Report Shows 40% of Consumers Are Using THIS New AI Tool for Search

This is probably the number one question that people ask us right now when it comes to AI, which is, are my customers still searching for local services on Google or where are they searching at? And this is probably the most robust report that I've seen from BrightLocal. And so in this video I'm going to go through and break down exactly what they're saying and show you what you can do for your business to make sure that you are showing up where your customers are actually searching with real data. So let's get right into this report. So some of the highlight things here that they found is that 70% of all general online searches are still conducted using Google. This is, this article came out right at the end of April 2025. So this is the information that's happening right now. Nearly three in five consumers search for something online multiple times a day, which not surprising. This one is very surprising which we're going to go through, which is 40% of consumers are actively using generative AI within search, which I'm going to show you what generative AI means for your business when we get to that section as well. Cool. Let's get right into this. All right, so the first thing is that they noticed that Google is still dominating general search. And here's some of the information that they found on why this is true. All right, so let me just move myself over here. All right, so consumer search frequency. So how often are people searching online? 85, 58% of people are multiple times a day, which not surprising, people are searching for that platforms dominating general search. So for local search in particular, we are seeing that Google and Safari are still the number one. And if you combine these two together, it's 70% of the searches like what they said are still happening on Google and ChatGPT is a close second. So overall Google is still dominating from a search perspective. And if you lump Safari into Google or Bing, whatever they use, you can put it all together and then you can see Bing, DuckDuckGo, TikTok, all these other platforms which yes, they get a lot of searches, but these are still dominating search in particular. Now some of the other things they notated on here was that Google Maps is something that a lot of people are searching for for local search. This is general searches. But when we talk about Google Maps, I'm going to show you in a second dominating local search. The other thing that was really important to look at is the generational search trend. So if your target audience is, you know, boomers, then obviously this is the people that you want to target. But thinking about long term, how's this going to shift the content that you're posting? So what this is showing is that 68% or 66% of boomers are using Google 64 Google. And obviously gen Z less people are using Google. More people are going to be using ChatGPT as they order. No boomers using 0% of this. So you can see that the generational skew is happening. And that's why, you know, in five, 10 years, when the Gen Z are gen zers are going to be owning homes and shifting for home service businesses, the shift is happening. It's just not as immediate as people would see. You can see with Gen X and Millennials, they're still using Google for search. All right, next one. Are consumers active using generative AI and search activity? All right, so this is where I'm going to kind of break down what is generative AI and what are the different places that people can search. So let's say that someone goes to Google and they type in H Vac companies, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is your normal Google search. You have Google local service ads, you have the map pack, you have your organic rankings for your website. Very normal search. That's what people are. Majority of people are still doing this search what they did find, which we'll get to this in a sec, but that millennials, they actually search more prominent on maps here. The reason that people like Maps is one, they can obviously see where things are at, but also it gives you a much longer list of just the map pack. You can get a bunch of different businesses. You can see the reviews and you can read reviews on here. Generative AI is when people are asking a question that's a little bit different. So not just H Vac companies, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, they might ask a question, who is the best H Vac company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You still get the Google local service ad. But this right here is called the AI overview, which is generative AI. And this is where Google is trying to summarize all the data on their search engine results page and give you, hey, these are the different companies and you can see they're listing them out right here, giving a quick overview of all these people. And you can dive deeper in AI mode, which AI mode I have turned on that I can use this, which is basically, I would say maybe ChatGPT esque of Google, where you can turn on AI mode and basically communicate back and forth with Google and you can get this results right here and ask it more questions. So you know, people might ask a qualifying question, okay, I got this information, but who's the best one for hot water heaters? Or who's the best one for ductless systems? Or who's the best one for furnace repair, whatever. And kind of narrow in on who they want to work with. So that's how AI generative. Now, if you see here in the results that they found was that 40% of people have and they use this AI generative thing inside of their search. So they're doing some type of search and then they're looking in there and reading the analysis of the search and results page and getting Google's recommendations. Okay, cool. We have nothing on that. Okay. Map searches take larger sites of the local pie. So this thing that I just mentioned here, this is called your map search. And this is what is starting to dominate. So how often are consumers searching with local intent? This is the local piece. And you can see on here, 41% of the searches are dedicated to finding information about local businesses. So majority of the searches that are happening, 41% of them, over half are for local intent. People are searching for local businesses or things to do, which is. Which is really promising that people are still using this platform. And you can see on here, the key platforms for local search are Google and Google Maps and Safari and YouTube and Apple Maps and Bing and then TikTok, Facebook, Yelp, ChatGPT. So the normal stuff that we're still utilizing is currently dominating the search engine results for Google, Google Maps, Safari, YouTube for local search. So nothing crazy here. The big one I saw was a Google Maps at 15%. And there's nothing different that you could be doing to market your business aside from just getting Google reviews and making sure that you are ranking, which would be something that you track your rankings. So using a tool. There's a bunch of tools out there to track your rankings, but you can track your maps ranking, your SEO ranking, your Google Map packs ranking. There's a bunch of different places to make sure that you're showing up in all these different areas that people are searching for. All right, which type of platform do consumers use for local search? 60% are still using search engines, 20% are still using maps, 14% use social media. And this was skewed a little bit because Gen Z uses social media more, which we'll get to that in a second. But still, 80% of the searches for local search are happening on search engine or maps, and then 14% is happening on. On social media. So nothing has really changed too much. Here, but this is the part that's, that's going to change with Gen Z. So what's the main reason consumers use their default for local search? People say, hey, I've always just used this platform to do it. It shows me the most relevant results. I trust the results on these platforms. And this is skewing a lot because boomers just like, hey, I've always used Google, so I'm going to use Google where Gen Z is like, I've used Google. But I also, I like the variety of results that this platform gives me. It's not just one, you know, recommendation. I get to pick what I like. So definitely, as people, as the younger generation gets older, it's going to change how they're doing search. All right, and top five local search platforms for Gen Z consumers, in particular, Google, Google Maps and 10% on TikTok. And surprisingly, people that don't use TikTok or don't know much about TikTok, it is very heavily based on your location. It will show you videos based off of your location. And so it can be great for local search, specifically getting in front of your local market because it skews a lot towards wherever you're at. It will show you that type of content. All right, top local search platforms for millennial consumers. Between the two of these, Google dominates 64%. And most millennials, you know, they're in their 30s, 40s, the 30s, and so they are going to be owning homes. This would be your target audience and above. So very interesting here. Just stick to what you're doing. Notice TikTok's not on here at all and it's not even any social media aside from YouTube. Top search platforms for Gen X. It's going to skew again even more to Google, Google Maps and then same thing for boomers. It's going to be pretty much all Google and then some Safari because they don't know how to get to Google or something. All right, five, following the local search journey. So this one is very interesting to me to look at what actions do consumers take during their local business search? All right, so always they look at reviews, their businesses found and often. So the number one thing that they're always looking at 29% is reviews. So you got to get reviews and respond to them. The second thing is that they're checking the business information, matches what they have found. So they're looking at the name, looking at the phone number, the address, the pictures. Is this the right. The logos, Is this the right business? Is this the Information that I found is correct. Another thing that was really interesting on this was this one. How important are these factors when researching local businesses? The number one factor that they said was presence of contact information in opening hours. So if you don't have your contact information right on your website or your Google business profile, you don't have everything filled out like your website. I'm hoping you have your phone number. But making sure that it's easy to contact your business specifically on mobile, because mobile is very hard for a lot of companies. That's why you need sticky headers at the top with your phone number and schedule your service. But people are looking, are they open at this time? Do they have the contact information available? This was a very interesting one. Price or products of services? A lot of home service businesses want to hide their pricing behind stuff. So we encourage people to create these estimate calculators where then you can give a basic information, you know, square footage of your home service that you want, are you residential or commercial? And then give them some type of ballpark price range. So that way people can get some type of an idea of pricing. And if you don't want to do that, just create a pricing guide for your service and say, hey, here's typically what something like this might cost. It could be 30 to 100,000, it could be 300 to $10,000. And then give what makes the price higher? What makes the price lower? Why would some people be cheaper? Why would some people be more expensive? Basically, educate the customer and build trust. But customers just want to know how much they're going to cost and when can you do it? That's the question that people are asking. All right, and then last piece impact for business, what it means for you at the end of the day, right now you want to be making sure that you're optimizing for Google Search. The second thing that you want to do is be making sure that you're optimizing for brand search. And that's going to be AI. The reason that AI is so important is because when we're looking at generative AI and we're talking about, okay, what is this section here? Generative AI is pulling in reviews, which is of course always going to be important because that is your customer saying, hey, is this company great or not? And then Google ChatGPT, whatever platform it is, is going to be reading the reviews and saying, hey, based off reviews, this company has the most reviews. This company is going to solve this problem for you. But the other thing is, since these are large language models, LLMs, these AI platforms, they're basically taking content all over the Internet. They're reading it and then they're digesting it and making recommendations. As a business, the number one thing you can do is give it more content to know about your business. And the way that you do that is by creating content for it to know about. So the pricing guide that I just said, that's a really good content piece. But video content is what's dominating because you can't just go to ChatGPT and create a pricing guide for whatever service that you offer. Video is still the last thing. That is me talking to you. That can't be replicated yet. And so by creating video content that's answering your customer's questions and educating the customer, it builds your authority and your brand in the marketplace, which then is a trigger back to these AI platforms that here's great content. This person is constantly creating this type of content to educate these people. This is a brand that you might want to reach out to because they clearly know their stuff. And I think a lot of businesses are missing this mark when it comes to content. They're just, you know, slapping up before and after pictures with not bad. We do that to help customers as well. But if you want to take it to the next level and in the next three to five years, you know, be on the forefront of digital brand and brand building that these AI platforms are going to recognize. I truly believe that it's all about creating content that your customers want to know about. Getting Google reviews, making sure that you're doing this stuff right now from an SEO perspective, that's positioning your company to be the number one brand that Google's recommending. Because if Google recommends you, these AI platforms are 9 times out of 10 going to recommend you as well. The content piece is the cherry on top. It's going to be the future of search. As we just saw Gen Z, as they get older, they're going to be going and looking at these brands on these social platforms, trying to evaluate who do I want to work with. They might do reviews, but they also might be looking at videos of services being done, who are the technicians, all that kind of stuff. So I would just really stress content is king, and the more content you create, the better for your business. All right, if you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing home service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.