When a Customer Asks the Phone Where to Buy, What Does the Phone Know About Your Shop?

What happens when a customer asks a phone where to buy something? A shopper types "hardware store open Sunday" into a search engine, or asks an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant (a program that answers questions in plain language, such as ChatGPT, made by the American company OpenAI, or Meta AI, which sits inside WhatsApp). The answer comes back in seconds. None of these programs visits the street. Each one reads what has been published about the shops nearby, compares it with the question, and passes on the shops it can describe with confidence.

The 2026 South African Customer Experience Report, an online survey of about 2,000 consumers, found that 23 per cent already use AI tools to compare products and prices, find deals and answer buying questions. Nearly one shopper in four now asks a machine before asking a shop.

What decides which shop the phone names?

Google's own guidance for businesses says that its map results rest on three things: how well a shop's details match what was asked, how far the shop is from the person asking, and how well known and well reviewed it is. The same guidance says plainly: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." Google also says that customers are 70 per cent more likely to visit a business whose profile is complete.

The AI assistants work in a similar way. Google says the AI summaries it places above its search results draw on the same information as its ordinary results, with no special requirements. OpenAI says that websites which block its search program cannot appear in ChatGPT's search answers. Each assistant, in its own way, repeats what a shop has already said about itself, wherever the assistant looks.

What does this mean for South Africa's shops?

It means the shop with the best-kept public record has an advantage the largest advertiser cannot buy. A family butchery whose details are complete, consistent and well reviewed can be the answer a phone gives, ahead of a chain store whose details are not.

What is already clear is the direction of travel. More customers ask their phones first. The shops that are easy for a phone to find are the shops those customers will visit.

It also meets customers where they already are. Standard Bank's Township Informal Economy Report, released in October 2025, found that 74 per cent of the township businesses it surveyed use WhatsApp to market and communicate. Customers who find a shop through a phone can reach it in the same app they already use to talk to family and friends.

What remains open?

Nobody has yet measured how often AI assistants name South African shops, and township shops in particular, or whether they answer a question asked in isiZulu, Sesotho or Afrikaans with the same shops as one asked in English. Those answers will shape which shops December's phone-first shoppers find.