The market is not the only thing that shrinks to a city radius. The evidence an assistant needs before it will name a business shrinks too, and most local operators have never audited whether that evidence actually exists.
Why does a city-level market behave differently to a national one in AI search?
A national brand can earn a citation through scale: enough content, enough backlinks, enough independent coverage that an assistant has plenty of material to draw on regardless of exactly who is asking. A city-level business does not get that luxury.
SOCi’s 2026 Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of those locations, compared to a 35.9% appearance rate in the Google local 3-Pack. AI search is roughly 30 times more selective than traditional local search, which means a city-level business does not have the volume of corroborating signals to absorb inconsistency the way a national brand can.
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