Chat Radar Local AI Search Trends

Every published week

Bar height: Business named in the answer, all businesses. The latest week is highlighted.

This week at a glance

The biggest moves this week came from website technical signals, where sitemaps and llms.txt files rose sharply across Chat Radar's panel. Sites with a sitemap reached 82% for all businesses in Chat Radar's panel, up 8 points, with car dealerships jumping 11 points to 67% and other businesses up 10 points to 90%; dental practices in Chat Radar's panel also rose 4 points to 92%. Car dealerships in Chat Radar's panel saw llms.txt adoption climb 11 points to 22%, and other businesses rose 5 points to 35%, bringing the all-businesses figure to 30%. On citation sourcing, ChatGPT cited businesses' own websites at 27% across Chat Radar's panel, up 5 points, while Perplexity moved in the opposite direction, falling 5 points to 35%; for car dealerships specifically, ChatGPT's own-website citation rate rose 5 points to 45% while Perplexity's fell 6 points to 57%. Average ratings and AI crawler-blocking rates did not meaningfully change in Chat Radar's panel this week.

What this is

Use this data

Licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse with attribution and a link. Download every published week as CSV, read the JSON index, or follow the RSS feed. Press questions: hello@chatradar.ai.

Cite the latest week

Chat Radar. (2026). Chat Radar Local AI Search Trends, week of October 12, 2026 [Data set]. https://chatradar.ai/trends/2026-10-12

Chat Radar. “Chat Radar Local AI Search Trends, week of October 12, 2026.” Chat Radar, 2026, https://chatradar.ai/trends/2026-10-12. Accessed October 19, 2026.

Chat Radar. “Chat Radar Local AI Search Trends, week of October 12, 2026.” Data set. 2026. https://chatradar.ai/trends/2026-10-12.

@misc{chatradar202620261012,
  author = {{Chat Radar}},
  title = {{Chat Radar Local AI Search Trends, week of October 12, 2026}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://chatradar.ai/trends/2026-10-12}},
  note = {Data set, CC BY 4.0}
}

Questions

How often does it update?

Every week. Data is collected on Monday for the week that starts that day, and the week is published on Tuesday once it passes its completeness checks.

Who is in the panel?

A fixed panel of 116 US local businesses that customers visit or that serve a local area: dental practices, car dealerships, home services and other local businesses. We publish only aggregates and never name a business. The panel changes only in a new, versioned panel.

Why is a number missing?

A figure is published only when at least 5 businesses and, for AI answers, at least 100 answers stand behind it. Smaller cells show “Not enough data”. If a data source was incomplete in a week, that source is marked as not collected rather than published from partial data.

Can I use the data?

Yes. It is licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse it with attribution and a link to chatradar.ai/trends. Each week page has ready-made citations, a CSV and a JSON endpoint.

How does Chat Radar collect it?

Each week we run the same set of local questions through Google search, ChatGPT and Perplexity, read each business’s website as an identified crawler, and read each business’s public Google Business Profile. The methodology page describes every step.

Why does Chat Radar publish this?

Chat Radar sells AI visibility services to local businesses, so we have a commercial interest in this topic. The index reports what the panel shows whether or not it helps that interest, and quiet weeks are published the same as dramatic ones.