TL;DR: Brand discovery is expanding beyond search engines — it's happening across AI tools, maps, and voice assistants. To win visibility in AI search, brands need to show up everywhere discovery happens. National search builds awareness, but local search drives action. In today's landscape, you can't lead nationally if you're not discoverable locally.
In case you missed it… search has changed more in the past 18 months than it did in the previous decade (or at least it feels like it).
Now, your customers are asking questions across ChatGPT and Gemini, on maps, and via voice assistants, with 75% of people using AI search tools more than they did a year ago.
Sometimes they're searching for your brand by name in these moments, but not always. More often, they're asking for what they need nearby and in the moment, like "best lunch spots in Times Square" or "urgent care near me."
What does this shift mean for multi-location brands? That winning in AI search requires a new focus on national visibility and local relevance. And whether you manage one location or 500, visibility is earned market by market. And how you perform locally now determines whether your national brand is seen, cited, and chosen.
Let's take a closer look at what national and local search performance really mean in the AI era, and why winning both matters more than ever.
What is national search performance?
If you've worked in marketing for a while, this one is no surprise: national search performance is the "big picture." National performance gives you a top-level view of your brand's visibility across traditional and AI search, and it's often the lens used by executives to measure awareness, growth, and how your brand is perceived in the market.
What it shows:
How your brand ranks across broad keywords and categories
Brand-level reviews and ratings
Aggregate traffic, clicks, and engagement
Competitive position across the industry
The gap: National views can miss what's actually happening at the ground level. One underperforming region or store can pull down your averages, or a few top performing locations could pull it up. Often, these issues aren't visible until performance starts to slip significantly.
For example: a retail chain might report a 47% first-party AI citation rate nationally, but location analysis could reveal rates of 70% in rural markets and 20% in competitive urban markets, where aggregators are more prevalent. These geographic variations illustrate why national metrics don't always tell the full story.
What is local search performance?
Local search is where real decisions happen. When someone searches for "ENT near me" or asks Siri for the nearest bank branch, they're not choosing a brand. They're choosing the location that feels closest, most credible, and most convenient.
What it shows:
Location-specific rankings and visibility
Local reviews, ratings, and feedback
How your individual locations appear across search, maps, and AI platforms
Why it matters: AI engines are prioritizing recent, reliable, consistent, and local data to answer customer questions. Our recent research shows that local websites consistently represent a significant citation source, ranging from 8% to nearly 20%.
If your local pages aren't optimized, or your individual location data is outdated, you may not show up at all in AI-generated answers.
How does strength in local search build national success?
When your individual locations perform well, your brand does too.
Here's how local success drives national growth:
Better reviews boost your authority. AI tools and search engines look at review volume and sentiment across every location. The better your local feedback, the stronger your brand credibility, which then leads to increased AI citations.
More visibility, more traffic. When more locations show up in search or AI results, your brand gets more overall exposure.
One weak link hurts the average. Again, a handful of low-performing locations can pull down your brand's national performance — and your reputation.
In short: in many ways, your national performance is only as strong as your local presence.
Why winning nationally and locally matters more in AI search
AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini aren't just pulling data from your brand website. They're evaluating how your brand shows up everywhere — especially at the local level.
Here's what's different now:
Search results and AI answers are becoming hyper-local and context-aware
Customers expect real-time answers tied to their current location and context
You can outperform national competitors in specific markets — if your data is strong locally
If you're only focused on national reporting, you're missing what's happening where it counts.
Closing the gap: insight + action
Many tools show you what's going wrong with your local performance — but not what to do next. Yext Scout goes further.
With Scout, local teams can:
Spot locations that need attention
See how nearby competitors are performing
Take action fast to close gaps using integrated tools like Listings, Reviews, Pages, and Social
Scout turns insights into prioritized step-by-step recommendations — so you can make the highest impact improvements quickly, without switching platforms or waiting on central teams.
Win locally, win nationally
You can't win nationally without winning locally.
Local visibility is no longer just an SEO metric; it's a competitive edge in AI search. As AI changes the discovery game, brands need clear insight and fast execution at every level. Yext helps you see what's working, fix what's not, and grow where it matters most - on the sidewalk.
Click here to get your brand visibility score with Yext Scout.
