AI chatbots picked national chains over local stores 90% to 94% of the time when asked to choose between them without web search, according to a study by Vaer AI and Lightspeed Commerce, which sells point-of-sale and e-commerce software to independent retailers. The researchers ran about 460,000 responses to 20,000 shopping prompts through ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Google AI Overviews in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Montreal. Turning on live web search narrowed the gap but didn’t close it, with national chains still taking 46% to 58% of named recommendations, and AI Overviews named no small or local store in two-thirds of its shopping answers. Adding the word “independent” to a prompt more than doubled how often small and local shops were mentioned.
