Local AEO Reality Check: Four Engines, Fifteen Buyer Questions, Very Different Manners

A practical test circulating in SEO circles ran fifteen real local buyer questions — dentists, plumbers, schools — through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude with live web search. Sixty answers. Every citation logged.

Headline behaviour

Three engines named specific businesses on all fifteen prompts. Claude declined on a chunk of questions and pointed to Google instead. Citation density also differed wildly: some engines cast a wide net; others named fewer entities with tighter source lists.

Why AEO Soup filed this under “keep”

Local is where AI answers stop being abstract. If an engine will not say your name, your Google Business Profile and directory graph become the consolation prize — or the whole game.

Tactics that fall out of the test:

• Win the directories Claude trusts.
• Earn descriptive mentions, not only homepage links, for engines that write long answers.
• Track “named in first 200 characters” as a visibility KPI; some engines front-load brands when they name them at all.

AI discovery for local businesses is still early, messy, and extremely worth measuring.