Your Next Customer Is Asking AI: Is Your Business Getting Named?

0:00 Why AI Search Is Replacing Google
Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration Your next customer is asking a robot the real question is is that robot? Is that AI chat thought mentioning your name? So we’re gonna dig into this. Let’s find out so last year almost nobody was using AI to sort of find local service businesses and And it was around five or six percent in 2025 where people that were using AI to find local businesses and that moved up to 45 in 2020 And so 45 out of 100 people are using AI to find local businesses. So that’s not a trend That’s a stampede and this comes from the BrightLocal survey as of February 2026 Now Google still is number one. It just has a smaller market share, right? So Google’s share of how people find a local business drop from 83 percent down to 71 percent in one you So that’s kind of a pretty big drop right there And 31 percent of people are now using chat tpt and 23 percent are using Google’s AI mode So it’s the same customer as but a new front door And every eye is changing everything and you just got to realize that change is in the air

1:21 Google Maps Rankings Miss AI Results
Now being number one on Google used to be everything right something Less than half of businesses that rank well in Google maps show up when someone asks AI for a recommend date So you have two separate games happening here You have the Google maps game which is ranking number one here gets you seen by real people searching But AI assistants aren’t really looking at Google maps And then of course you have AI recommendations where one out of 80 local businesses get named and so Google’s ranked doesn’t help there Now of those local businesses chat tbt only recommends one two of those local businesses Chat tbt is only recommending 1 .2 percent So only 1 .2 percent of those people actually come to websites, which is really Really really sad right so Google ranking is kind of invisible to AI You’re going to need a different strategy going forward and everyone knows about the click apocalypse right the clicks are drying up When Google shows an AI answer at the top most people get the answer and move on And that means that they’re getting no clicks no visits no chance to people come to the website And so it’s like 8 percent Essentially of clicking the website but if it’s an AI answering it’s like 1 percent right And that’s from the pew research center, which is looking at 68 ,000 real searches

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

2:46 Where AI Gets Its Answers YouTube Dominates
So where does the robot get all of his answers? And I was really surprised to find out it was youtube youtube is the single most quoted source In Google’s AI answers. It’s not even close to reddit wikipedia or other sites So if you just look at this one example here 21 sources of AI answers was youtube versus eight on reddit and like six and wikipedia and three and other sites And this is from hrefs study in june of 2026 where they looked at 3 million searches In youtube was cited 21 percent of the time ahead of reddit wikipedia and everyone else So huge and it’s not even close across chat tpt Perplexity and Google’s AI YouTube gets quoted 200 times more than any other video platform So look at that here that share of citations is like 20 versus vimeo and like tiktok It’s like 0 .1 and that’s from bright edge looking at 30 million sources And of course we didn’t take their word for it So we have our own AI tracker, which is tracking real data real clients or whatever

3:54 PushRank Tracker Real Client Data
And our tracker looked at around 2800 real Questions from our own clients tracking every answer every citation Tation every mention across chat tpt Perplexity and Google’s AI and Here’s what k2794 real questions asked 42 42 clients tracked across all of her industries and we ended up with 813 unique question testing visibility scenario So looking at our own numbers YouTube is showing up 536 times more than anywhere else, right a youtube video was the source 536 times more to answer a question about our client industry And the breakdown was 421’s youtube citations and Google’s AI overviews brought in 421’s citations And Perplexity was 115 and that’s from our push rank live tracker from june through september of 2026 here’s some real numbers from one of our clients

4:58 Bear Restoration Named 24 Times by AI
bear restoration, which is a restoration company in Northwest arkansas they’re not famous. They’re not huge out of 142 answers A real customer would ask bear got named 24 times as the answer by AI engines So one out of six question was answered by them with zero paid ads and zero SEO agency ads And the breakdown there was Perplexity was 17 answers Google AI overviews was like four And chat tpt was like three and so the honest take here is that video is a monster to some AI engines And completely invisible to others. So for Google’s AI and Perplexity Monster because Google drives because the video drives citations surface area and authority This is where video content earns its keep for AI search Now if you’re

5:53 Video Works for Some AI Engines Not All
talking about chat tpt and gem night zero I mean zero citations in our live data zero doesn’t move the needle at all And so if you really want to show up for chat tpt and gem night or at least for ChatGPT You need to be doing Reddit right so anyone tells you that video fixes everything is selling you something the real data is split here And one thing to remember is that these robots these AI chat bots aren’t watching our videos on youtube They’re reading the transcript. So an AI can’t sit down and watch 10 minutes of footage But it reads the transcript every word you said written down So what you say out loud is when an AI is going to quote So you need to speak in your videos, right? If you don’t say anything in the video then the AI doesn’t even know you said anything

6:41 AI Reads Transcripts Not Footage
And so you’ll never get cited, right? So it’s important in the video to say your town your city your neighbor your service Do you what do you do? You do roof repair HVAC install kitchen remodeling and then say the price It’s important to say the prices or at least a range in prices because AI is really loves specifics And then another thing to remember is that you don’t have to be famous Right it doesn’t even matter if you’re ticked on two famous or not Actually 41 % of AI quoted youtube videos have under a thousand views And that’s a that’s a huge number that’s about half the videos So you don’t have to have a channel with like five or ten or a hundred thousand subscribers You just get to put out really good quality content that Google and ais will cite And so really the truth is it’s not really about the channel size. It’s about the quality of the content It’s really always about the quality of the content But the best answer wins not the biggest channel

7:38 You Do Not Need a Big Channel or Budget
and you don’t have to be rich, right? An agency video can cost 42 thousand dollars per average project which is polished expensive And often says nothing as far as answering questions that and somebody would actually search using an AI or Google But you could do and your phone beats it every time because it’s zero Dollars and if you actually answer the question and give value by retention And talk for the entire five or ten minutes The robot doesn’t care about your lighting. It cares whether or not you’ve answered the question And so if you’re answering the questions, you’re going to win over these agency videos that are like A hundred or a thousand times more expensive. So are we actually in the game?

8:19 PushLeads Own Videos Quoted by AI
Or do we practice what we preach? Yes, we do we’ve been posting youtube videos every day Throughout all of august and four of our own videos got quoted by AI And every single one of these videos had three things in common nothing else Each one answered one specific question Not a brand overview not a demo reel One specific question that your customer actually asked secondly the transcript was posted as text on the website Why because the robots read the text right the transcript made the text indexable and quotable And then thirdly we embedded the video on the matching page of the site The video lived on the same page on the site that answered the same question And so and so time from being posted to being quoted by AI’s was four days to three weeks That’s it with no ad spend no agency just in the right place Answering the question

9:15 Five Steps to Get AI to Name Your Business
And so here’s the recipe five steps no agency no ad spend in the right place One question per video how much does water damage cost in ashville? Whatever your question is say your city ashville north kalina. That’s a quotable line Add the transcript in the chapters. This is the part that AI reads Make the videos eight to 15 minutes because 94 percent of what AI quotes goes to these long videos not shorts Shorts will bring people to your channel, but they’re not going to actually earn AI citations And of course then put the video right on your page with the words the transcript below that super important you do that And what gets you buried is low quality slide show only Like AI slop basically so in january 2026 youtube shut down channels that had tens of millions of subscribers And these channels were producing empty temp empty templated content And this is not theoretical youtube really did shut these down And so it’s fine to use AI tools to help you script an AI to research answers But what gets you buried is using templative videos with no real face Math produced content with no local context and shorts and filler with no substance So really so really the bottom line is your face on a job site or on location giving the real answer That’s the whole trick

10:38 One Video Works in Google and AI Both
And of course we know that Google still shows youtube videos as well right 38 percent of results actually show youtube results In the search right and so nearly four out of ten searches surface of video resume And then 80 percent of video searches come from youtube youtube dominates in video search by far And so the truth is that one video can work in the old Google and in the new AI realm at the same time And this is the best and bill in marketing right now to answer One question in one video and make that video Eight to fifteen minutes long because it’s going to be siteable versus like a short right So really there’s a huge opportunity here. The door is wide open Only 1 .2 percent of local businesses are getting recommended by AI today And almost nobody across all these media industries are actually doing youtube This means the opportunity is huge right now So when someone asks AI who’s the best SEO company in town or who’s the best water damage specialist in ashville or whatever your city is Let’s do the thing make the videos and make sure that AI is answering you and you get recommended And you get that visibility. All right, i’m jeremy ashburn with PushLeads helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration Talk to you soon