AI Search Is Quietly Changing Where El Paso Customers Find Your Business in 2026
By Nolean Francisco | El Paso Advertising Solutions
Picture this: a woman on the West Side has a dog with a torn ACL. It’s Sunday night. Her usual move would have been to type “vet El Paso open Sunday” into Google. But these days, she opens ChatGPT instead, types out the whole story — her dog’s age, the symptoms, where her usual vet is — and asks, “Where should I take her tomorrow morning?”
ChatGPT names three clinics. Yours isn’t one of them.
That’s the quiet shift happening in our market right now, and most local business owners haven’t fully noticed it yet.
What’s Actually Changing
For two decades, “getting found online” meant ranking on Google. That game hasn’t ended, but it has shifted. Customers — especially anyone under 40 — now move between traditional search and AI tools all day long, often in the same task.
The numbers are blunt. ChatGPT alone now has roughly 883 million monthly users and processes around 2 billion queries every day. Google’s AI Overviews — those AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of regular search results — now show up on about a quarter of all Google searches, and on more than half of long-tail queries (the specific, conversational ones people actually type).
The bigger deal is what comes next. Roughly 93% of AI search sessions end without a single click to any website. The customer gets their answer, picks a business, and moves on. If your name didn’t surface in that answer, you weren’t in the running.
This isn’t a future problem. It’s already changing how customers in El Paso decide where to spend money.
Why It Hits Local Businesses Differently
Here’s the part most national marketing blogs skip: AI search is uniquely consequential for local businesses, and especially for ours.
When someone types “best mexican breakfast El Paso” into ChatGPT or Perplexity, they don’t get ten links to scroll through. They get a short paragraph naming two or three places, often with a sentence about why each one stands out. There’s no “page 2.” No SEO consolation prize for being the seventh-best result.
You’re either named, or you’re not.
And the AI tools aren’t simply repackaging Google rankings. Recent analysis shows that roughly 80% of URLs cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google’s AI Mode don’t even rank in Google’s top 100 results for the same query. The AIs are pulling from review sites, news mentions, your Google Business Profile, Reddit threads, your About page — wherever they find clear, recent, structured information about you.
That means everything you’ve already done for traditional SEO still matters. It’s just no longer enough on its own.
What El Paso Businesses Can Actually Do This Quarter
I’ll keep this practical. Here’s what we’re doing for our clients right now, in priority order:
1. Audit How AI Currently Describes You
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode. Ask them the questions a real customer would ask: “best [your category] in El Paso,” “where to get [your service] near 79912,” “[your business name] reviews and prices.”
Read what they say. Note what’s wrong, what’s missing, and which competitors keep getting named.
This takes 15 minutes and is genuinely more useful than most paid SEO reports we’ve seen.
2. Make Your Google Business Profile the Source of Truth
AI tools lean heavily on structured, well-maintained data, and your GBP is one of the cleanest signals you can hand them. That means:
- Hours that are actually current (a wrong holiday hour can cost you mentions for weeks)
- A description that uses the exact phrases customers say — not corporate-speak
- Categories that match what you actually do
- Recent posts and photos (freshness gets weighted more than people realize)
- A steady stream of reviews — and visible replies to them
Pages that have been updated within the last 60 days are roughly 1.9x more likely to appear in AI answers. That includes your profile.
3. Write Content That Answers Real Questions
The content AI tools cite most often isn’t long, keyword-stuffed homepages. It’s listicles, comparison pieces (“X vs Y”), and “best of” articles — content that directly answers a question someone is actually asking.
If you run a roofing company, you don’t need a blog post called “The Importance of Quality Roofing.” You need one called “How Much Does Roof Replacement Cost in El Paso? (2026 Guide).” Because that — almost word for word — is what people are typing into AI tools.
4. Get Mentioned Where the AI Actually Looks
AI tools don’t just read your website. They pull from:
- Local news outlets (KVIA, El Paso Matters, KFOX, El Paso Inc.)
- Review platforms (Google, Yelp, BBB, industry-specific sites)
- Reddit threads and community forums
- Press releases, chamber of commerce listings
- YouTube descriptions and video transcripts
One feature in El Paso Inc. or a substantive Reddit answer about your industry will often do more for your AI visibility than another month of generic blog posts.
5. Don’t Skip the Bilingual Layer
Here’s something almost no national guide will mention: AI search in our market is genuinely bilingual, sometimes in the same query. Customers ask Perplexity “necesito un mecánico que hable español cerca de aquí” and expect coherent local results back.
If your website, GBP, and content only exist in English, you’re invisible to a real chunk of borderplex customers — including ones with serious money to spend. We’ve seen this play out firsthand with clients in healthcare, automotive, and food service.
If you’ve been putting off Spanish-language content, this is the moment to stop putting it off.
Same Customer, Three Years Apart
To make this concrete, here’s how the same customer journey plays out today versus three years ago:
| Step | 2023 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Customer has a need | Opens Google | Opens ChatGPT, Google, or both |
| Sees results | 10 blue links | One AI-written paragraph naming 2–3 businesses |
| Decides | Compares listings, reads reviews | Often picks based on the AI’s recommendation alone |
| Visits a website | Frequently | Less than half the time |
| Time to decision | Minutes to hours | Often under 60 seconds |
The window to influence a customer has gotten smaller, faster, and more dependent on what the AI says about you in a single sentence.
What I’d Skip
A few things getting hyped that I wouldn’t lose sleep over yet:
- AI-generated ad creative as a strategy. It’s a useful tool, not a plan. Bad creative made faster is still bad creative.
- “AI SEO” packages from anyone who can’t show their methodology. This is the snake oil moment for our industry. Ask for the audit before paying for any fix.
- Chasing every new AI platform. Optimizing for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity covers the overwhelming majority of meaningful AI search traffic right now. Worry about the others later.
The Bottom Line
The El Paso businesses winning a year from now won’t be the ones with the cleverest AI hacks. They’ll be the ones with clean data, fresh content, real reviews, strong local mentions, and a presence in both English and Spanish.
Most of what you should already be doing — done a little better, a little more consistently, and with the awareness that part of your audience now isn’t human.
This is the kind of shift that rewards businesses who pay attention early. And it quietly compounds against the ones who don’t.
Want to See How AI Currently Describes Your Business?
We run free AI visibility audits — we’ll show you what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are saying about your business right now, which competitors are showing up instead, and the three highest-leverage fixes for your specific situation.
Request Your Free AI Visibility Audit →
Or if you’re ready to move:
Get a Custom AI Search Strategy →
Nolean Francisco is Partner and Co-Founder at El Paso Advertising Solutions. He works on the strategy side — helping borderplex businesses stay visible as the way customers search keeps changing. Reach the team at Carlos@elpasoadvertisingsolutions.com.
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