-area businesses specifically, so the “structurally disadvantaged” read is informed extrapolation, flagged as such. Study scope: one pinned model, one plan tier, Memory off, one phrasing family (“who is the best {service} in {city}”), August 18–28, 2026, 214 paired markets.
This article was researched and drafted by Glint, Will Tygart’s AI collaborator, from the Spearleaf study’s published data. Every statistic above is traceable to the source report.
Want this applied to your shop? Tygart Media runs focused AI-search and local AEO sprints for contractors — audit first, then a tight fix list. Talk to us.
