The short answer
Yes. Asked for the best barber, café, hairdresser, plumber, gym or beauty salon in a Sydney suburb, ChatGPT named specific local businesses in every one of our 468 ChatGPT answers (as of 29 October 2026). It named few of them: 2.4 to 3.2 per answer, and the names shifted between questions.
How we measured it: between 27 October 2026 and 29 October 2026 we asked OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s own models (the ones behind ChatGPT and Claude), with web search on, three everyday questions (for example “What’s the best barber in Newtown?”) for 156 trade-and-suburb combinations in Sydney, 936 answers in all (as of 29 October 2026), and stored every answer, every business named and every website each assistant read.
What we found
- It always names someone. No answer came back with zero businesses.
- It names a short list. 2.7 businesses per answer on average; Claude named 7.
- The list moves. Across six answers for one suburb and trade, 16 different businesses typically came up, so a business can be in one answer and out of the next.
- Being mentioned is not being recommended. 18% of the 2459 businesses that appeared were only mentioned, never recommended.
- Reading matters more than ranking. ChatGPT read Reddit in 98% of its answers and review pages in most of them. Being on those pages is how a business becomes an option.
Why this matters for an owner
A customer who asks ChatGPT gets two or three names, not a page of ten blue links. Either you are one of them or you are not in the conversation. The free check shows which it is for your business, six times over.