A 3.3-star car wash just won the AI answer.
When Annie Jackson, Director of Revenue Operations and Growth at GatherUp, asked Google for a no-touch car wash that fits an SUV in Norfolk, VA, Google returned a 3.3-star business and answered the clearance and hours questions above the star rating itself. Query match outranked rating.
That example frames the session Jackson presented with Jason Wertham, Vice President of Review Defense Operations at GatherUp: AI tools assemble their description of each location from reviews, listings, and public web mentions, then repeat that description to customers who never reach your website.
Jackson and Wertham walked through the four-prompt emergency audit they run to surface what ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Ask Maps say about a multi-location brand today, then the build, manage, defend rollout that changes the answer.
The recap below covers the findings. The prompts, the rollout, and the audit handout live in the full session. Watch it on demand.
How Do Customers Use AI To Find Local Businesses Now?
They ask a full question and accept the summarized answer. In GatherUp consumer data collected in fall 2025, 55% of consumers had consulted Google or Bing AI summaries, 48% had asked ChatGPT about a local business, and 31% had asked multiple times.
Jackson’s car wash query shows what that looks like in practice. Instead of “car wash near me,” the search was “no-touch car wash for my SUV in Norfolk, VA.” Google pulled from its 300 million places and 500 million review contributors to return one business, with clearance height and 24/7 hours answered inline.
“Google answered my questions, but this business is actually showing up as a 3.3 star,” Jackson said. “It’s surfaced the context of my query above the star rating.”
Wertham added that these tools now factor in who you are and when you ask. “The time of day when you’re actually doing this query in Google Maps could impact which businesses are getting returned in those results,” he said. An LLM that knows you own an SUV or a large dog applies that context to every future local query, whether you restate it or not.
The session’s audit starts from this behavior shift: four prompts, from a brand-name query to a location-by-location spot check, that show you the answer your customers already see. See the four audit prompts.
Do Google Reviews Feed AI Answers?
Not from the listing itself: Google, Yelp, and the other major directories block LLM crawlers from reading review content on business profiles. Reviews still support local rankings and conversion on the listing; they only enter AI answers through surfaces LLMs can crawl.
“The major directory service providers, Google, Yelp, and others, they do not allow LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude to scrape or crawl the review data on the business listing,” Wertham said. “You’ll notice they’re not citing specific reviews from those platforms.”
The same reviews become crawlable…
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