⚡️🧟♂️ It's aliiiiive!! Local Ranking Grids is here. Check it out!
⚡️🧟♂️ It's aliiiiive!! Local Ranking Grids is here. Check it out!
How do you build a local business reputation that is likely to result in your brand being shown as a ChatGPT response, like the ones shown above? We’ve been investigating this at Whitespark and have data to share with you today.
When we follow up our query for local business results with a question about why ChatGPT recommended these specific companies, the first thing it tells us is that these inclusions are based on reviews.
Microsoft is a major partner and investor in OpenAI’s ChatGPT conversational AI chatbot. ChatGPT uses Bing’s data, and though its chatbot is confused and contradictory as to whether it is using Bing Places/Maps data, recent studies like this one from Joe Youngblood theorize that having a Bing Places listing and a good aggregate rating across multiple review platforms could influence ChatGPT inclusion.
Given this, we wanted to do an up-to-date check-in on the review platforms Bing Places is currently preferencing in its results.
Nota Bene: If you ask ChatGPT, it will tell you reviews are an important factor (but of course, you should always be a little skeptical about anything an AI chat tells you). Still, it stands to reason that diversifying reviews across the sites that ChatGPT is referencing would likely be beneficial for ChatGPT visibility.
We pulled data for 17 local business categories across 9 major US cities (none of which we were physically located in), running a total of 153 queries. We looked at the first page of Bing Places results for each query and documented the review sources associated with each listing.
There are clear winners when we look at the total frequency of occurrences across all the cities and categories we investigated. Here are the platforms on which the businesses in our study have earned the most reviews:
Takeaways
Facebook is running away with the game when it comes to Bing Places review sources, appearing on nearly twice as many businesses as the next biggest platform: Yelp. We found this interesting because Yelp tends to be the first review site that comes to mind when we think of where Bing Places pulls its reviews from. Yelp, in turn, has nearly twice the number of occurrences than the next biggest platform, which is Angi. Porch has a notable presence, but everything after that is a mere smattering when we’re talking about overall averages.
Next up: Let’s see if the narrative changes when we drill down by category. Here, we’ll look at the top 3 review sources for each category and provide the numbers.
Takeaways
Facebook comes out again as the frontrunner Bing Places review source, being the biggest player in the 12/18 categories we investigated. Yelp is the runner-up with 3/18 first places, but as we can see, platform dominance definitely varies by category. For example, Angi is a more important source for bakeries and sushi restaurants, while Porch leads the pack for garage door repair. Your takeaway is that you should be investigating and focusing on the dominant review platforms for your category, based on your own survey of Bing Places results.
Next up: let’s see if this pattern of review platform dominance varies by city.
Takeaways
By this point in the study, we were no longer surprised to see that in all but one city (Los Angeles), Facebook is beating out Yelp as the dominant source of local business reviews in Bing Places, when taken in average across all the categories we investigated. Your task is to identify the review platform comfort zone of the local community you serve to understand where you have the best chance of receiving reviews. Study your own Bing Places listing and the listings of your nearby competitors to discover the best fit for your brand.
Clearly, your brand should be getting Facebook and Yelp reviews. That’s no surprise. But, depending on your category, you shouldn’t overlook Angi. It’s always a risk when a platform goes through a rebrand. Angie’s List became Angi.com in 2021, and it looks like it is maintaining a strong presence in specific verticals. Meanwhile, Porch.com came up 50 times across our study and is one you should check out if you are marketing in a home services category.
Of course, we did not expect to see Google Business Profile reviews appearing in Bing Places results, given the long competitive history between the two search engines. What did surprise us, however, is that we saw zero TripAdvisor reviews when we looked into restaurants, given its brand recognition in the hospitality sector.
Yes! There’s been considerable SEO industry buzz about an alleged strained relationship between Microsoft and Open AI and we’d like to quote Greg Sterling’s NearMemo on a development you should be tuned into:
❝ ChatGPT has historically used Bing for web search, and Bing Places to power its local results, though not exclusively. But Aleyda Solis points to a blog post by French SEO Alexis Rylko, who argues that ChatGPT is now using Google instead of Bing. If true, this would be a significant development with major implications for local. ❞
You can follow those links to see the study in question. Right now, we’re not seeing Google Business Profile results in ChatGPT (and neither is Greg Sterling) but we recommend continuing to follow this story on where ChatGPT is sourcing its data. Our take is that there is no firm industry consensus on this topic.
We can’t publish a study about conversational AI without including a proviso. As you can see, the above screenshot shows a map that ChatGPT generated when I queried it about plumbers in Seattle. However, when I asked the chatbot to explain to me to disclose the source of this map to me, it replied:
We have now repeatedly run into this weird messaging from ChatGPT, in which it is insisting that it is not showing a map. We’d like to know the source of the map in case it would provide useful clues as to the degree to which ChatGPT is training on Bing vs. Google local data. However, what we really get from this exercise is a warning: AI should not be seen as an authoritative expert on its own sources or outputs. We strongly advise you to be wary of any articles which are using AI as their source of answers. Does anyone want a future in which we are citing AI about AI? *Chills*.
Facebook and Yelp have turned out to be huge players in the Bing Places index when it comes to reviews. Given Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI (at least at the moment), we recommend that you expand beyond Google Business Profile reviews to build up your reputation on whichever review sources are being pulled in most frequently in the Bing Places results for your city and industry.
But the larger takeaway here requires taking a step back from the finer details to look at the fact that, suddenly, our industry is talking about Bing again after a big sleep of 10+ years. Microsoft’s business decision have brought it back into the conversation. How many of us would’ve predicted this even three years ago?
Given this, we highly suggest that you reboot your neglected Bing Places listings, or create new ones for any neglected locations. Need help building out your citations across the majors? Whitespark is at your service.
Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com.
