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The Local AI Visibility Index

Fresno Occupational Therapy

We asked 5 AI answer engines 10 questions a prospective patient would actually ask, then measured which of the market’s 60 practices got named. 55 of them never came up once.

Market
Fresno, CA
Practices
60
Questions
10
Engines
5
Measured
July 2026

Every practice in the market · one dot each · ordered by Google Maps rank · lit = named by at least one engine

Named by AI — 5 practicesNever named — 55 practices

91.7%

of Occupational Therapy practices in Fresno were named in none of the 50 AI answers we collected.

Finding 01

Does ranking well on Google mean AI recommends you?

It helps, and it is nowhere near enough. Of the 20 best-ranked practices in Fresno, 4 got named by an AI engine 20%. Of the 20 ranked lowest, 0 did. The single most-named practice in this market ranked 2nd on Maps, coming up in 52% of answers.

Google rank and AI answers are decided by two different systems looking at different things. Your map position comes from how close you are, what category you are in, and how people engage with your listing. Whether an AI names you depends on whether it can find, read and trust a description of your practice in the sources it pulls from. Ranking first buys you better odds. It does not buy you the answer.

Google Maps rank vs getting named — Fresno
Where they rank on Google MapsNamed by AIShare
The 1st third — best ranked on Maps4 of 2020%
The middle third1 of 205%
The bottom third0 of 200%

Finding 02

How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?

Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 60 practices measured, 5 were named at least once and 55 were never named. The three most-named practices took 89.4% of every mention in the market.

The most-named practice came up in 52% of answers; the fourth came up in 10%; everything below that was 1% or less. A short shelf at the top, and a long floor underneath it.

Practice A52%
Practice B31%
Practice C10%
Practice D10%
Practice E1%
55 practices0%

Bar length is the share of all 50 answers, so a full bar would mean every answer named them.

Practice A is one organization — 3 Google Maps listings that share its website, counted once because AI engines cite the organization’s site rather than any individual listing.

Finding 03

Are the best-reviewed practices invisible to AI?

Often, yes. Take the 15 strongest practices in Fresno — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 11 were never named by any engine. That is 73.3% of the best practices in town, missing from every answer.

One of them ranks 10th on Maps with 5.0 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. One of them ranks 14th on Maps with 5.0 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. Their patients rate them highly and Google ranks them well. The AI engines do not know they exist.

Why this matters more than who came first. The practices at the top of this market are already competitive. The practices with the most to gain are the 11 practices that earned a top-25% reputation and get none of the benefit of it in AI answers.

Finding 04

Do Google reviews affect whether AI recommends you?

A little, here. In Fresno the practices AI named average 4.64 stars against 4.32 for the ones it never named.

5 practices here were named by at least one engine, rating between 4.2 and 5.0 stars. 50 were named by none, rating between 2.0 and 5.0. The two groups overlap almost completely.

Reviews do real work in the map pack and in how patients choose. This measures something narrower: whether they are what makes an AI say your name. In Fresno the answer is what the numbers above say it is, and it is not the same answer in every market we measured.

Finding 05

Do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend the same practices?

No. Asked the same questions about the same market, the closest any two engines came to agreeing was 57.1% of thepractices they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 0%.

Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Gemini named 11, Google AI Overview named 6, Perplexity named 5, ChatGPT named 3. Showing up in one does not mean showing up in the others, so checking yourself against a single assistant tells you very little.

1611031ChatGPTGeminiPerplexity
Of the 13 practices named by any of the three, all three agreed on 1.
How often two engines named the same business
Engine pairAgreed on
Perplexity & Google AI Overview57.1%
Gemini & Google AI Overview41.7%
Gemini & Perplexity33.3%
ChatGPT & Gemini16.7%
ChatGPT & Perplexity14.3%
ChatGPT & Google AI Overview12.5%
ChatGPT & Claude0.0%
Claude & Gemini0.0%
Claude & Perplexity0.0%
Claude & Google AI Overview0.0%

How we measured it

We pulled every Occupational Therapy practice Google Maps returns for Fresno60 of them, after combining duplicate listings of the same practice — then asked 5 AI answer engines the same 10 patient questions and recorded which ones each engine named.

Who is in it
60 practices, from everything Google Maps returns for "occupational therapist" in Fresno, CA. A practice with more than one listing is counted once. 11 listings that share the websites of 5 organizations are counted as those organizations, because AI engines cite the organization's site rather than any individual listing.
What we asked
10 questions a patient would actually ask, kept identical across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. 50 answers in total, July 2026.
How we scored it
The share of answers that named or cited a practice, weighted by how many people use the engine that named it.
How we ranked reputation
Google Maps position, star rating adjusted for how many reviews back it up, and review count on a sliding scale that levels off around a thousand.
Scope
One market, one category. Every number on this page describes Fresno and comes from that market alone — results differ between markets and we do not carry them across. We never name individual practices. AI engines change over time; this describes July 2026.

For anyone who wants the statistics

The findings above are counts, which is how most people want to read them. Here are the same relationships as correlations, for readers who prefer them.

Reputation signals vs getting named — 60 practices
What we measuredHow closely it trackedWhat that means
Google Maps rank−0.366A slight connection
Review count−0.071No connection
Star rating+0.064No connection

Reading the middle column: 0.0 means the two things had nothing to do with each other. 1.0 would mean they moved together perfectly. A minus sign means they moved in opposite directions. Anything under about 0.2 either way is noise.

The Local AI Visibility Index — Fresno, July 2026. Published by Moonline AEO GEO.