BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 asked 1,002 US adults about AI and local businesses. 40 percent trust AI platforms to provide business recommendations, against 32 percent who do not. 42 percent trust AI recommendations as much as traditional reviews. 82 percent read AI-generated review summaries, the snippets Google and others now place above the individual reviews, and 23 percent are willing to rely on the summary alone to make a decision.
- Trust AI platforms to recommend local businesses: 40 percent (32 percent do not)
- Trust AI recommendations as much as traditional reviews: 42 percent
- Read AI-generated review summaries: 82 percent
- Would decide from the summary alone: 23 percent
These are self-reported answers across all kinds of local businesses, not clinics specifically. They still describe a reader who often decides before calling, from a paragraph a machine wrote out of the reviews a business happened to collect.
That paragraph is built from the reviews, so it is edited the same way: more recent reviews from more customers, each one specific about the job, and owner replies that read like a person. A clinic with twelve old reviews and no replies gets a summary that says so.
Test it tonight. Search your clinic's name. If there is a summary at the top of your reviews, read it as a stranger. Is it true? Is it what you would say? Would you book you?
What ProxMedia does about it: a review request after every visit and reply drafts you approve, and profile work that gives the summary something better to say. The 4.5-star note covers the rating itself.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adult consumers via SurveyMonkey, published February 11, 2026).