Growing restaurant chains showed up in ChatGPT's answers to roughly 20 percent of relevant queries, versus about 3 percent for chains that are shrinking, a gap of roughly six to seven times. That's the central finding of SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, reported 7 and 8 September 2026, and it's worth being upfront about the source before anything else: SOCi sells local-marketing software, this is a vendor-sponsored study, and its methodology hasn't been independently verified. Read the figures with that in mind, but the directional pattern is still worth acting on.
What the study measured
SOCi tested queries across AI assistants, primarily ChatGPT, alongside comparisons to Gemini and Perplexity, and against Google's traditional local 3-Pack, the block of three local business results Google shows for location-based searches. For expanding restaurant chains, ChatGPT surfaced a recommendation in about 20 percent of tested queries. For contracting chains, that fell to about 3 percent. SOCi also assigned a visibility score of 62 out of 100 for growing brands versus 47 out of 100 for shrinking brands, using its own scoring methodology.
The bigger gap: AI assistants versus Google local results
The more striking number in the study isn't the growth-versus-shrinking split, it's how selective AI assistants are compared with traditional local search generally. Across AI assistants tested, only about 1 to 11 percent of a brand's individual locations got recommended in AI-assistant answers. Compare that with 35.9 percent of locations appearing in Google's traditional local 3-Pack for the same kind of queries. That's a large gap between two different visibility systems answering what looks like the same question from a user.
In other words, ranking well in Google's local 3-Pack tells you very little about whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity will recommend the same location when someone asks a similar question inside one of those tools. These appear to be separate systems with very different hit rates, not two views of the same underlying ranking.
Why growth status might matter
SOCi's own framing is that expanding brands tend to generate more recent signals for an AI assistant to draw on: new location openings, fresher reviews, more current local citations and more recent news or social mentions. A shrinking brand, by contrast, may have stale or declining signals across those same sources, even where its remaining locations are otherwise well-run and well-reviewed. That's SOCi's explanation for the pattern, and it's a reasonable one given how these assistants tend to draw on recency and volume of information, but it's the vendor's interpretation rather than something independently confirmed.
What to actually do
If you run a multi-location business, or any SaaS or service product that depends on local relevance, such as a booking platform, a field-service tool, or anything sold market-by-market, don't assume your Google local 3-Pack ranking is a proxy for how you show up in AI assistants. Test it directly.
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and ask the kinds of questions your actual customers would ask, phrased the way a real person would type them, not as a branded search. Do this for a handful of your key locations or markets, and note whether you're mentioned at all, not just whether you're mentioned favourably.
If you're not showing up, look at how recent and complete your presence is across the sources these assistants likely draw from: your Google Business Profile, recent customer reviews, current local citations, and any recent press or social mentions. Freshness looks like it matters more here than it does in traditional local search rankings, so treat stale profile information or a long gap since your last review as a real gap to close, not a cosmetic one.
Build this into a recurring check rather than a one-off test. Because this is vendor-sourced data without independent verification, and because AI assistants change their retrieval behaviour without notice, re-run the same set of test queries every month or two and track whether your own hit rate moves, rather than treating one snapshot as the final word.
Don't over-invest based on this single study alone. Use it as a reason to start testing AI-assistant visibility as its own channel, separate from your local SEO reporting, and build your own read on where you stand before making budget decisions off it.
The bottom line
SOCi's vendor-sponsored 2026 Local Visibility Index found AI assistants recommending growing restaurant chains roughly six to seven times more often than shrinking ones, and recommending only 1 to 11 percent of any brand's locations overall, compared with 35.9 percent for Google's local 3-Pack. Treat the figures as directional given the source, but go test your own visibility inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity directly this week rather than assuming your local search ranking already covers it.