AI Visibility Checks

Research

AI search, demystified for local businesses

Plain-English guides on how to make your website findable by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews — written for owners and marketers, not engineers.

June 5, 2026 · 10 min read

The Restaurant & Hospitality AI Update: Yelp Goes Agentic, OpenTable Embeds AI, Gemini and ChatGPT Take Orders

Six weeks after our first restaurant post, the picture has consolidated. Yelp Assistant went agentic (April 21), Starbucks and Little Caesars launched ChatGPT ordering (April 15-17), Gemini got native OpenTable integration (May 19), and AI Mode agentic booking arrives U.S. summer 2026. Here's the consolidated mid-2026 state — three live booking surfaces, one coming — plus the updated 6-step playbook for independents.

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June 2, 2026 · 9 min read

Visual AI Search Is About to Happen: How Customers Will Find Local Businesses With a Camera

Google announced Gemini Omni (multimodal video generation) and intelligent eyewear with Gemini at I/O 2026. Two halves of the same story: customers will start finding local businesses by pointing, not typing. Here's the verified rollout — Samsung, Gentle Monster, Warby Parker glasses this fall — and the 6-step playbook for image SEO, geo-tagged photography, and ImageObject schema.

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May 19, 2026 · 11 min read

What Is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)? A Plain-English Guide for Small Stores

UCP is the open standard for AI shopping agents — co-developed by Google and Shopify, backed by Walmart, Target, Etsy, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard. A May 2026 study scanned 3 million sites and found only 26 with a publicly detectable UCP file at /.well-known/ucp — and none of the launch backers were among them. Here's what UCP does, where adoption actually stands, and the 5-step playbook for small stores.

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Research — AI search and local business · AI Visibility Checks