More customers are asking ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini which business to hire before they ever open a search engine. New research from BusySeed, a digital marketing agency in New York City, suggests that the business those assistants recommend first can change from one week to the next.
BusySeed asked the three assistants the same 160 buying questions every week from April 27 to August 3, 2026, and recorded which company each one named first. Across 480 weekly series, the company in the top spot changed in 56.4% of week-to-week comparisons. Only 85 of the 480 series kept the same company in first place for the whole period.
Being mentioned at all was far more common than being mentioned first. Of the 1,664 companies the assistants named during the study, 95.9% showed up somewhere. But how often a business appeared depended on which assistant a customer used: 43.6% of the group appeared on ChatGPT, 42.1% on Gemini and 29.3% on Claude.
The assistants also rarely agree with one another. In BusySeed’s monthly tracking, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini named the same company for the same buying question only about 3 times in 100, in each of July, August and September 2026.
“A small business owner who checks ChatGPT once and sees their name might think they’ve made it, and one who doesn’t see it might think they’re invisible,” said Omar Jenblat, BusySeed’s founder and chief executive. “Neither is true. What matters is how often you show up across many questions and all three assistants, and that comes from being talked about on the sites these tools read.”
For local owners, the practical takeaway is that a single check of an AI assistant says little. Showing up more consistently depends on what other websites, reviews and publications say about a business, not only on its own website.
The research has limits. It measured short-term changes using one version of each assistant, so it does not show long-term shifts in which businesses win. AI answers also vary from one run to the next.
BusySeed was founded in 2013 by Jenblat in Providence, Rhode Island, and is now headquartered in New York City. It provides search engine optimization, paid advertising, lead generation and marketing automation, and it tracks how AI assistants recommend businesses. Its earlier research on how rarely the major assistants agree was reported by B2B News Network and The Baltic Times.
The studies, with their methods and data, are published at https://busyseed.com/research/category-leader-volatility-check and https://busyseed.com/research/state-of-ai-search-2026-09.
