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Local Comparison: Google Beats ChatGPT

More than two-thirds of consumers have used ChatGPT for local business discovery. Yet local search is not a common use case for AI. That's because most consumers see Google as a more accurate source of local data and information. That perception is confirmed in a new local accuracy benchmarking study from Birdeye. The company ran 2,400 "near me" prompts in urban, suburban and rural areas of Illinois across four verticals (Dental, Healthcare, Restaurants, and Self-Storage). The contestants were Google, Bing, Yelp, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek. Birdeye used multiple criteria to evaluate the accuracy and relevance of the results for each platform, including whether listings returned were current, correct and proximate to the searcher. Google and Bing performed the best in the study and essentially tied. After that, Yelp and ChatGPT were pretty neck-and-neck. Then came Gemini and the other AIs. DeepSeek was the worst performer of the group. AI platforms committed multiple errors not seen in the search engines: made-up listings, too-remote businesses, stale listings (closed) and bad categorization (not relevant). ChatGPT, the best AI performer, delivered location-accurate results in urban areas but struggled in more remote locations. It also returned 40% fewer listings than Google and Bing.