AI search is 1–2% of local calls, CallRail reports
By Mohit Sawhney
If you have been told that ChatGPT and Gemini are about to replace Google for finding local businesses, here is a number worth holding on to. Search Engine Journal's Local Search section has written up a session from SEJ Live on 26 August, in which Sean McCrohan, VP of Technology at call-tracking firm CallRail, said that clicks from citations in AI answers account for roughly 1% to 2% of calls across CallRail's customers.
That figure has roughly doubled since January, he said — but from a very small base.
This is a trade publication reporting what two speakers said at a webinar. It is not a Google announcement, and nothing about your Google Business Profile has changed.
What the numbers say
Steve Wiideman, an SEJ contributor who advises multi-location brands, said that filtering Google Analytics for visits arriving from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok comes out close to 1% for his clients. He described that as normal for a channel people use to discover businesses rather than to buy from.
Only two things can really be measured, according to McCrohan: a click on a citation inside an AI answer, which looks like any other referral to your site, and a customer simply telling you that ChatGPT suggested you. Both have grown by more than 100% since January, again from a small starting point. He said tracking AI activity all the way through to a phone call is very hard at the moment, because the AI companies do not yet offer the kind of measurement tools ad networks do.
He also described a common pattern: someone starts their research with an assistant, then searches for the business by name. In your own reporting that just looks like an ordinary search, even though the assistant did the first bit of work.
The out-of-hours point is the useful one
The most practical finding in the write-up has nothing to do with AI tools. McCrohan said CallRail has historically seen about half of website traffic arriving outside normal business hours. With AI search, that rises to nearly two-thirds — people start browsing in the afternoon and are still going well past midnight.
He also noted that AI answers often name the top three businesses rather than one. So a missed call does not sit in a voicemail queue; the enquiry goes to whoever picks up. His advice was blunt: get something in place to handle calls out of hours. "You don't have to use mine," he said of CallRail's own voice agent, "but get something, because more and more of this business is a 24 hour business."
That is worth thinking about whether or not a single customer ever finds you through an AI assistant.
Keep one phone number everywhere
One technical point may matter if anyone has set up call tracking on your website. McCrohan said the crawlers AI assistants use do not run scripts on your pages, so the kind of dynamic phone-number swapping that happens in the browser is invisible to them. Doing it on the server works, but it is a developer job.
Wiideman's warning is the one most small businesses should take away: keep the same canonical local phone number everywhere Google can see it, because your name, address and phone number need to match in Maps. He also cautioned that serving different content to different crawlers can stray into cloaking territory. If you are not already running call tracking, this is not a problem you need to solve — just make sure the number on your website matches the one on your profile. Our guide on what affects your local Google ranking covers why that consistency matters.
What to do
Nothing urgent. Don't rebuild your website around AI search on the strength of a 1% figure. Do make sure enquiries that arrive at ten at night still reach you in some form, and that your phone number is identical everywhere. If you want a few practical ways to convert the visitors you already get, see five ways to turn website visitors into customers.