Which AI Do Your Customers Actually Use? Here's the Honest Answer

The Short Answer

ChatGPT has more people using it day to day than any other AI assistant. But that's not the whole story, and if you only optimize for ChatGPT, you're leaving money on the table. Google is folding AI answers directly into regular search, which means way more of your customers are seeing AI-generated answers without ever opening a separate app. Gemini rides along on every Android phone and every Google account. Claude is mostly used for work stuff, not "who fixes my furnace at 10pm." Perplexity is small but growing, and it's built specifically for search, so the people who use it tend to trust it a lot for exactly this kind of local question.

So there's no single winner. That's the honest answer, and anyone telling you different is guessing.

Why This Is Hard to Pin Down

I talk to owners every week who ask me flat out: "Which one do I need to be on?" I get why they ask. It would be a lot simpler if there were one app to fix.

But think about how your own customers behave. Some of them have ChatGPT open because their kid showed them how to use it for homework help. Some of them just type into Google like they always have and don't even realize the answer at the top of the page came from an AI model, not a website. Some of them have an iPhone with Siri getting smarter every update. Some of them have a work laptop where IT installed Copilot and now that's just what they click.

A homeowner in Ohio whose furnace dies at 11pm isn't thinking about market share. They're grabbing whatever's already open on their phone and typing "furnace not turning on, need someone tonight." For a lot of people right now, that's ChatGPT. For a growing number, it's a Google search that returns an AI Overview instead of ten blue links. Both of those moments are where you either show up or you don't.

What Actually Matters For Your Business

Here's the part that matters more than picking a winner: these tools pull from the same kind of information about your business. Your reviews. Your website. Directory listings. What other sites say about you. Whether your service area, hours, and licensing show up clearly and consistently everywhere.

If you're set up so ChatGPT can find and trust you, you're mostly set up so Gemini and Perplexity can too. The underlying homework is the same. That's actually good news — it means you're not choosing between four different strategies. You're doing one strategy that covers all of them.

What's different is how each one talks. ChatGPT tends to give a shortlist with a little reasoning attached — "this company has strong reviews for emergency service and is licensed in your area." Google's AI Overview is more clipped, pulling from whatever ranks well and has clear structured info. Perplexity shows its sources more openly, so if you're not cited anywhere reputable, you're invisible to it in a very literal way.

The Mistake I See Owners Make

The mistake isn't picking the wrong AI to focus on. The mistake is picking none of them, because it feels too uncertain to bother with.

I had a call with an HVAC owner in Texas last month who said, "I'll wait until it settles down before I worry about it." Meanwhile his top three competitors already show up when I type his own service area into ChatGPT and he doesn't. It's not settling down. It's the opposite — more people are routing basic questions through these tools every month, not fewer. Waiting doesn't save you the work, it just means you start from further behind.

The other mistake is treating this like regular SEO and assuming your website ranking on Google means you're covered. It doesn't. AI models often pull from review sites, from what other businesses and blogs say about you, from how consistent your business info is across the internet — not just your own site's keywords. A plumber with a mediocre website but strong, consistent reviews and clean listings can outperform a plumber with a beautiful website and messy, contradictory info floating around online.

What To Do About It

You don't need to pick a favorite AI. You need to know what each one currently says about your business when someone asks it a question you'd want to win — "best electrician near me," "emergency plumber open now," "HVAC company with good reviews in [your town]." Ask them yourself. Type the questions in. See if you show up, see if the info is right, see who they recommend instead of you.

That's the actual starting point. Not picking a platform — finding out where you stand right now across the ones your customers are already using.

Want to see exactly what ChatGPT, Gemini, and the others are saying about your business today? Run the free scan at hollar.ai/scan and we'll show you where you stand.