Name: Yext 2026 AI and Local Discovery Consumer Search Trends
Uploaded: 2026-05-21T16:01:07.491Z
Duration: 42 min 41 s
Description: Yext 2026 AI and Local Discovery Consumer Search Trends

Transcript for "Yext 2026 AI and Local Discovery Consumer Search Trends": Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us for the release of our new Yext consumer research about how people really search today in the age of AI. I'm Lauren Chamberlain. I'm our senior editorial manager. But I have to say that as as being part of the team that led this report and I drafted the report itself, this is one of the more interesting and exciting things I've had the opportunity to work on in my eleven years at Yext. And the reason for that is I think that what we found validated some theories I already had, of course, and things we all know in the industry. But two parts of it really surprised me and kinda went against some of the, associations or or preconceptions I had in my mind. So I'm really excited to get into it with you today. We're breaking these findings into three parts, and I wanna start with act one, which is just the AI search shift. So if you have been in the industry like me, you have absolutely been hearing AI is changing how people search. AI search is coming. AI search is here. And, you know, that's absolutely true. But I do think there's still a little bit of an assumption that local search happens on traditional search engines or maps. And it's not really the case. Half of the market globally so we surveyed over 3,800 people globally, and half of the market has already moved to AI search. That's that's our big takeaway. 42.7%. It's actually higher if you do just the North American data slice. And, that means that these people have used an AI tool, not just for something, but for local search in the past month. 28%, getting close to a third, have actively tried a new local business in the past six months because of an AI recommendation specifically. And then finally, when it comes to higher income customers, 61% of high income North American households actually start their searches with AI. So if you're not visible in AI search, you are potentially invisible to half of your customer base. But again, this is something that very possibly you know or you've already seen in in your traffic data or in how customers are finding you. I don't think this is new. I think we I think we know that being visible in AI search is table stakes, but this research does confirm that the tipping point has happened. And especially with high income households, really valuable customers, it's moving even faster, and this curve is only going in one direction. And now to unpack these findings a little bit more, we're gonna go to our fantastic panel, which includes Garrett Sussman, director of marketing at iPollRank, Amber Wilcox, digital marketing manager at United Rentals, and Brad Schafer, search and Gemini partnerships manager at Google. Welcome, guys. Let's let's get into this a little bit more. Alright. So we just talked about this AI adoption shift and the fact that the way people are searching has fundamentally changed already. The tipping point has happened, and it matters for every business regardless of category or customer. So, Garrett, I wanna start with you. Does that 42% adoption of AI tools for local search surprise you, or does that kinda match what you're seeing in your work at iPullRank? It absolutely matches. You know, the way I'm paying attention to it is, like, we are four years in from ChatGPT kind of becoming this mainstream thing. Google has passed OpenAI in a lot of ways. And the biggest thing that I've noticed is there's less and less friction of encountering AI, whether it's being kind of forced to the top of AI overviews, being inserted into Google business profiles. Now it's being added to Maps and, Gemini. So however people are conceptualizing AI, it's almost like you can't avoid it, but it's also a better experience for a lot of folks. And so it doesn't surprise me that as people have more experience with it, they're gonna start going towards it to reduce that kind of cognitive load experience. So 42% is almost low, but I anticipate to continue to grow. Totally. That's from the global data too. I think when you zoom in on North America, it's actually even a little bit higher. But out of, you know, 4,000 respondents globally, we're seeing at least, you know, close to that halfway point of of having used it in the last month. So, yeah, I agree with you. The the curve's only heading one way. And then, Brad, I guess, we wanna talk to you from the Google perspective in particular. How are you seeing this play out in in search behavior? Yeah. Yeah. I'll say on a personal level, I always look at my parents as the litmus test of are they actually adopting, because we are all power users. I'm using Gemini and using AI mode. And I look at them, I saw them using AI mode, and, they refer to it as search. And I was like, okay. This is becoming, very much mainstream. From the Google perspective, I'll say we see queries are becoming more conversational. We see it's about two to three times longer than our our old conventional queries of restaurant near me, you know, activities this weekend is turning into more personal too. So you're seeing a specific query have, you know, six different items of intent of a restaurant near me that has a patio that can serve dogs and offer vegan food. And so previously, that those were six different queries now into one. So it's, high intent. It's, great conversational queries, but it does change the landscape of what search is today. And what is that a little follow-up there. What does that mean brands need to do? And anybody can weigh in on this, but, like, let's let's just get shortly into into that in a conversational world where all of these questions are kinda one question. What does that really mean? Garrett, I see you're ready. I'm always I'm always ready. Well, I was just trying to what you're saying. I mean, the the the time of this just announced at IO was this idea of the interactive search box. And one thing to your point, Brad, is, like, there's still, like, this mental model of when I'm in a a Google search, I'm in keyword ease. I'm writing, like, two to three words where I'm trying to get the best result. But once you get into a chatbot with AI, you have that natural language. So, you know, now that Google has released this interactive chatbot, I think people are going to be trained to use natural language more and more with their queries. Now what brands need to do at a local level is really complex. There's gonna be a lot of, like, it depends. Right? But I think ultimately is getting as much information and brand visibility as you can across all of the different channels. You're not just focusing on showing up on search. It's so much more of a holistic experience because there are all these disparate sources of information that can be pulled. So as a brand, you have to be much more aware about the sentiment and the narrative to give yourself as much opportunity to not only show up in a search, but also for it to be a positive recommendation and not just a avoid this brand because they do all these things wrong. Right. And, yeah, thank you for seeding what we're gonna talk about in the next q and a section, Garrett. But, Amber, you know, I do wanna talk from the brand side with you also. How are you seeing this at United Rentals? Like, let's let's get into it. Has your data changed? How are people finding you? Are you seeing this AI adoption play out, from your perspective? Yeah. I think you'd be lying. Anybody would be lying to say that traffic patterns haven't changed over the last, right, twelve to eighteen months. But I don't think things are just disappearing. Right? Like, my traffic isn't going away. It's shifting to a new new spot. Right? So we're looking at how consumer behavior is changing. Right? So maybe before this, a search started in a traditional Google query, where now it may start with ChatGPT or Google Maps or Reviews. So I don't look at it as AI has, right, taken taken my traffic away from me as much as they've taken it and they've replaced it with a new, like, journey map. Right? So, I know for it for my own personal knowledge, like, I don't believe everything AI tells me and I nor should anyone else. So we want we want to validate those things by looking at location accuracy, the hours, the availability, the reviews. I still go into every single Google review listing to make sure, like, okay. How in the last six months, even though these are the hotels that someone recommended me, where were all the bad reviews that that were given? And so I think it's important to not just realize, like, not take it for for, you know, for what it is and understand that traffic has changed, but we're just using different signals now to validate. So I'm gonna look at Google Google Maps more to really understand my reviews now than to be able to, just start there. Right? It's it's helping us, but it's not taking away the traffic that, you know, that we're saying it is. And so a a lot of reports are saying, oh, my traffic's going away. No. It's not going away. It's just moving to another location. Right. And I absolutely love that you talked about that verification journey because that actually tees up something else that we found in the report that, you know, really surprised and interested me and I think is is gonna be key for brands to understand. I'll say I do love the what you mentioned, Amber. I'm just like I have referred to it as foundational content of, like, hours, menus, reviews. And I think a lot of folks can get really wrapped into how am I speaking for an AI bot to understand my brand when they're missing the foundational information as far as, like, respond to review or having correct hours. I'll say, what I tell brands is using search and using Gemini is, like, how how are you displaying your brand as if it was word-of-mouth to another person? And and so how how is your brand viewed within you know, are you able to, deliver on a query of, does my restaurant have a patio? Does it have vegan food? Does it have is it open on this time? Like, those are foundational content that, you'd be surprised on how many brands really missed the mark there. And so, with these high intent queries, I think it makes it even more important than ever. Yeah. And I think response, I know from the, you know, general standpoint, I help with with the review management and looking at, one of the great things that our our Yext partner, shared with me is the responses actually do matter and what you're putting into them. So if a product is mentioned, I'm going to mention it back to the the customer in the review, and, like, seeding a little bit of that information into those reviews. You know, we respond, but also responding in a way that includes some of that key language that that AI may pick up on too. Yeah. That's a that's a great point, Amber. It's interesting because historically in local SEO, we're always like, you should respond to show great customer service for review, but it wasn't always necessarily like a ranking factor in the same way that utilize justifications within the actual review, which recently Google put out, you know, kind of guidelines of, like, don't ask for a specific, you know, reference to a product or don't reference a specific employee's name. But at the same time, AI is AI, and and and it picks up any sources. So you almost have to think I'd be interested to hear future experiments, but that the owner's response probably will matter more in the future. Like, it probably will be pulled in in a way that it hasn't in the past because of the probabilistic nature. So your your customer service is is really important in terms of, how you're recommended. Yeah. It's very important in terms of how you're recommended and how you're cited in AI. But what's what else we found is that it's really important in how you are trusted by humans too in a way that maybe I didn't expect. So let's go ahead and dive into the second part of the data on that. Alright. So I think this is a great moment to get into kind of the act two, the second big takeaway, from our report, which is part that really surprised me actually. So you'll see that we found that consumers say they trust AI. 75% of our respondents say that especially when it comes to local recommendations, they trust AI at a four or five out of five. And at the same time, almost 60% say their trust in AI has grown over the past year. Only a really small percentage say it's declined. So people trust AI. And I think this is a place where we hear two really disparate narratives across the industry or at least I have. It's either people trust AI and then they act on that recommendation. It's all AI, AI, AI all the time. Or you hear, you know what? Actually, people are skeptical of AI. They don't really trust it. They're still acting in traditional channels. But what we found is actually a little bit different and a little bit more complex. They trust AI and yet they still verify. So people are engaging with AI. We know this. We saw that big trend in the search behavior. People are shifting, starting their journeys that way, using it as part of their journey. But when they get that AI answer, 95% of them still take an extra step. 95%. They do something else before they actually take an action to buy something, choose a service, visit a place. So what do they do? Well, after the AI answer is when this verification loop kicks in. So after getting an AI answer, we found that 53% of our global respondents search Google or Bing to verify or learn more. About half visit a business website directly. 42% go click through all of AI cited sources. 28% look at reviews, and 20% go check into a business' social media profile. Now even if you, like me, never took a collegiate level math class, you will notice that these numbers do not add up to a 100. And that's because we gave people, of course, the opportunity to answer, multiple to check multiple boxes of what you do. So it's not as if someone gets an answer and then one person goes to ping and then that's it. Most people at some point in this verification journey do search, do look at reviews, and also check the social media profile. So it's a pretty complicated process. And AI trust is not binary. You you it's not people trust and they immediately act or they don't trust or they don't use. There is a verification process. And I think honestly very similar to the way that, you you know, if you got an answer, a really conversational good answer recommendation from a friend, you might still go and look that business up online. Right? Same thing's happening here. So what does that mean? Brands can actually, unfortunately, go missing at any stage of this journey. So let's say you did a great job, you drove AI visibility, you appeared in that AI answer, fantastic job. Well, what's going to happen if someone clicks through to your website and doesn't find confirmation of the answer they were looking for? Or goes to reviews and isn't able to, verify that somebody had a good experience with you? There is a chance to go missing and all of these disparate channels have a really big impact on who stays in the answer set as a brand. I'll give you an example from from my own life. Recently, these are my interests. I I did ask ChatGPT for a series of recommendations of where to take a good friend to get martinis and fries in New York City. I I received a few recommendations. They all looked like places I'd wanna check out. And so what I did, though, was I went and looked at their venues local pages to see if they actually had a martini and fries listed. I looked at reviews. I think I saw some Google Business Profiles and clicked through the photos to see if I was seeing photos of indeed martinis and fries and what they looked like. So it was fantastic to be included in that answer, but trust was built and decisions were made all throughout all of these different channels and platforms. So it's a mistake to think about AI visibility as the be all and all. We talked about that's table stakes, but building trust with both people and AI engines through consistency of information and considering channels like reviews and social as potential decision levers is where brands can really stand out. Let's go to the panel to talk about that a little bit more. So we just unpacked how consumers have not reduced but relocated the need to verify. There's this verification loop that runs after every AI answer. 95% of people are taking an additional step after they get an answer, and reviews and social signals are this huge part of the conversion layer between AI recommendation and purchase. So, Garrett, let's start with you. For brands that are, you know, really heavily investing in this AI visibility, but ignoring the verification layer when it comes to reviews or pages or social, whatever it is, what happens to their conversion over the next year? It might go down a little bit. No. I mean, you you think about it. Let's think industry by industry. Right? Like, if I am an a restaurant, I'm going to have a person who, you know, might go to social, might go to TikTok. You hear these narratives around, you know, different demographics going to social media to see people that they trust locally talk about their experience at a brand. If you're thinking for your money in your life, like a lawyer or a doctor with insurance or the experience there, this is a really important personal experience. So, people people, when it comes to your money in your life, are definitely going to do more intense research. So I think when you're thinking about your own brand, your own business, you really do need to understand how your ideal customers, audience, whoever are searching and where they're spending their time, you know, more and more people are using Reddit. So there's a lot of channels to stay abreast of, but you know your business better than anyone else. So it makes sense that if there is a negative sentiment that appears on another channel after they get recommended AI search, people aren't you're not gonna even have a chance to defend yourself. They're gonna make their decision before they ultimately go or don't go to your business. Right. That was the crazy thing to me is you can fall out of this consideration set kind of at any moment. You know? You you did all the things. You showed up in the AI answer, the citations coming from your website, whatever it is, but somebody's still going to go look at at that review or that listing or that whatever it is and then make a decision about whether they can trust what has been recommended to them. Kind of the same way they always have. You know? When you get a recommendation from a friend, you ask another friend or you ran a search on Google or whatever it was. So this this is still happening. It's just happening in a more a more complex way where you're right. You need to know your business, but there are going to be a lot of touch points, to manage in that. So for Amber, I mean, how do you think about this at United Rentals, especially about the role of reviews in social? You mentioned reviews a little bit earlier, but, how do you think about those as decision layers and maybe not just something that's a nice to have for brand awareness? Well, I think they're part like, AI is a part of every stage now. Right? When we're thinking about it, we're looking at it for validation. We're looking at it for recommendations. But, I like I mentioned earlier, I don't trust blindly those recommendations. So you do have to do that validation. I will say, though, if you don't know what AI is saying about your brand, then there's a big miss there, right, and being able to understand how AI is talking about you. And so I think that's really important. That would be one of my biggest recommendations would be to say, like, if you don't know how AI is talking about your brand, then ask it or find a tool that can help you figure that out because I think that's really important is to be able to understand, right, what it's saying, but also what it's citing. I that might surprise you. I know sometimes, like, the the websites and things like we talk Reddit, but there are other platforms, right, that that AI could be using. They kind of pull that information in and whether that's you know, they're they're pulling it from, you know, a work related website all the way to, your own website. So I think it's important to kind of just look at not just, what you are hoping that AI is going to say, but there are tools. And there's I mean, there's even the option for you to just put it in a a platform itself and say, you know, what does what what do you think about this brand? Be able to see what it's saying. Because if you don't know what it's saying about your brand, then it may surprise you for sure. I love that point, Amber. That's that's good advice. And, also, thank you for teeing me up through a little plug for Yext Research. We do have yext.com/research. We have a lot of reports general and broken out by industry that actually, what we found is that 86 plus percent of citations are from brand managed sources. So, of course, the Reddits are gonna be there, especially for that maybe national level or broad level question. But AI is citing your local pages, your reviews, your listings, your etcetera, a lot more often than maybe people think. And you can take control over that if if you have the requisite information. So love that you called that out. And then Brad, for you, you know, we're gonna be doing a lot of talking today about the the Google versus the Gemini of it all even though, of course, those are becoming more and more of the same, but, you know, the traditional search into the AI search. Do you have kind of a start, stop, continue for brands in this age of not just AI, but this constant verification loop where it's, yes, it's an AI question, but then your listing still matters, but then your website still matters, and then there's traditional Google search, and then you're back into AI mode. What are what are the best practices or any stop start continues there from your perspective? Yeah. I'll say Garrett plugged it a little bit earlier on the, revised guidelines that we released on best practice for SEO, GEO. And just this week, we had quite a number of announcements at Google IO, which you'll see search is gonna continue to become more of this conversational layer and have Gemini built into every product that we have at Google. And previously, I'll say it was really easy to see query to purchase, like, query to conversion. Now, like you said, this verification layer, it's, it is a query and then it is a, continued query and it's really hard to track the exact a to b. And I think what it means for continue is to continue to, focus on those foundational layers of content like Amber mentioned before. It's gonna be even more important to have reviews up to date, to have your listings and fresh content is going to be huge. And so I think when we look at search today, if you know search previous, the top would show how many milliseconds a query would be delivered. They would be, you know, the smallest increment you can think of. Now users are more accustomed to waiting, a few more seconds to have more accurate answers. And so I'll say Gemini within search is going to going to prioritize accuracy over speed at the moment. And so you're gonna see it's really important to make sure all different areas where your brand is visible, like as we mentioned, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, to make sure it's consistent across all of your surfaces so that when Gemini is pulling, it's going to be an accurate response. I love that you said that, Brad, about, like, being willing to wait more because I think to the queries that I've done, and I've even gone as far to say to it. Like, take a minute to think about this further before you get back to me on a straight answer because, you know, if it thinks longer, it finds more information. And I think, that's interesting because they get back to my own queries. Like, yeah, I do wait longer sometimes for it to to give me a better response. Love that. So I think the picture that I just set up that that emerged from those findings, I was saying, people trust AI answers but verify across channels kinda suggests a really clean division of labor. Right? As if it were ask an AI question, then check reviews or local pages or listings, and then transact in a on a traditional platform for purchase. Right? It's not true. As we started to get into already, the reality is a lot more fluid. So really and we have a lot more stats on this in the full report that I hope you'll download. But AI is one node in a multichannel journey. There are certain use cases where it's number one, But for something like looking up basic business info, it's number four behind Google business websites, maps apps. Also something you can dive into further in the report is that we asked people what they use AI for. We gave them a lot of different options. And the number one use case was for really in-depth research. The second use case, a quick direct answer. And all of the use cases were within 12 points of each other. So basically, what that's saying is people use it for a lot of different things. It completely depends on the context. Again, it's one node in a multichannel journey. So what does that mean? Unfortunately, there's no one right moment to show up in AI search. You don't wanna optimize for one AI touch point or, you know, make it part of your just only brand awareness. Instead, you wanna be the brand that AI can cite with confidence at any time in the journey. Let's go to our panel to unpack this last funding. So what we just talked about is definitely a standout finding to me, which is that some of that data about trust but verify after getting an AI answer sort of suggests that there's this simple delineation of AI for research and then traditional platforms to close the deal for purchase. But that's really not true. People are using AI for everything, and then also that verification loop runs at every single stage. So it can be the first question you start with, then verify, then back to AI. It can be something I saw on social media, then AI when I'm comparing options, etcetera. All of those use cases, you know, we we talked about in this this part of the segment. So, Amber, you know, you teed this up before. Since AI doesn't belong to any one part of the funnel, how does this affect your marketing strategy? Yeah. Absolutely. So I I think the biggest mistake that anyone makes is treating it as a separate strategy, and I think Brad can help us validate that for sure. But, AI isn't, right, like, replacing the traditional search. And if anything, it's making us wanna focus, like, honing in a lot on on the the fundamentals and and looking at that because AI is just another user, right, that's looking at the same things that, everyone else is looking at, just doing it quicker and and in a better way. And so we know that we're getting that information cross checked, but we don't wanna make this this the isolated for a channel, and and focusing only on that. So continuing to look at all of the different signals that we know, looking at our website, how is it performing, but also looking at your reviews, you know, the photos, the listing consistency. We have a very, you know, focus, thanks to Yext, with that, the the support that we can provide our locations and making sure that those are up to date. Right? So we we have the option to use Scout now and and be able to look at the review volumes, looking at, you know, how are my writings and and how can I improve those different areas to help with showing up more in local search while still focusing on some of those traditional search options as well? I think all the touch date points together are really important to help you be, like, consistent and credible and visible across all of the all of the different platforms. It is more complicated now than it was before, and I know Brad can probably definitely speak to that. But, I think as a whole, we're really focusing on treating it not as a separate strategy and just working it into what already exists. Right. Totally agree with you. And I love that you called out the the local angle. Thank you. Because it is it's it's so true. We do have a lot of times this conversation about national level AI and, like, does your brand appear? But the way that both people are making decisions as we see in our research and that AI engines are citing things really has a lot to do with that local competitive factor. And so having those insights and then being able to manage that and and act on it at scale is is really key going forward. And it's scary, but AI knows where you live. Right? So they're able to No. Totally. So when you ask for something, it's going to give you a local recommendation as well. Exactly. And we saw the research. I mean, people are at least I guess, close to 30% have tried, a a local business because of an AI recommendation specifically in the last month, and I think that may not be going to go up. But, Brad, would you like to add your 2¢ on that? I know Amber said you can help us help us validate that from the people's side. Yeah. No. I love that. Amber, I feel like you are an absolute expert, and you're doing so great at managing your brand. So I I'm gonna give you the stamp of approval that you're doing a great job from the Google perspective. I wanna make sure I pass it along to my team too. Definitely. You have the you have the certification. So, you're doing great. Yeah. I think it's, like you said, AI being looked at as, like, a user looking at your brand. I love that analogy, and I I I feel the same that it's it's really like, how are you being displayed to the world? And, like, we I I mentioned some announcements at IO this week. I think we're gonna continue to even see agentic queries with buyer decisions. So you're gonna be able to see users that actually aren't even looking through a list of brands. It's, you know, Gemini taking those actions on on users' behalf. And so it makes it even more important how are you being displayed, through all of your different brand credible, you know, like I mentioned Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, making sure you're you're responding to reviews, making sure you have proper attributes and different categories for your business is such low hanging fruit that businesses frequently forget. I mean, I I was taking a look at it internally. We have, like, 5,000 different business attributes within Google. And so I'm sure as a business, you might have a few relevant categories. And so, there's a lot you can do, and I think Amber, I'm gonna it's like a plus stamp. If everyone does what Amber's doing, it's great. Thanks, Brad. I I love that. And, Garrett, I guess, go go to you because you and I had a chance to do at SEO week a little bit of start to start continue ourselves. But for this, I I wanted to ask you. So we we really are in this search everywhere reality. What's the biggest mistake you see brands making, my full rank perspective, and what's the biggest opportunity for for really standing out or driving conversions? Yeah. So one thing I'm really paying attention to going forward, and Brad kinda started to touch on it, as Google evolves is, the personal context. So there's a lot more data that Google is collecting about you. And so in the near future, right now, there's there's different types of implicit context, what it knows about you know, Amber mentioned your location. You would expect a recommendation based on exactly where you are with your device. But as Google understands, you know, when you're connecting your Gmail and you're connecting your photos and your calendar that you have a family. So you might not even need to say, I need a restaurant that's family focused. That's something that Google can intuit about you. And so when it makes those recommendations, to Brad's point, all of those attributes for every type of audience, you know, that you're targeting needs to be filled out. You can't hope and, you know, hope that that Google will mind read. You need to explicitly say somewhere, whether it's on your website, on the Google Business Profile, on a, you know, other listings profile for whatever industry you're in, that that somewhere is explicit as we're going back to full to reviews. If someone mentions that you have a great new dish that for people who like spicy food and Google knows that from your personal context, you like spicy food, there is a near future reality where you're recommended that restaurant because of it. So I think that right now, what brands need to do is, a, understand their business inside and out. You know, everything that is not top of mind that that is hiding under some couch cushion somewhere needs to be put on the Internet. Be you need to understand your audience. Talk to the people that are, you know, your your business, customers that what's important to them, what they care about, what their issues are. And if you're not doing those two things and then putting it out on the web, you're missing opportunities or you're missing, what your competitors could be doing and why whether it's a Gentic or an individual personal context might not surface your brand as a recommendation. So there's a lot. There's a it it is complex. I mean, yeah. And it's not you don't wanna put it somewhere on the Internet. You wanna put it everywhere. You know? That clean, correct, structured data everywhere a person or AI engine could look throughout this funnel because AI is happening at at every stage. Yep. That's that's exactly it. So, actually, I do I wanna close with I like I like to make these things tangible in in our real life. So I I wanna close with a fun question, which is, let's see if we all fit the behavior pattern, you know, that we found in this research. What is the last thing you searched for or a question you asked using an AI tool that you can remember? And what'd you do after that? And you can say anything. You don't have to adhere to my data. You know, maybe you went right out and bought it. Maybe your browser transacted for you immediately. But, yeah, what's what's the last thing you asked or searched for and what you do next? Is it cheating if I look? No. I would look like the same. I mean, look. Yeah. I'll I'll tell you mine too. I've I can go. Yeah. Amber, go ahead. Yeah. So in my personal life, well, you know, we could say, I've used it a lot, within like, it helps me refine and cross check emails, I think, a lot. So, if I'm looking to validate, a claim I've heard of something, like, maybe a piece of news and that, we recently our our HOA has all sorts of claims that happen all the time about things that are happening in our community with airplanes flying overhead. And so I used it to validate someone's complaint about an airplane flying over. And it gave me some really great, like, information, but then also spent I use it a lot in email writing, and I think people underestimate the value of just helping it. Like, I will put in make me sound a little bit better and then say, like, oh, and validate that I'm correct on this. And so, yeah, email writing and validating my my thoughts a lot of the time. Use it on the consumer side and on the workforce side, and I'm sure that's that's the problem. Garrett, what about you? Yeah. Same story. Like, use a lot for work. Actually, I'm I'm about to publish an experiment on Google personal intelligence that I talked about in SEO week. So, you know, just making sure that that everything is accurate, that there are no holes in the methodology. So real really testing, that. The other thing is recently, my my four year old daughter makes a mess in our downstairs, and I've really wanted a bench that looks a certain way but has storage at the bottom. So I did one of those, like, long long tail searches of, like, all my requirements. And, you know, the the reality is even if AI, in theory, could find it, if the product doesn't exist, it can't tell you it exists. So Yeah. Maybe I'll start making some benches like what I was looking for. But, that was my search. And then the other one I'm excited to test out is going to Boston with the family for an SEO conference in a couple weeks. And I wanna do one of those, like, plan my weekend. How how good are you, Google? And then I'll call up Brad and be like, dude, I got some I got some fixes. I don't know. But after that, if you make that search, you know, are you gonna click right through to book the hotel, or are you gonna read some reviews? Oh, hell no. I I can't make any a verification. Although, transparently, when it comes to local, I'm a I'm a maps guy. If I want any local business, I go straight to maps. I don't even use Google search. And and so and people do too. We talked about that in our third, you know, our third section is that, like, when it comes also, like, basic business info, a lot of times, maps is the starting point. Just like, let me look up this restaurant real quick. And I do the same thing, which just reinforces this constant this this need to be present everywhere and be able to have all of the attributes filled out and all the information that that's I think I've also looked at the recent like, especially when it comes to our hotel, Garrett. I don't know about you. But, like, I've found, like, our a their AC down was down to a week ago, or their elevator wasn't working. And I'm like, okay. I'm not gonna choose you because a week ago, you just told me that elevator didn't work. Amber, it's dangerous. Reviews are dangerous because we all suspect of, like, you see that one bad review that shouldn't ruin the brand. But you can't forget the one person who found the bed bug that one time seven years ago, and I'm not gonna go to that hotel. Don't I almost don't wanna look at reviews because it's gonna prove me out of everything. I hear you. And there's some things you can't control, but I will say I have a much more like, most people in our survey, I have a much more positive association if I see at least some fresh positive reviews, and I see the brand engaging with the negative and positive ones. I'm gonna feel differently about that than if I don't, and, I think so to say hi. And, Brad, do you wanna share yours? Yeah. Yeah. I also just booked a trip to Boston, Garrett. So maybe I'm gonna be Will be that? I don't I don't know. And so I booked, hotel and flights, and I was using I actually use Gemini built into Google Flights to help. I just said, I wanna leave in the morning, and I wanna, take off in the afternoon. And it just found me the best flights, which was so cool. I'm also on a fitness journey right now. I've been using Gemini as my fitness coach, plugging the new Fitbit Air that just came out. And so I've I'd say in January started using Gemini to build me, like, meals every day, like, track everything, and it's been doing such a great job for me. And I've lost a ton of weight because of Gemini. And so it's like, what's your secret? Is it this? Is it that? I'm like, no. Gemini. And and, I mean, has it recommended? Obviously, it has for you, like, meals that you ate, products that you had you've never tried before. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I said, hey. I'm a terrible cook. Please help recommend things for a terrible cook, and so it's done a it's done a pretty good job. There you go. So those brands, they were clearly they were they were ready to be cited and, presented to you, and I'm I'm glad it worked. Mine is that I recently I actually just got back from Paris, yesterday, and Oh, wow. Super fun trip. It was just a long weekend trip with a couple a couple girlfriends, which was great. But, you know, I obviously had to do had to hit the whole, you know, help me plan my trip for Paris, and I've been before. So, you know, what are underrated, you know, things maybe I haven't done. Got some recs. I did the social media thing. And in a in a complex way, of course, I, you know, I looked at the social media profile of the hotel we were going to stay in, and that was an influencing factor. You know, looked fantastic, positive comments, people posting from there. But I sorry to all of our brands listening. I then did the thing where I just went through reels, and I was looking at people talking about it in French. I wanted to see if Parisians were going to such a place if it was on their list. So there's so many different, like, little avenues to go down, and it did originate with that, you know, chat g p t question, but it went in so many places. Both brand managed, so you have to really be there, and also just open in the world. And that's that's the complex reality today. That validation is the more in there. Another plug for Gemini, what you can do coming back from a long trip to say Gemini, help me not have any jet lag from coming back from my trip. And it'll tell you exactly when to sleep, wake up, nap, and caffeine intake, and it does a pretty good job too. That's good. Well, that's why that's what I needed before I got back at 11:00 last night and then not after this. Okay. So one more thing. Thank you so much to our panelists for joining us. I just wanna get quickly they gave some good tips too, but I wanna touch quickly on, like, what does this actually mean? Something that our chief data officer, Christian Ward, has has shared recently that's really stuck with me as he says there's a lot of admiring the problem going on. You know, a lot of saying the tipping point has happened for AI search. A lot of saying it matters to show up everywhere. Well, okay. What is what does it mean? You will see that, of course, first, showing up, AI visibility, table stakes, half of your future customers, and most of your high income ones start there. The second piece is winning that verification journey. So are you thinking about individual location reviews, individual local pages, individual social profiles as a conversion layer? Because AI visibility without review quality, etcetera, won't convert and you can go missing from the conversation. And then finally, just a little just a little tidbit, easy one, be citable everywhere. We talked about AI does show up in this verification loop runs at every stage of the funnel. You wanna be the brand AI can cite confidently at any of them. We mentioned a little bit in the panel, we've given to in the panel that 86% of, sources that AI draws on for citations actually are brand managed. You can go to yext.com/research. Yext research, our entity, dives really into, okay, what levers can brands pull across listings and data syndication, reviews, etcetera? What can you do to be cited by AI engines and, of course, trusted by customers during this verification loop? So I hope you'll check that out. And finally, you know, one more plug. Please download the report. We're really excited to share these full findings with you and what that means. So feel free to click, see where your brand stands, read the full consumer report, dive into Yext research, and thank you so much for joining us.