London SMEs face inaccurate AI search results

Searchable found that 93% of London businesses in its study were described inaccurately by major large language models, with smaller firms affected more severely than larger companies. The research tested ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini more than 13,000 times on 165 London businesses, checking answers against LinkedIn profiles and Companies House records.

Half of SMEs received at least one false fact from an LLM, compared with 32% of large companies, while SMEs saw a 56% higher rate of fabricated information. Across all prompts, 11 in 100 questions about SMEs returned false or missing information on key brand facts, compared with 7 in 100 for large companies. LLMs were also twice as likely to fabricate information about an SME, with a 5% fabrication rate versus 2% for larger brands.

The weakest areas included company size, website, founding year, phone number and services, all of which are important for prospective customers. Searchable co-founder Chris Donnelly said smaller firms may be less visible because LLMs are trained on public web data that skews toward larger, more widely referenced brands, but added that better optimisation could help SMEs improve how they appear in AI-driven discovery.