Short answer: We ran nine real searches — “best {service} in {city}” — across Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg and Arusha, and looked at who Google and its AI answers actually named. In travel and hospitality, a business’s own website was just 23% of page-one organic results; the other three-quarters were online travel agencies, directories, and travel media, and in every hotel or safari search the top result was an aggregator, never the business itself. In professional services the picture flipped — local accounting firms’ own sites were 68% of page one. And on all nine searches, Google served an AI-generated answer. The raw data is published below.
Picture a lodge owner outside Arusha, doing the thing every business owner eventually does at 11pm: typing their own line of work into a search box to see what the internet thinks of them. “Best safari operator in Arusha.”
Up comes a tidy answer. Three operators in a map box, then a wall of results — and almost all of them belong to somebody else: a review site, a booking platform, a “top 20 operators” listicle written by a company on a different continent. Their own website, the one they paid for, is somewhere down the page, wedged between two aggregators like the one guest who showed up to the party without an invitation.
We wondered how common that actually is. So instead of guessing, we measured it — in five cities, across two very different kinds of business. The answer turned out to depend enormously on what you sell.
Illustrative composite — not a client, not a testimonial
What we actually did
We took one plain, high-intent search — best {service} in {city} — and ran it for two categories across five African cities: boutique hotels and safari operators (travel and hospitality) and accounting firms (professional services), in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg and Arusha. For each of the nine searches we recorded every result on page one and classified it: the business’s own website, an aggregator (an OTA, directory, or marketplace like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, or Clutch), media (a listicle or blog), or UGC(Reddit, Instagram, YouTube). We also noted Google’s own surfaces — the hotel panel, the local map pack, and any AI answer.
It is a pilot, not a doctorate. But the pattern was consistent enough to be worth writing down, and the whole dataset is published as raw JSON so anyone can check our arithmetic.
The headline: it depends what you sell
The single clearest finding is that “does the AI name a local business?” has no universal answer — it splits sharply by sector.
| Category | Searches | Own website’s share of page one | What owned the rest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Travel & hospitality (hotels, safari) | 5 | 23% (11 of 48 results) | OTAs, directories, travel media, Google’s hotel panel |
| Professional services (accounting) | 4 | 68% (25 of 37 results) | A few directories and “Big 4” multinationals |
Same country, same search box, same AI — wildly different odds of a local business being the thing that gets named, depending only on the trade it is in.
Travel: you are inside Booking, not on the marquee
For hotels and safari operators, page one belonged to the aggregators. Across the five travel searches, the number-one organic result was alwaysa review site, an OTA, or a directory — TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Trip.com, Airbnb, or a “boutique hotels” aggregator — and never the business’s own site. Above all of that, Google usually stacked its own hotel-booking panel.
The businesses were not absent, exactly. They were present the way a bottle of hot sauce is present in a supermarket: on a shelf, in someone else’s aisle, under someone else’s branding. When the AI Overview summarises “best boutique hotel in Lagos,” it is reading Booking and TripAdvisor — so it learns the hotel as an entry in their inventory, not as a business with its own voice. That is exactly the mechanism behind getting a hotel cited by ChatGPT and the wider problem of reducing OTA commission — the same aggregators that take a cut of the booking also take the citation.
Professional services: you can still own your name
Accounting told the opposite story. Across the four cities, roughly two-thirds of page-one results were local firms’ ownwebsites — Elixir Audits in Accra, MGK Consulting and Hamo & Associates in Nairobi, SIAO in Lagos, MMS Group and RAiN in Johannesburg. The map pack was full of real local firms, not platforms. The aggregators that did appear were the professional-services kind (Clutch, national directories, a regulator’s list) and the global “Big 4,” not a booking platform sitting between the firm and its customer.
The lesson is not “accountants have it easy.” It is that in a sector without a dominant middleman, a clear, well-built own-site can genuinely win the page — which is a preview of what travel businesses can claw back if they do the work, and what small business SEO is really for.
The AI layer is already the default
One number applied to every search regardless of sector: 9 out of 9. Every query we ran returned at least one Google AI element — an AI Overview, or AI-written answers inside the People-Also-Ask box. Not the ones we cherry-picked. All of them.
So the common objection — “AI search is a Silicon Valley thing, it hasn’t reached my market yet” — did not survive contact with the data. In Accra, Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg, Google is already answering these questions with AI before the human scrolls to a single blue link. The only open question is whether the answer will have heard of your business. That is the whole premise of answer engine optimization and ranking on ChatGPT.
What this means for your business
If you are in travel or hospitality, the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful: winning the AI answer is not the same job as being on the OTAs, and doing the first does not happen automatically from the second. The moves that shift it are unglamorous and mostly free — state your facts plainly on your own site, add structured data, keep one consistent name, address and phone everywhere, and let the AI crawlers read you. That is precisely the GEO work this whole site is about.
If you are in a professional service, you are starting from a stronger position — but “on page one” and “named in the AI answer” are still two different things, and the second is won by being the clearest, most quotable source on the specific question a customer asks.
Method, sample, and the honest limits
We collected the data on 28 August 2026 using the Google desktop SERP (including AI Overview presence) via the DataForSEO SERP API, one canonical phrasing per search, with country-level geolocation and English language. Each page-one organic result was hand-classified into own-site, aggregator, media, or UGC.
The limits, stated plainly so nobody has to guess: it is nine searches, not nine hundred. It is desktop and English only. Google’s AI Overview text is served asynchronously, so we recorded whether an AI answer appeared rather than parsing every word it cited. And search results move, which is exactly why this page carries a date and will be re-run — the raw dataset is there so the next version can be compared against this one honestly.