Which hair salons in Austin, TX does AI recommend?
Google Maps returns 99 of them. Four assistants, asked three buyer questions each, named 16: 16.2%. Every name is below.
hair salons Google Maps returns for this query
of them were named by at least one assistant
were named by none of the four
What we asked
Three phrasings, fixed before the study ran, put to each of the four assistants. Chat models were sampled three times per question because their answers move between runs.
- “best hair salon in Austin, TX”
- “which hair salon in Austin, TX would you recommend”
- “I just moved to Austin, TX, which hair salon should I go to”
Who each engine named
Engines are ordered by how many businesses they reached. A name appears here when the Maps listing name showed up as a whole phrase in at least one answer.
Google AI Overviews
6 of 99 (6.1%)- Boho Salon
- Hair House ATX
- Nova Hair Collective
- Plume Salon
- Red Stella Salon
- Strange Bird Salon
ChatGPT
5 of 99 (5.1%)- Birds Barbershop
- Raven Row Salon
- Ruiz Salon
- Shag Salon
- SWOON salon
Gemini
4 of 99 (4.0%)- Black Orchid Salon
- Lather Salon
- Method Hair
- Raven Row Salon
Claude
2 of 99 (2.0%)- Salon Lofts
- Spoke & Weal
Where the engines agree
Of the 16 businesses named at all, 15 were named by a single engine and nobody else. That is the practical argument against picking one assistant and calling it your AI visibility: Austin, TX looks like a different market depending on which one you ask.
Named by two or more engines (1)
- Raven Row Salon
Named by all four (0)
No hair salon in Austin, TX was named by all four engines. Full agreement is rarer than it sounds.
How to read this, and what it does not say
- This is not a ranking. Being named means an assistant said your name out loud when a buyer asked. It is a visibility measurement, not a judgement about which hair salon is better.
- It is one snapshot. Collected 2026-08-15/16 on the models of that week. Generative answers move, so a business missing here may be named today and the reverse is just as true.
- The denominator is capped. Google Maps was queried at depth 100, so the real Austin, TX market is at least 99 hair salons and possibly larger. The share is therefore an upper bound.
- Strict name matching. A looser matcher, the one the product itself uses against a single business, would put this market at 28 businesses (28.3%) instead of 16. Both are published; the strict figure is the headline because the loose one inflates counts across a full roster.
16 names on this page come straight from that file, so every claim here can be recomputed without trusting us.