SOCi says AI search visibility is now core to local marketing

SOCi is no longer treating AI visibility as a separate dashboard problem. In its latest G2 Summer 2026 results, the San Diego company framed AI search as something that depends on the daily plumbing of local marketing: listings, reputation management, social posts, local SEO, and the consistency of location data across every branch.

The company said it earned recognition in five AI-focused categories, including AI Agents, Agentic AI, AI Agents for Business Operations, AI Content Creation Platforms, and AI Customer Support Agents. It also said it remained strong across the classic stack of local marketing, social media management, online reputation management, local SEO, and listings management. SOCi ranked among the top 1% of companies in G2’s AI Agents for Business Operations category, a placement it is using to bolster its pitch that brand-trained automation can run across AI search, reputation work, social media, and local discovery.

That positioning fits a broader shift in how multi-location brands are being managed. SOCi’s message is that AI answers do not reward a strong homepage alone. They reward reliable location data, current listings, positive reviews, structured local content, and a system that can keep those signals synchronized across hundreds or thousands of markets. For enterprises, that makes AI search visibility an operational issue, not just a media or SEO concern.

Monica Ho, SOCi’s chief marketing officer, said multi-location brands are moving beyond experimentation and now want solutions that can autonomously execute marketing work at scale. The company has spent much of the year trying to prove that point with hard numbers. On May 21, SOCi said it had surpassed 300,000 deployed Genius Agents, with those agents on track to execute more than 20 million localized marketing tasks annually. SOCi said the system had saved 3.5 million hours and recaptured $2.5 billion in annualized marketing value, with nearly 99% of tasks approved publish-ready.

Those figures followed an earlier milestone on Feb. 11, when SOCi said it had more than 200,000 brand-trained Genius Agents, up more than 200% from 66,400 in the fourth quarter of 2024. At that point, the company said the agents had completed 12.5 million local marketing tasks and helped recapture $2.1 billion in annualized marketing value. In November 2025, SOCi said it had reached more than 150,000 agents, more than 10 million tasks, 750,000 hours saved, and nearly $2 billion in annualized local marketing value.

The backdrop matters. G2’s 2026 AI Search Insight Report says 51% of B2B software buyers start research with an AI chatbot more often than Google, 71% rely on chatbots somewhere in the software research process, and 69% say chatbots surfaced information that changed their vendor choice. That helps explain why SOCi is linking AI search to local operations: if AI answers are becoming the front door, then the data behind each location is now part of the sale.