How AI Search is Reshaping Customer Calls
ChatGPT Is Changing How People Find Your Businesses:
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way customers discover and connect with businesses. In our recent webinar, “AI is Changing Search – What Does it Mean for Your Customer Calls?,” Marchex experts explored how large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are driving a growing share of customer inquiries and what leaders can do to capture that business.
What’s evident from the conversation is how quickly AI search tools are becoming mainstream, what that means for call-driven industries, and what you can do to start tracking.
LLMs Are Becoming the New Discovery Channel
The rise of AI-powered assistants is reshaping the search journey. ChatGPT alone now has 700 million weekly users, generating more than 18 billion prompts per week — a fivefold increase in just one year.
Notably, 49% of prompts are information-seeking, indicating that consumers are turning to LLMs to answer questions they once asked traditional search engines. Adoption is expanding across age groups, with strong growth among users ages 26–40. Customer conversations increasingly reference AI tools — phrases like “ChatGPT recommended you” are on the rise.
“This isn’t a side experiment anymore. LLMs are reshaping how people find businesses,” Jason Clark, senior product manager at Marchex, said during the call.
Calls Driven by AI Search Are on the Rise
Marchex’s analysis of millions of customer conversations revealed a 21× increase in calls attributed to LLMs in the past year. While AI-driven calls still represent less than 1% of total call volume today, their growth trajectory signals a significant shift ahead.
Better yet for marketers: calls coming from AI search often show higher call-through rates and comparable quality to those driven by traditional search ads. ChatGPT referrals, for example, generated a call-through rate nearly three times higher than Google Ads. “Customers who come through LLMs often arrive better informed and ready to take action,” Clark noted. “That’s a significant opportunity for businesses.”
Why This Matters for Businesses
For many callers, engaging with an LLM is only the first half of their customer journey. By the time they reach a business’s website or phone line, they may have already asked detailed questions about products or services.
That means businesses need to be prepared to:
- Meet higher-intent callers mid-conversation from the start of certain LLM-inspired calls
- Ensure call agents are equipped to handle more advanced questions quickly
- Capture attribution data from this new channel to optimize marketing efforts
Three Ways to Capture More Calls from AI Search
Critical actions every business must now prioritize:
- Optimize Business Listings and Reviews
- Ensure name, address, phone, and business descriptions are consistent across directories like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and industry-specific sites.
- Maintaining Name/Address/Phone (NAP) consistency across platforms. When setting up a listing on a site like Yelp, provide a canonical business phone number. Yelp may display a call tracking number to users browsing Yelp.com, but for search engines and web crawlers, Yelp shows the actual business number to preserve NAP consistency. To verify what number is associated with a business, log into the directory directly to confirm the canonical number they have on file.
- Encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews, which may serve as credibility signals for LLMs.
- Build Conversational, Structured Website Content
- Add FAQs and content that reflect the actual questions customers ask on calls.
- Use natural language and structured data to optimize for LLMs ability to recognize and surface your business.
- Strengthen Online Reputation
- Maintain a strong social media presence and earn positive mentions across the web.
- LLMs are likely to interpret these references as indicators of trust and authority.
The Long Game: Data and Attribution
Marchex’s Marketing Edge solution now allows businesses to track AI-driven calls as a distinct channel and analyze them alongside traditional sources like paid search and social. This enables leaders to:
- Measure call volume and quality from LLM referrals
- Identify which AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) are driving the most leads
- Use conversation analytics to improve call handling and close more appointments
“Optimizing for AI search is a lot like SEO,” Clark explained. “It takes consistent effort over time monitoring listings, improving reviews, and curating website content, but it’s likely to position you to win as this channel grows.”
What’s Next
AI search calls are still in their early days, but the pace of change is rapid. As LLM adoption expands and platforms introduce more advertising and attribution features, this emerging discovery channel is likely to become critical to growth.
Businesses that start laying the groundwork now by optimizing their digital presence and tracking AI-specific referrals will be ahead of the curve as the landscape matures.