Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Yelp and Meta ranked for an American business by what each one is worth showing up on

None of these five replaces Google for an American business, and ranking them on a single scale is the mistake that wastes the budget. They are five different jobs. Google is where intent is already formed. Amazon is where the purchase happens for a physical product. LinkedIn is where a business to business buyer can be reached before intent exists. Yelp is where a local service buyer compares and where trust is manufactured or lost. Meta is where demand is created for something nobody was looking for. The correct order depends entirely on which of those three business shapes you are, so here is the order for each, with the condition that flips it.

The order to buy them in, by business shape

Rank	Physical product	Local service	Business to business
1	Amazon, because that is where the transaction is	Google, including the business profile	Google, on high intent commercial terms
2	Google, for the branded and comparison searches Amazon creates	Yelp, in the metros and categories where it still carries weight	LinkedIn, for reach before intent
3	Meta, for demand creation and retargeting	Meta, for local awareness at a tight radius	Trade press and directories, which is where the engines look
4	Yelp, only if you have a physical location	Amazon, only if you also sell a product	Meta, for retargeting and little else
5	LinkedIn, for recruiting rather than for selling	LinkedIn, for recruiting and partnerships	Amazon, for almost nothing unless you sell through it

What each surface actually costs to show up on

• Google. Two costs, and they are unrelated. The organic cost is pages, technical health and sources that cite you. The paid cost is the auction, which in American legal, insurance and medical categories runs high enough that the metro decides the budget rather than the channel.
• Amazon. Referral fees, fulfilment, advertising, and the hidden cost of the comparison grid, which is that your product is shown beside substitutes at the moment of decision. Price that in before you treat Amazon as pure incremental revenue.
• LinkedIn. The highest cost per click of the five in most business to business categories, and the only one where you can reach a defined job title at a defined company size. Worth it for a high value deal, poor value for a low value one.
• Yelp. A listing is free. The cost is review management as an ongoing operation, plus advertising if you choose it. Yelp's weight varies a lot by metro and by category, so test before committing.
• Meta. Cheap reach, expensive attribution. The honest way to buy it is as demand creation measured on a holdout or on total revenue lift, not on last click.

The American rules that touch each one

Reviews and endorsements are the common thread and the FTC is the common regulator. The FTC Endorsement Guides require disclosure of a material connection between an endorser and a brand, and the Commission's 2024 rule on consumer reviews and testimonials made the use of fake reviews, undisclosed insider reviews and reviews bought with undisclosed incentives directly actionable with civil penalties. That lands hardest on Yelp and Amazon, where review volume is a ranking input, and on Meta, where creator content is the format. Three practical rules follow. Never buy reviews. Never ask employees or family to review without disclosure. And keep the substantiation for any performance claim in the ad copy before it runs, because Section 5 of the FTC Act applies to the whole impression a reasonable buyer takes from the ad.

Where the assistants send an American buyer, measured

There is now a sixth surface, and it does not take advertising. On 22 October 2026 we put a 198 question American buyer bank to the ChatGPT and Gemini product surfaces through a data provider. The United States was fixed inside the text of each question, because the provider accepts gl, hl and location parameters and ignores all of them. The brand batch, which names us in the question, is excluded from every figure below because it measures a ceiling.

In 64 blind American readings the engines produced 2,866 citation URLs on 1,143 distinct hosts. Of the five platforms in this page's title, only Google's own properties appeared near the top of that citation list, and they dominated it: developers.google.com in 17 readings, support.google.com in 15, blog.google in 11 and business.google.com in 7. The agency directories clutch.co and goodfirms.co appeared in 11 and 6 readings. Trade press appeared heavily, searchengineland.com in 13 and searchenginejournal.com in 7. The regulator appeared too, ftc.gov in 9 and consumer.ftc.gov in 6. One host in the raw data, ccn.web.tr at 8 readings, is the data provider's own fetch infrastructure rather than a publisher and is excluded.

So for an American business the practical reading is that the assistants are not routing buyers through Amazon, Yelp, LinkedIn or Meta when they answer a supplier question. They are routing them through Google's documentation, the trade press, directories and the regulator. A platform strategy built only on the five named surfaces leaves that queue unaddressed, and in 38 of the 64 readings the engines named no supplier at all, which is the largest single outcome and the cheapest opening in the set.

How to decide this quarter

• Name your business shape from the three columns above, then buy in that order rather than buying all five thinly.
• Test Yelp's weight in your own metro and category before funding it. Its influence is not uniform across the United States.
• Measure Meta on a holdout or on total revenue, never on last click, or it will be defunded for the wrong reason.
• Price LinkedIn against your deal value. Above a certain deal size it is cheap and below it, it is not.
• Add one line for the sixth surface. Twelve buyer questions, both engines, United States stated in the question, saved with their sources. That is the baseline nobody has by default.

If your shape is local service, the profile and directory work is the larger half of the job and the page type gaps are set out in the four page types most local sites are missing. If it is a physical product, the file that tells shopping agents what your store sells is now part of the Amazon versus own store decision, and it is explained in what the file tells AI shopping agents.

Questions American businesses ask about the five platforms

Can I skip Google and win on the others?

In almost no American category. Even when the transaction happens on Amazon, the comparison and the brand check happen on Google, and the assistants themselves cite Google's own properties more than anything else.

Is Yelp still worth managing?

In the metros and categories where it holds weight, yes, and it is uneven across the country. Treat the listing as free and the review operation as the real cost, and test before you advertise on it.

Does LinkedIn work for a local service business?

Rarely for selling, often for hiring and for partnerships. Budget it out of the recruiting line rather than the marketing line and the decision gets easier.

Should a brand on Amazon also run its own store?

Yes, for margin and for the customer relationship, and expect the own store to be found through Google and increasingly through shopping agents rather than through Amazon.

Which of the five do assistants actually read?

On our 22 October 2026 American readings, Google's documentation and support properties heavily, directories moderately, and the other four barely at all in the context of a supplier question.

The surface that takes no advertising and still decides who gets called

Four of the five platforms above will sell you placement. The assistant queue will not, and on our American reading it named no supplier in 38 of 64 cases and named software in the other 26. AI Knows Us reads ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews for the buying questions in a category, splits the result by engine with its denominator, and keeps the raw answer text so the number can be checked rather than believed. For a buyer in the United States that is the Growth plan at 299 dollars a month, the cheapest tier that reads all five engines, read on aiknowsus.com/pricing on 22 October 2026.