Introduction
If a prospective customer in Fort Wayne searches for a service you offer today, there's a good chance they form their first impression of your business inside an AI-generated answer—before they ever see your website, your reviews, or your phone number. That's no longer a prediction. According to a Pew Research Center survey reported by Search Engine Land, 60% of U.S. adults now say they read the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. Three in ten say they don't, and another 10% aren't even sure whether they have—which tells you how seamlessly these summaries have blended into ordinary searching.
For a small business owner, that single number reframes a lot of decisions. The search box is still the front door, but increasingly a customer reads an AI's version of the answer first and decides—right there—whether you're worth a click or a call. We've written before about where your website traffic went when AI Overviews started intercepting clicks; this is the demand-side companion to that story. The behavior is now mainstream, the data is one day old, and the practical question for a Fort Wayne HVAC company, dental practice, law firm, or home-services business is simple: how do you become the business the AI surfaces and actually recommends?
There's an honest catch buried in the same week's research, and we'll get to it: showing up in an AI answer is not the same as winning the customer. Sometimes the AI cites your page and then recommends a competitor anyway. So the goal isn't just visibility—it's earning the recommendation. Let's break down what the data says and what to actually do about it.
Key Takeaways
- A Pew Research survey of 5,119 U.S. adults found 60% now read AI summaries in search results; 30% don't, and 10% are unsure.
- About 40% of U.S. adults use chatbots to find information, and ChatGPT usage rose to 44% of adults from 34% a year earlier—discovery is fragmenting across summaries, chatbots, and classic results.
- Appearing in an AI answer doesn't guarantee the click: one analysis found AI Overviews recommended competitors 69% of the time even while citing a brand's own “best” listicle.
- The realistic win for a local business is earning the AI's recommendation through entity clarity, structured data, NAP consistency, and review signals—not just chasing a ranking.
- For time-sensitive queries, AI summaries can appear within hours, so freshness and original local detail matter more than ever.
- Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana businesses that get their fundamentals right now can win the AI recommendation while most local competitors are still ignoring it.
How many people actually read AI summaries now?
The headline figure is the one worth memorizing: in a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults conducted February 17–23, 2026, 60% reported reading AI summaries at the top of search results. The full Pew report, “Americans and AI 2026,” puts that behavior alongside a broader shift in how people find information. Men were slightly more likely to read the summaries than women (63% versus 57%), and adults 65 and older were the least likely group—useful nuance if your customer base skews older, but not a reason to assume you're exempt.
The summaries are only part of the picture. Pew found that about 40% of U.S. adults use chatbots to find information, which is now the single most common thing people do with them. Roughly half of adults use AI chatbots at all, up from about a third in 2024, and a quarter use them daily. ChatGPT leads adoption at 44% of adults (up from 34% a year earlier), with Gemini around 24% and Copilot and Meta AI behind that. The takeaway Pew draws is the one that matters for your marketing: people now find information through “traditional results, AI summaries, and chatbot answers”—three distinct surfaces, not one ranking you can optimize and forget.
| AI search behavior (U.S. adults, 2026) | Share |
|---|---|
| Read AI summaries in search results | 60% |
| Use AI chatbots at all (up from ~33% in 2024) | ~49% |
| Use chatbots to find information | ~42% |
| Use a chatbot daily | ~24% |
| Use ChatGPT (up from 34% a year earlier) | 44% |
| Use Gemini | ~24% |
Source: Pew Research Center, “Americans and AI 2026.”
For a local business, the practical reading is that your discoverability is no longer a single funnel. A customer might see an AI Overview on Google, ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, and only then scan the blue links. We dug into how these surfaces differ in how AI Overviews and AI Mode change user behavior, and the short version is that each one rewards slightly different signals. The constant across all of them is that an AI is now mediating the first impression.
Does showing up in an AI summary mean you'll get the customer?
This is where honesty matters more than hype. Being cited by an AI is not the same as being recommended by it—and the gap between the two can be wide. An analysis by Lily Ray of Amsive, reported by Search Engine Land, examined 100 B2B “best [category] software” queries and found that when a brand's own self-promotional “best of” listicle was cited, Google's AI Overview recommended competitors 69% of the time. In 224 cases, the AI cited a brand's own page but did not recommend that brand. As Ray put it in her own writeup of the study, calling yourself the best can end up helping your competitors win.
The pattern underneath that finding is instructive. The AI Overviews leaned heavily on third-party sources—Forbes, Reddit, and YouTube were among the most-cited domains for “best” queries—and established brands with stronger link profiles and independent mentions were more likely to be the ones actually recommended. In other words, the AI treats your own marketing claims with skepticism and trusts what other people say about you. A page that asserts “we're the top choice in Fort Wayne” is a citation candidate at best; the recommendation goes to whoever has the corroborating signals.
That reframes the whole exercise. The goal isn't to game your way into an AI answer with self-congratulatory copy—it's to build the kind of independent, verifiable reputation that makes the AI comfortable putting your name forward. This is the same logic behind our answer engine optimization guide: you're optimizing to be the trustworthy, well-corroborated answer, not just a string of keywords. Visibility without the recommendation is a brand impression at best and wasted effort at worst.
To be clear about the limits of this data: Ray's analysis focused on B2B software “best of” queries, not local service searches, so the exact 69% figure won't map cleanly onto “HVAC repair near me.” But the underlying mechanism—citation isn't endorsement, and third-party signals drive recommendations—is consistent with everything we see in local AI search, and it's the part worth acting on.
What makes an AI recommend your business, not just cite it?
If self-promotion doesn't earn the recommendation, what does? In our experience working with Northeast Indiana businesses, the levers that move the needle are unglamorous but reliable. None of them are tricks; they're the structural signals that let an AI confidently identify who you are and vouch for you.
Start with entity clarity. An AI needs to understand, without ambiguity, what your business is, where it operates, and what it does. That means a consistent business name, a clear description of services, and structured data (schema markup) that spells out your business type, location, hours, and offerings in a machine-readable format. We walk through the local version of this in our Fort Wayne AEO guide, and the underlying principle is to make your website the unambiguous source of truth for local AI search rather than leaving the AI to guess.
Next, NAP consistency—your name, address, and phone number matching exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, directories, and citations. Inconsistent details are one of the most common reasons an AI hesitates to recommend a local business, because conflicting data reads as uncertainty. We covered the mechanics of this in NAP consistency for AI bots, and it remains one of the highest-return, lowest-cost fixes available to a local company.
Then there are review signals. Because AI systems lean on third-party corroboration, your reviews are no longer just social proof for humans—they're evidence the AI uses to decide whether to recommend you. A steady stream of genuine, recent reviews on Google and relevant platforms gives the AI the independent validation it's looking for. We explored this shift in detail in how reviews shape SEO and AI visibility. Finally, publish answer-shaped content: clear, specific pages and FAQs that directly answer the questions your customers actually ask, in language a person would use, so the AI can lift a confident answer straight from your site.
None of these guarantee the recommendation—we're honest about that. But together they're how you move from “occasionally cited” to “regularly recommended,” and they compound over time rather than requiring constant chasing.
What about time-sensitive and breaking-news searches?
Not every query is evergreen, and speed changes the calculus. Reporting from Search Engine Land on USA Today's coverage strategy offers a useful window here. The publisher noted that AI Overviews can appear for news events within roughly four hours—and no later than half a day—according to Polemic Digital's Barry Adams, which is why USA Today aims to publish “while search interest is still rising, before Google has enough information to generate an AI Overview.” USA Today's sports editorial director also observed that AI Overviews have “likely lowered the traffic ceiling compared with a year ago.”
Most Fort Wayne businesses aren't racing the news cycle on World Cup coverage. But the principle scales down. If you serve a seasonal or event-driven need—storm-damage roofing after a spring hailstorm, HVAC repair during the first hard freeze, tax help in March—the window to be the cited, recommended answer is short, and the businesses with already-published, specific, locally-detailed content are the ones the AI can draw from in the moment. The lesson isn't to chase headlines; it's that freshness and genuine local specificity are part of what earns the recommendation when timing matters.
It's also a reminder of the trade-off we keep returning to: even when you do everything right, the AI summary may satisfy the searcher without sending a click. That's why the durable goal is the brand impression and the recommendation, not the raw click count. Judging this work purely by traffic will undersell its value, the same way it would for any business measuring a channel by the wrong number.
What this means for Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana businesses
Here's the local opportunity hiding inside an otherwise unsettling statistic. If 60% of your prospective customers are reading an AI's answer first, and most of your Fort Wayne competitors are still treating AI search as someone else's problem, the local business that gets its fundamentals right now can capture the AI recommendation while the field is still open. We see this across DeKalb County and Allen County: the owners who act early aren't doing anything exotic—they're fixing entity clarity, tightening NAP consistency, earning steady reviews, and publishing genuinely useful local content before their competitors notice the shift.
Concretely, picture the verticals most affected here. A Fort Wayne HVAC company wants the AI to recommend it for “furnace repair near me,” which means clear service-area pages and a clean Google Business Profile. A local dental practice or medical office needs answer-shaped pages for the procedures patients search and a recent, genuine review base. A law firm benefits from clear practice-area definitions and independent citations that establish authority. A home-services contractor wins on locally specific content and fast, consistent NAP data across directories. In every case, the play is the same: make it effortless for an AI to understand who you are, confirm you're trustworthy, and recommend you to a neighbor who's ready to buy.
The honest caveat applies locally too. None of this guarantees a flood of clicks, and AI summaries will sometimes answer a customer without sending them your way. But the alternative—being invisible or, worse, cited while the AI recommends a competitor—is the real risk. For a Northeast Indiana business, the early-mover window is genuine, and it's open right now.
Ready to become the business the AI recommends?
If you're not sure whether AI tools currently surface your business—or whether they're recommending you or your competitor—that's exactly the gap worth closing this year. Our AEO services are built to make Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana businesses the clear, trustworthy, well-corroborated answer that AI summaries and chatbots actually recommend. We'll audit your entity clarity, structured data, NAP consistency, and review signals, then build the answer-shaped content that earns citations and, more importantly, recommendations. The 60% shift has already happened; the businesses that respond to it first are the ones who'll own the AI recommendation in their market.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How many Americans read AI summaries in search results?
- According to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults conducted February 17–23, 2026, about 60% said they read the AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. Roughly 30% said they do not, and another 10% were not sure whether they had. Men were slightly more likely to read them than women, 63% versus 57%.
- Does appearing in an AI summary mean I will get the customer?
- Not necessarily. Being cited by an AI is different from being recommended by it. One analysis of B2B "best of" queries found Google's AI Overviews recommended competitors 69% of the time even while citing a brand's own page. The practical goal is to earn the recommendation through independent trust signals, not just to appear in the answer.
- How does a local business get recommended by AI search?
- Focus on the signals an AI uses to identify and trust you: clear entity information and structured data, consistent name-address-phone (NAP) details across the web, a steady base of genuine reviews, and answer-shaped content that directly addresses customer questions. Because AI systems lean on third-party corroboration, your independent reputation matters more than self-promotional claims.
- Why does AI search seem to trust competitors over my own website?
- AI systems tend to treat a brand's own marketing claims with skepticism and weight independent, third-party sources more heavily. Analysis of "best" queries found established brands with stronger link profiles and outside mentions were more likely to be recommended. Calling yourself the best on your own site can even help better-corroborated competitors win the recommendation.
- Are AI summaries replacing traditional Google rankings?
- Not entirely—they are adding surfaces rather than fully replacing them. Pew found people now find information through traditional results, AI summaries, and chatbot answers, with about 40% of adults using chatbots to search. The smart approach is to optimize for all three rather than assuming a single ranking captures all of your discoverability.
- How fast do AI summaries appear for time-sensitive searches?
- For news and event-driven queries, AI Overviews can appear within roughly four hours and no later than about half a day, according to commentary cited in coverage of publisher strategy. For seasonal or event-driven local services, that means already-published, locally specific content is what an AI can draw from in the moment the demand spikes.
- What should a Fort Wayne business do first about AI search?
- Start with the fundamentals that are cheapest to fix and highest in return: confirm your NAP details are identical everywhere, clean up your Google Business Profile, add structured data so AI tools can understand your business, and build a steady flow of genuine reviews. From there, publish clear, answer-shaped content for the questions your Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana customers actually ask.
Sources & Further Reading
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/americans-read-ai-summaries-search-results-pew-480592 — Pew: 60% of Americans read AI summaries in search results
- Pew Research Center: pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026 — Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-cite-self-serving-listicles-recommend-competitors-480573 — Google AI Overviews cite self-serving listicles, but recommend competitors 69% of the time
- Lily Ray (Amsive): lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/why-calling-yourself-the-best-could — Why Calling Yourself the “Best” Could Be Helping Your Competitors Win in AI Search
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/usa-today-google-ai-overviews-world-cup-480603 — USA Today races Google AI Overviews on World Cup coverage