66% use AI chatbots as a search engine. Does yours show up?
On October 26, 2026, KTVU FOX 2 asked its viewers what they use AI chatbots for. The top answer, by a wide margin, was “as a search engine.” When someone asks a chatbot instead of scrolling a page of links, the answer names a handful of businesses. Here is what the poll found, what it does and doesn’t prove and how to be one of the names.
What the poll found
KTVU FOX 2, the Bay Area station, ran the question “What do you use AI chatbots for?” on ktvu.com on October 26, 2026. The final results, read on air on “Mornings on 2” at about 11:35 am (broadcast transcript):
- As a search engine: 66%. The number one answer, more than the other three combined.
- Solving problems at work: 17%.
- Someone to chat with: 12%.
- Finding recipes: 5%.
It is an online viewer poll: people chose to vote, and the station did not publish how many did. That makes it a snapshot of KTVU’s readers, not a scientific survey of everyone. It points the same way as what we see when we test AI answers every week: people ask a chatbot the question they used to type into Google.
Why it matters for a small business
A search results page shows ten links and the ads around them. A chatbot answer usually names three to five businesses, often with a reason for each, and the person picks from that short list. If your business isn’t on it, there is no second page to scroll to.
Being named is not luck. AI assistants recommend businesses they can read about and verify: a website that says plainly what you do and where, structured data that confirms it and listings that agree with your site. On October 23, 2026, Perplexity named Carson River Resort for 8 of the 8 customer questions we track for it. In the same month, 8 of 65 small-business websites we checked were telling AI crawlers to stay away, usually because of a platform setting the owner didn’t know was on (here’s the Squarespace one).
How to be the business the answer names
- Let AI crawlers in. Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot followed by “Disallow: /”. If you see it and didn’t mean to, that is the first fix.
- Answer the questions customers ask. One clear page per service and place, written the way people ask: who you serve, what it costs, where you are, when you’re open.
- Add structured data. Schema markup tells search engines and assistants your name, address, phone, services and prices in a form they read without guessing.
- Make every listing agree. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps and Yelp should show the same name, address, phone and website as your site.
- Be on Bing, not just Google. Several AI assistants draw on Bing’s index, and many small sites have never been submitted to it.
- Measure it. Ask the questions your customers ask, in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and write down who gets named. Do it again next month.
Want to know where you stand? Our free visibility check asks the AI assistants your customers’ questions and shows who they name instead, with the three fixes that matter most. More on the method in how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT.
Questions
Free visibility check
See how your business shows up on Google, Bing and in AI answers.
No sales call, no obligation; the document is yours to keep whether or not you hire us.