Your customers read six review sites before they pick you

The pages you have never opened

Healthgrades has a page about your practice, and Angi has one about your shop. Yellow Pages and the Better Business Bureau carry entries for most local businesses too. Nobody in your office signed up for any of them, and they are still up.

BrightLocal ran its Local Consumer Review Survey again this year on a panel of 1,002 US adults. The average consumer uses six different review sites when choosing businesses. Reading them is close to universal now, at 97% of people.

Google is still the biggest single stop on that route, at 71% of the people who read reviews. Last year the same survey put it at 83%. Apple Maps nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%, which is about one in four people. That's the map app that comes on every iPhone, and most owners I talk to have never opened their own entry there.

Facebook, Tripadvisor, the Better Business Bureau, Trustpilot, Healthgrades, Yellow Pages and Angi all grew over the last 12 months. Local news sites went the other way, falling from 48% to 29%.

Where people write reviews is a different list again. Google takes 45% of them, Facebook 34%, Yelp 24%, Apple Maps 17%. The site a customer leaves a review on and the site the next customer reads one on are often two different places. That's how a page with three old reviews on it stays up for years without anyone noticing.

Angi and Yellow Pages carry entries built from old data feeds, and Healthgrades lists practices that never signed up. An owner who has polished the Google listing to a shine has still never read five of the six places a customer stops at.

Six is an average across the panel, so plenty of people check three and plenty check nine. Either way, one listing is no longer the whole picture a customer builds of you before they dial.

Nearly half of people now ask a chatbot first

Same survey, same panel. Use of ChatGPT and similar chat tools for local recommendations went from 6% last year to 45%. That makes it the third most popular way people get a business recommendation.

Semrush read 126 million US AI search prompts between January and April 2026 and published what those answers get built from. When ChatGPT describes a business, most of the words come from pages other people wrote. Customer reviews, forum threads, write-ups by other publishers, and industry pages. The report puts ChatGPT at an average of 15 sources per answer, and Gemini at about 3.

Fifteen pages is more than most owners have ever seen written about themselves. Some of them will be your own site. The rest are reviews, a forum thread from 2023, a directory entry, a trade write-up. The paragraph a customer reads gets stitched together out of that pile, and you had no hand in most of it.

So one pile of pages does the work twice over. Somebody reads a few of them before they call you, and when a customer asks ChatGPT instead, the answer gets assembled out of the same material.

Semrush recorded which pages these tools quote. Nobody has shown that an AI engine ranks businesses by review recency or star rating. Anyone who tells you it does is guessing, and a guess is a poor thing to spend money on.

Semrush also put a number on how few companies can check any of this. 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure what AI answers say about their brand, and only 9% have the tools to track every relevant number across platforms. Most owners are in that same position with a lot less help.

What people say they do once they get there

The survey also asked what consumers do when they land on a page. Every number below is something people said about their own habits. 41% say they always read reviews when browsing, up from 29% last year. 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

74% only care about reviews written in the last three months. 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher. The thing they weigh most is several reviews saying the same kind of thing, at 56%, ahead of a high star rating at 42%.

A business with 8 reviews on a site you forgot about falls under the floor nearly half of those people set. Once you know the page is there, you can start asking customers to leave a review on it.

A page with wrong facts on it costs you before any of that comes into play. What turns up is usually dull and cheap to fix. A phone number from a line you gave up. Hours from before you moved your Friday schedule around.

Half an hour this week

This runs the same whether you own a dental practice, a medspa, an HVAC company, a law office, a vet clinic or a home-care agency. Sit down once with a laptop and work through six things. Five of them are just looking and writing down what you find. Only the last one asks you to change anything.

1. Type your business name plus your town into Google and read past the first three results. Write down every site that has a page about you.
2. Open your own entry on Apple Maps. Check the hours and the phone number against what you actually keep today.
3. Do the same on the one site specific to your trade. Healthgrades for a practice, Angi for a contractor, the Better Business Bureau for most others.
4. On every page you find, check four things: phone number, hours, address and list of services. Write down whatever is wrong.
5. Ask ChatGPT what it knows about your business by name, then ask it where it read that. Compare its list against the one you wrote in step 1.
6. Fix the wrong facts on the pages you can edit yourself. For the rest, write down who owns the page.

You're hunting for wrong facts this week. The star rating is a separate job for a separate month, and it moves a lot slower than a corrected phone number does.

BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found the average consumer uses six different review sites when choosing businesses, and most owners have only ever opened one of them. About half an hour this week gets you the other five.