Executive Summary

The Biggest Shift in Local Discovery in 20+ Years

Local commerce is undergoing its most significant transformation in over two decades. For years, discovery was dominated by Google: consumers searched, scanned, ranked results, compared options, and made decisions. That behaviour still exists, but it no longer defines how discovery works at scale.

The consumer doesn’t search anymore. Increasingly, their personal AI does.
Our research shows a seismic shift in both frequency and flow. Consumers are searching more often and across more surfaces, with over half now turning directly to AI-driven systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. These platforms do not return ten blue links. They interpret intent, aggregate signals from across the web, and surface recommendations on the user’s behalf, before brands are actively evaluated.

This marks a fundamental shift in power and pace. Discovery is faster, more automated, and increasingly mediated by AI agents rather than humans manually comparing options. The risk for brands is clear: if AI systems cannot confidently understand, trust, or recommend a location or brand, visibility simply disappears. The opportunity is equally large.

This playbook exists to help multi-location brands and enterprise marketing leaders respond to that shift. Drawing on insights from 2,000+ consumers across the US, UK, France, and Germany, alongside 200 senior-level US marketers and third-party research, it explains how discovery is evolving and what AI systems now rely on to make decisions and recommend your brand to consumers.

More importantly, it provides practical guidance. It outlines the new architecture of discovery and the new operating models for the AI era. For CMOs and marketing teams, the question is not whether this shift is coming, but how quickly they can adapt to the new landscape where AI-mediated discovery is the default.