Ask ChatGPT for the best physiotherapist in Brunswick. Then ask Gemini the same question. You will often get two different lists, with only one or two names on both.
ChatGPT and Gemini name different businesses because they read different sources. Gemini answers from Google’s search index, which carries Google Business Profile data. ChatGPT runs its own index and buys in business listings from other companies. So a business can be well known to one platform and close to invisible to the other, and the work that fixes each one is not the same.
That matters because the person asking usually rings one of the names they were given. If you are on one list and not the other, half of those calls were never going to reach you. The test takes two minutes.
Each platform builds its answer from its own set of sources, then writes that answer in its own words. Two systems reading different sources will name different businesses.
Both tools do one of two things when you ask about a local business. Sometimes they answer from what the model picked up while it was built, which can be a year or more out of date. Sometimes they search first, then write an answer from what they find. The second is where a business has any influence at all.
Gemini’s live searching runs on Google’s search index. An index is the copy of the web a search engine keeps so it can answer quickly. That same index carries the local business data behind Maps and the three-result map pack. A well-kept Google Business Profile therefore turns up in Gemini answers more often than a neglected one.
ChatGPT works differently. OpenAI runs its own crawler and its own index. Its published documentation says ChatGPT search also uses third party search providers and content supplied by partners. Google’s index is not one of them.
The answer is also written fresh each time. Ask the same question twice and the order usually changes. Sometimes a name drops out altogether. Treat any single answer as one sample rather than a ranking.
Gemini leans on Google. ChatGPT leans on a mix of its own crawling and licensed data. The table below sets out what that means in practice.
That Yelp line needs an Australian footnote. Most writing on this subject comes out of the United States, where fixing your Yelp listing is sensible advice. Coverage here is patchy outside hospitality and retail in the larger cities. The listings that carry weight in Australia are your Google Business Profile, your Apple and Bing listings, and the directories your industry uses. Fix the ones that exist rather than working through an American checklist.
| ChatGPT | Google Gemini and AI Overviews | |
|---|---|---|
| What it reads to answer live questions | OpenAI’s own index of the web, built by a crawler called OAI-SearchBot | Google’s search index, the same one behind ordinary Google results |
| Where local business details come from | Third party listing and review data, plus whatever sits on the open web. OpenAI licensed Yelp listings and reviews in July 2026 | Google Business Profile, the free listing that also feeds Maps and the map pack |
| What you can change | Your website, how clearly each page answers one question, and whether the crawler is allowed in | Your website, your Google Business Profile, your categories, hours and reviews |
| What you cannot change | Which sources it picks and how it words the answer | The same, plus how far you are from the person asking |
| What shuts a site out completely | Disallowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt | Disallowing Googlebot removes you from Google results and AI Overviews. Disallowing Google-Extended affects the Gemini apps only |
| Can you buy your way into the answer | Not the answer itself. OpenAI now runs ads in ChatGPT, which sit beside it | Not the AI Overview. Google Ads sit above and below it |
Yes, and the most common cause is one line in a file most owners have never opened. Your robots.txt file sits at the root of your website and tells automated visitors which pages they may read. Each platform reads a different name in it, and the names do different jobs.
OAI-SearchBot is the one that matters for ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s documentation states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.
GPTBot is a separate bot with a separate job.
It collects content that may be used to train OpenAI models. Blocking it is a fair decision, and it does not remove you from ChatGPT search answers.
ChatGPT-User only turns up when a person asks.
OpenAI says it is not used to decide whether your content appears in search, so it is not the setting to change if you are missing from answers.
Googlebot covers Google Search and every feature inside it,
including AI Overviews. Block that and you lose the ordinary results as well.
Google-Extended is the Gemini control.
Google’s documentation says it controls whether crawled content trains Gemini models and grounds answers in the Gemini apps. Google also states that it does not affect a site’s inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal.
That last pair is the trap. A single ‘block AI bots’ switch in a security plugin or a content delivery network can turn off ChatGPT’s search crawler and Google-Extended together. Your Google rankings stay where they were, so nothing in the monthly report changes. The AI answers stop naming you and nothing tells you why.
Access is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix. OpenAI says it takes about 24 hours after a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust.
The overlap is larger than the difference, and it is where most of the useful work sits. Four things carry across.
Pages that answer one question completely.
Both systems lift passages, not whole pages. A section that reads as a full answer on its own is easier to quote than one that only makes sense after the two above it.
Business details that agree everywhere.
Name, address, phone number, hours and what you do. Contradiction between sources reads as uncertainty, and a system that is unsure leaves you out rather than risk getting you wrong.
A complete Google Business Profile.
Google says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance comes from how complete and detailed the profile is, and more reviews and positive ratings can help. That work pays on Google, in the map pack and in Gemini at once.
Being written about somewhere other than your own website.
Both platforms favour claims they can attribute to a source. A mention in a trade publication, an industry body listing or a local news piece carries further than another page about yourself.
No. Neither company publishes the rules its answers follow, and neither promises those answers will hold from one day to the next. You have the proof already if you ran the same prompt twice and got a different order.
If a provider guarantees your business will be named in a ChatGPT answer, ask how they plan to control an answer that changes between two runs of the same question.
What can be promised is the work underneath. Crawlers allowed in. Details matching across every listing that exists. A complete, reviewed Google Business Profile. Pages written so a machine can lift a clean answer out of them. Those things move the odds. Nobody controls the outcome.
Ten minutes and a notepad. Do it before you buy anything sold as AI visibility work. The result tells you which platform has a problem with your business, and whether you have one at all.
Write three prompts a customer would use.
Not your business name. The words a customer would say out loud. For a plumber: “best emergency plumber in Coburg”, “who do I call for a burst pipe in Melbourne’s inner north”, “plumber near Preston open Saturday”.
Run all three on both platforms, twice each.
Same wording every time. The second run tells you whether a name is a stable answer or a one-off.
Note who gets named and who gets linked.
They are different results. A link is stronger, because it sends the person to your website instead of leaving them with a name to type into Google.
Ask each platform about your business directly.
Try “what do you know about [business name] in [suburb]”. Wrong hours, an old address or a service you stopped offering points straight at the listing that needs fixing.
Check your own access.
Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. Look for OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot, Google-Extended and any rule that disallows everything. A block you did not ask for is your first job.
At the end you have something better than a general opinion about AI search. You have the two or three names that keep coming up instead of yours, on each platform, and a reason why.
Once a quarter is enough for most businesses, and the run takes ten minutes. The bigger risk is a change at your end that nobody connects to AI answers until months later.
| Re-run the test straight away when any of these happen You move, change your phone number, or start trading under a different name Your website is rebuilt, moved to a new host, or put behind a new security service Someone adds bot filtering, a firewall rule or a caching plugin You add or drop a service you want to be known for You open a second location, or change which suburbs you serve |
|---|
One change is already documented. OpenAI now lists a fourth crawler, OAI-AdsBot, which checks pages submitted as ads inside ChatGPT. Ads are arriving in the same place the recommendations appear. You still cannot pay to be named in the answer itself, and that distinction is about to get harder for a customer to see. Worth knowing before somebody offers you guaranteed ChatGPT placement and means an ad slot.
If you would rather someone else ran the test, read the access rules and fixed what turns up, that is the work behind CJ Digital’s AI SEO service. Send through your website address and the three prompts your customers would use. You will get back a plain account of who is being named instead of you, and which of the two platforms is the problem.
Platform behaviour in this article was checked on 9 August 2026 against each company’s own documentation: OpenAI’s Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, Google’s list of common crawlers, and Google Business Profile Help on local ranking. Both companies change how their systems retrieve information without announcing it, so check the current documentation before acting on anything here.
No. ChatGPT builds its own index of the web using a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI’s documentation says ChatGPT search also draws on third party search providers and content from partners. Google’s index is not one of them. Gemini is the platform that answers from Google’s index, which is why your Google Business Profile shows up there and has far less pull inside ChatGPT.
The answer is generated fresh on each run rather than read off a fixed list. The sources the system picks can change between runs, so the order shifts and names drop in and out. Run each prompt at least twice before you decide you have a problem. A business that appears on both runs is a stable result; one that appears once is closer to noise.
For Gemini and Google AI Overviews it does a great deal of work, because both answer from the Google index that carries profile data. For ChatGPT it matters less directly, though a complete profile helps keep your details consistent everywhere else. Any local business should have one either way. It is free, and it feeds the map pack that still drives most local phone calls.
It depends which bot. Blocking the training crawlers, GPTBot and Google-Extended, is a reasonable position to hold on your own content. Be aware that Google-Extended also controls grounding in the Gemini apps, so blocking it can take you out of Gemini answers. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search answers. Blanket blocks are the problem. Decide bot by bot.
Nobody publishes a timeframe, and a provider quoting one is guessing. Access changes register quickly, and OpenAI says about 24 hours for a robots.txt update. Changes to content, listings and authority are slower, with no guaranteed end point. Judge it over months, and measure it on the enquiries that arrive rather than on whether one prompt names you today.
