Birdeye vs BrightLocal

Birdeye View 2026 Event Announced: Agents at Work for Multi-Location Brands

New event page for View 2026 with registration open, featuring 'Agents at Work for Multi-Location Brands' and updated product categories. Multiple new blog posts published across AI marketing, local SEO, and reputation management categories.

AI search levels field between national brands and local firms

BrightLocal chief executive Myles Anderson argues that AI-powered search reduces the advantage of national brands over local businesses by rewarding narrow, provable local expertise, fresh content and direct booking capability. Large, multi-location brands risk appearing generic to language models unless they create localized, frequently updated signals across touchpoints. BrightLocal's Consumer Search Behavior Survey 2026 shows substantial consumer testing of AI for local recommendations, but many users still verify answers on Google. Anderson also highlights Google’s deep local data assets and warns that 'agentic' AI assistants able to book appointments could start routing leads toward businesses that permit direct agent interaction by late 2026.

• Home Depot operates more than 2,000 US stores, each competing locally.
• BrightLocal Consumer Search Behavior Survey 2026: 58% have tried AI tools for local business recommendations; 31% use them at least monthly; 18% acted on AI answers without further checking; 82% went to Google afterward to confirm.
• Google holds around 200 million business records, about 40 million of which are actively claimed and maintained by their owners, plus roughly 120 million local guides contributions and about 20 million freshness updates daily.

Guide: Get Your Business Recommended by AI Engines

MarTech Series published a July 9, 2026 article reporting that marketing strategist Zues Ordaz (Founder & CEO, New Gen Marketing Company) has released a free step-by-step guide showing how businesses can get recommended by AI recommendation engines — a practice he calls Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The article cites industry data showing rapid consumer adoption of AI discovery tools (BrightLocal: 45% used AI tools for local discovery in 2026; SOCi: ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of local businesses) and broader shifts in information sources (McKinsey: 44% of AI-search users now use AI as their primary source). Ordaz’s agency is presented as a working example: when asked for the top marketing company in Worthington, Minnesota, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend New Gen Marketing Company. The guide is distributed via Ordaz’s AI Prompt Vault.

• BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45% of consumers used AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to find local businesses in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier.
• A 2026 SOCi Local Visibility Index analysis of more than 350,000 business locations found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses.
• Research from McKinsey in early 2026 found 44% of AI-search users consider AI their primary source of information versus 31% for traditional search.