Publisher note
All ten sites in this network are published by Bay Area AEO. They cover answer engine optimization in the Bay Area from ten angles and link to one another so readers can move between related topics.
| Question | ChatGPT | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | OpenAI | |
| Where the customer meets it | A conversation the customer starts | Above the regular results on a Google search |
| How it gets current facts | Searches the web and composes an answer from the pages it retrieves | Draws on Google's index and Google's business data |
| Business data it is likely to read | Whatever pages and listings its searches retrieve | Google Business Profile categories, hours, attributes and reviews |
| Follow-up questions | The customer can refine in conversation | Google's AI Mode carries the conversational version |
How AI Overviews reaches a customer
A customer does not have to choose AI Overviews. It appears on the Google results page for many questions, so it reaches people who think they are running an ordinary search. Bay Area AEO's published estimates put the share of adults who read Google's AI Overviews at 60%, against 49% who use AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini and 24% who use an AI chatbot every day. Those estimates are published by Bay Area AEO according to Pew Research (June 2026).
Because the summary is built from Google's own data, the Google Business Profile matters a great deal here. Its categories and hours, its attributes and its reviews are the facts the summary can draw on.
How ChatGPT builds an answer
A customer opens ChatGPT and asks a full question, often with several conditions: “My water heater is leaking. Is there a plumber in Hayward who can come today?” When ChatGPT searches the web it breaks that question into smaller searches, reads the pages it retrieves and composes one answer. Bay Area AEO's own explainer describes the sequence in four steps: understand, fan out, retrieve, answer. A business is named when the retrieved pages and listings make the fit clear. For that plumber question, Bay Area AEO's plumber page points to same-day and emergency availability stated consistently on the website and every listing, and to city-level service areas with response time expectations.
The other assistants
ChatGPT and AI Overviews are two of six platforms Bay Area AEO optimizes for. The others read in their own ways.
| Assistant | What it draws on |
|---|---|
| Google Gemini | Google's index and Google Business Profile data |
| Perplexity | Searches the web for every question and shows numbered source citations beside its answer |
| Claude | With web search enabled, reads retrieved pages and can recommend businesses by name |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing's index and Bing Places data |
| Voice assistants such as Siri | Often the same listing data the text assistants use |
The practical consequence is breadth. A business that has polished only its Google profile may appear in AI Overviews and Gemini and be missing from Copilot if its Bing Places record is stale. Bay Area AEO's answer is to cover the listings and directories each platform relies on, along with the content.
What a business can influence on each
For AI Overviews and Gemini, the closest lever is the Google Business Profile: correct categories, complete hours and attributes, and reviews in which customers describe what the business does best. Behind that sits the website, which Google indexes like any other page, so service pages that answer the questions customers ask in plain language give the summary something to draw on.
For ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, the lever is the set of pages their searches retrieve. Those include the business's own site, its listings on Yelp, Apple Maps and Bing, the directories of its trade, and the local guides and publications that mention it. Structured data helps every one of them, because schema markup states the services, service area and hours directly. A site that allows AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot in its robots.txt can be read and quoted; Bay Area AEO checks this and, where a site blocks them, recommends the smallest fix.
Voice assistants such as Siri answer spoken questions, often from the same listing data the text assistants use. A business with clean listings on Apple Maps and the other platforms is in a position to be named aloud as well as on screen.
One panel across every platform
Since each platform can answer the same question differently, Bay Area AEO measures them together. It builds a list of the real questions a business's customers ask AI and runs them across every major AI platform each month. The client sees, platform by platform, how often the business is mentioned, how it is described, which competitors appear and which sources the AI cites. A gain on ChatGPT and a gap on AI Overviews show up side by side, and the next month's work goes where the answers need it. See prompt panel and share of answer.
Local use across the Bay Area
The same estimates, applied by Bay Area AEO to population figures, give a sense of scale in the largest cities.
| Place | Population | Adults | Use AI chatbots (49%) | Use one daily (24%) | Read AI Overviews (60%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Jose | 980,000 | 779,000 | 382,000 | 187,000 | 468,000 |
| Oakland | 430,000 | 348,000 | 171,000 | 83,600 | 209,000 |
| Fremont | 234,000 | 182,000 | 89,100 | 43,600 | 109,000 |
Reading the two answers side by side
Ask the same question in ChatGPT and on Google and the two answers often name different businesses. That difference is useful. It shows which sources each surface leaned on, and the cited-sources record in the monthly report makes it concrete: a neighborhood guide behind one answer, a Google profile behind the other. A business named on one surface and absent from the other can usually trace the gap to a listing or a mention the second surface reads. The fix then has an address, and the next month's panel shows whether it worked.
See also
How AI assistants choose businesses · Query fan-out · AI SEO · AEO vs SEO