How many people use ChatGPT and other AI assistants to find local services

The short answer

Nobody publishes a clean count of people who use ChatGPT specifically to find a plumber, a roofer, or an air conditioning company. What the published research does show is enough to act on.

Pew Research Center found that 44%¹ of U.S. adults say they use ChatGPT, up from the year before. BrightLocal's consumer survey found 45%² of U.S. consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for local business recommendations, a sharp rise from the year before. And Scorpion, surveying homeowners who recently hired a trades professional, found 22%³ now use AI tools such as ChatGPT to research or find recommendations.

So the honest answer is: a large share of adults use ChatGPT, a meaningful and growing share use AI tools to find local businesses, and for home services specifically the only published figure we found is Scorpion's. Each of those numbers measures something different, and the differences matter.

How many people use ChatGPT at all

Start with the broadest number. OpenAI says ChatGPT has more than 900 million⁴ weekly active users. That is a worldwide figure the company reports about itself, so it tells you scale, not who your customers are.

Pew's figures are narrower and more useful for a U.S. business. Pew asks U.S. adults whether they ever use ChatGPT, and 44%¹ say they do. About half⁵ of U.S. adults now use an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, by Pew's count. Pew notes that its question wording changed between survey years, so the year-over-year growth is a direction, not a precise rate.

ChatGPT is also not the only assistant that matters. Google reports that the Gemini app has 950 million⁶ monthly active users, and that AI Mode in Google Search has passed 1 billion⁷ monthly active users. Similarweb's traffic panel shows ChatGPT's share of visits to generative AI websites falling to roughly 53%⁸ over a year, as other assistants grew. Those are company-reported and panel figures, but they point the same way: people are spread across several assistants, and a business that only thinks about ChatGPT is looking at part of the picture.

How many use AI to look things up

Using ChatGPT is not the same as using it to find a business. Many people use it for work tasks.

Pew asked what people use chatbots for. About four-in-ten⁹ U.S. adults say they use chatbots to search for information, which Pew reports as one of the two most common uses, alongside work tasks. That base is all U.S. adults, not only chatbot users.

Bain & Company asked users of AI chatbots what they rely on them for, and 42%¹⁰ said they ask for shopping recommendations. That figure is from early 2025, its base is chatbot users rather than all consumers, and shopping is broader than hiring a contractor. It still shows that asking an assistant "what should I buy, and from whom" was already common before the newer surveys.

How many use AI to find local businesses

This is the closest published measure to the question. BrightLocal's consumer survey found that 45%² of U.S. consumers had used ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local business recommendations, making AI the third most popular source of recommendations in that survey.

Two cautions. BrightLocal sells local marketing software, including an AI visibility tracker, so it has an interest in the result. And the page does not state the survey's field dates. The figure is useful as evidence of direction and rough scale, and we would not quote it as a precise share of your market.

The same survey carries a related signal: the share of consumers who use Google to read reviews of local businesses dropped to 71%¹¹. Google is still the top source for reviews, but a smaller share of consumers read them there than a year earlier.

How many homeowners use AI to hire trades

For home services specifically, the one figure we found comes from Scorpion, a marketing agency for home-services companies. Among U.S. homeowners who had recently hired a trades professional, 22%³ said they now use AI tools such as ChatGPT to research or find recommendations. The same release says most of those homeowners start their search online.

Read that figure carefully. It does not say those homeowners go to ChatGPT instead of Google, and some articles that repeat it have added that claim. It says they use AI tools as part of researching or finding a pro. A homeowner can ask ChatGPT for names, then look those names up on Google, read reviews on Yelp, and call two of them.

The same study surveyed business owners, and 80%¹² of home-services leaders said they are unsure how to appear in AI-driven search results. That is also a vendor survey from a firm that sells the fix, so weigh it accordingly.

What these numbers do not tell you

None of these surveys tells you whether an AI assistant names your business, or which of your competitors it names instead. A national share of people who use ChatGPT says nothing about what ChatGPT says when someone in Mesa asks for a roofer.

They also do not tell you how the assistants choose. The engines search the web, read a handful of pages, and build an answer from them. Which pages they read, and whether your business is described on them, decides whether you are named. We cover the mechanics in how AI engines find local businesses.

And they are mostly self-reported. People are not always accurate about their own habits, and survey wording shapes the answer. Where a survey is run by a company that sells AI visibility or local marketing, including the kind of service we sell, treat its figure as a signal rather than a fact about your customers.

What this means for an owner

The published surveys put the share of people who ask an AI assistant for a local recommendation well above zero and rising, and that use is spread across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's own AI features. You do not need a precise national percentage to act on that. You need to know what those assistants say about your trade in your city.

That part is measurable. Ask the questions your customers ask, on every engine, and record which businesses each answer names and which websites it cites. Do it more than once, because answers can change from one week to the next. Our guide to checking whether ChatGPT recommends your business walks through a first check you can run yourself. For how this fits with Google, see are AI assistants replacing Google for finding contractors.