Everyone talks about listicles.
But if you run a local business, there’s another factor that matters just as much.
Your Google Maps reviews.
So I ran the numbers. 300 queries like “best plumber in Austin TX” (10 niches across 30 US cities). I collected 900 ChatGPT answers and matched them against 29,859 companies pulled from Google Maps.
Here’s what actually moves the needle:
More reviews, more mentions
The pattern is hard to miss.
Under 50 reviews? ChatGPT names you less than 1% of the time. Cross 500 reviews and that jumps to 12-13%.
And the rating matters too.
Drop below 4.5 stars and ChatGPT almost never names you. We’re talking about 1%.
The map pack is the real lever
Review count is big. But one thing beats it.
The Google Maps top 3.
If your company sits in the top 3 of the map pack for the same query (the map block at the top of Google), ChatGPT names you far more often.
Look at the gap.
Top 3 in the map pack: named in 33 to 38% of answers. Not in the top 3: only 3%.
That one spot is worth more than almost anything else you can do.
Where ChatGPT actually gets its data
You’d assume it pulls from Yelp or Reddit.
It doesn’t.
Those sites rank in Google’s top 10 for 66 to 74% of these queries. Yet ChatGPT opens them only about 1% of the time.
So where does it go?
Review aggregators and local-rating sites.
Birdeye gets opened 57% of the time. Expertise.com, 55%. Angi, 33%.
Yelp and Reddit? Around 1%.
The playbook for local
So here’s exactly what to do.
Pile up Google Maps reviews, keep your rating at 4.8+, fight for a top-3 spot in the map pack for your target queries, and build profiles on Birdeye and Expertise.com.
Listicles still help.
But for a local business, reviews and the map pack are what actually get you named by ChatGPT.
📊 300 queries (10 niches × 30 US cities) · 900 ChatGPT answers · 29,859 Google Maps companies · chatgpt.com via the DataForSEO LLM Scraper · October 2026.
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