Google ranks you.
AI ignores you.

The gap, in three bullets

• Google and the AI assistants don’t see the same internet. We asked the same buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, plus Google SERP, across 22 local US markets for 28 days.
• 99 businesses won Google and missed Perplexity’s top ranks. Real roofers, salons, law firms, and HVAC companies Google surfaced across September, sitting outside Perplexity’s per-market top-10.
• Buyers are moving from search pages to AI answers. When the shortlist changes, 99 real businesses aren’t on it. This report names every one, market by market, with the day-count gap.

A sample of the 99

The full report lists all 99 across 22 markets, plus methodology and three quantified gap examples.

The publicly-verifiable list: 92 businesses

On 2026-10-01 we independently recomputed the gap from the public per-market reports alone, no private data. Perplexity’s “Most named” tables (218 rows) vs Google’s “Most cited” tables (130 rows), names matched case-insensitively, non-business phrases removed (recomputed 2026-10-06). Result: 228 of 272 named businesses in the 22 local markets (83.8%) appear in only one of the two lists, and 44 appear in both (recomputed 2026-10-12). The public tables are truncated (not full top-10s), so 92 is the verifiable floor of the 99.

Corrected 2026-10-06: counts recomputed with non-business phrases removed. The first version showed 31 of 302 businesses in both, 89.7% disjoint, and cited a 90.6% headline.