Is ChatGPT Reading Your Customers an Old Directory Listing?

The Situation

When a customer asks ChatGPT for a propane dealer nearby, the answer often comes from your Yelp, BBB or Angi listing, not your website. A Cheers market baseline covering the 28 days ending September 2, 2026 shows why. If the phone number or service towns on that listing are out of date, that is what the customer hears.

The baseline counted 356,019 citations across 100 metro areas. ChatGPT split its home-services citations nearly evenly. About half went to contractor websites and 44.7 percent went to directories and review platforms. Gemini, by contrast, pointed to a contractor's own website in 80.7% of citations.

The baseline ran 32 home-services prompts, the category that covers propane delivery. It used four engines: Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and ChatGPT.

The Facts

How each AI engine picks its sources

The baseline also found Perplexity pulled 72.3% of its citations from contractor websites. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode was the only engine where google.com itself carried a real citation share, at 11.4%. That directory share means a stale Angi or BBB record is doing real work on that engine.

The most cited platform domains across all 100 metros were google.com, expertise.com, angi.com, bbb.org and reddit.com, Cheers found. Check that list against your own listings before you assume a directory doesn't matter.

What larger studies and OpenAI say

Cheers also cites an October 2025 Yext analysis that found a similar pattern at larger scale. It covered 6.8 million citations across 1.6 million responses. In it, 52.15% of Gemini's citations came from brand-owned websites. Meanwhile, 48.73% of ChatGPT's citations went to third-party sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and MapQuest.

OpenAI's help documentation, as quoted by Cheers, says placement in ChatGPT search results is not guaranteed. It names one concrete step a site controls: letting its OAI-SearchBot crawler onto the site. It does not promise that a Google Business Profile, a Yelp page, or any other directory feeds a local answer.

Why this matters now

Customers are using these tools more. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, as cited by F9XR, found consumer use of AI tools to find local businesses rose from 6% to 45% in a single year. The baseline covers home-services prompts broadly and does not break out propane or fuel delivery. So how propane dealers perform within that mix is not yet confirmed.

Business Impact

Which listings matter most depends on which engine a customer opens. A dealer with a thin or hard-to-crawl website will lean on ChatGPT's directory habit, like it or not. Gemini and Perplexity customers will judge the dealer mostly by what the website itself says.

What this means for your business: 1. On ChatGPT, your directory listings supplied a large share of home-services answers in the baseline, even if you've never touched them. 2. A crawlable, current website matters more on Gemini and Perplexity, where most citations came from contractor sites. 3. Confirm OAI-SearchBot can reach your site; OpenAI names that as the one specific step it controls for ChatGPT citations.

Key Takeaways

• Which listing answers for you depends on which AI engine the customer opens.
• Directory and review profiles do real work on ChatGPT, so treat them as part of your website.
• bbb.org and angi.com were among the most-cited platform domains across the study's 100 metro areas.

Action Steps

1. 1.Open each of your review-site and directory profiles this week and confirm the main line, hours and delivery area match your website.
2. 2.Check whether your website blocks OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI names as the one control point for ChatGPT citations.
3. 3.Before your next directory renewal, read each profile's delivery towns against your actual route map.

Competitive Advantage

Dealers whose listings and website agree give every AI engine one clean answer to repeat, whichever one a customer opens.