Grid My Business has launched AI Search, a new product that maps local business visibility across AI platforms, the company announced in a report carried by The Globe and Mail.

The launch targets a measurement gap that has opened as consumers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and similar assistants for local recommendations instead of typing queries into traditional search boxes. Grid My Business, a provider of local search rank-tracking and grid-based visibility mapping, built its business on showing where a business appears — or fails to appear — in Google's local pack for a defined geographic area. AI Search extends that grid-style methodology to AI-driven answer engines.

The company frames the tool as a way for multi-location brands, agencies and local marketers to answer a question that standard rank trackers cannot: when a user asks an AI assistant for, say, a plumber, a dentist or a restaurant in a given city, which businesses does the assistant actually name? Traditional local SEO tooling measures positions in mapped and organic results. AI answers, by contrast, surface a small set of named businesses in generated text, often without a stable, numbered ranking — a format that breaks conventional position tracking.

Grid My Business has not published the full technical details of how AI Search collects its data, which platforms it covers, or how it scores visibility, based on the announcement as reported. The core pitch is comparative visibility mapping: showing businesses where they stand in AI-generated local recommendations across platforms and locations, in the same grid format the company already uses for Google local results.

The product arrives as local businesses and the agencies that serve them try to quantify their exposure in AI answers. Google itself has folded AI Overviews into local-adjacent results, and OpenAI, Google and Perplexity have all added or expanded local recommendation capabilities to their assistants. None of these platforms publishes a rankable index of which businesses they cite, which leaves brands without a native way to measure AI visibility — the gap commercial tools are now rushing to fill.

For the local search industry, the launch is another signal that visibility measurement is fragmenting by engine. A business can rank first in the Google local pack for its core keywords and still go unnamed when a nearby customer asks an AI assistant the same question, because AI systems draw on a different mix of sources — reviews, structured data, third-party directories and training or retrieval corpora — rather than a single search index. Tools such as AI Search are positioned to surface exactly those discrepancies.

The practical use case Grid My Business emphasizes is coverage at scale: brands with dozens or hundreds of locations need to know which stores or offices AI platforms mention in each market, and where the mentions thin out. Grid-style reporting, which plots visibility point by point across a map, lets an agency spot the neighborhoods or cities where a client is absent from AI answers and prioritize fixes — citation building, review velocity and entity consistency — accordingly.

What remains unconfirmed is whether AI Search tracks any given platform's answers over time, how frequently it refreshes its data, and how it handles the inherent variability of generative outputs, since the same prompt can produce different named businesses on repeated runs. The announcement does not state pricing or general availability details beyond the launch itself.

Watch for Grid My Business to publish methodology specifics and platform coverage in the coming weeks, and for competing local SEO trackers to respond with their own AI-visibility modules as demand for cross-engine measurement hardens.