A new study from Google and brand-tracking firm Tracksuit, analyzing 31 brands, just put numbers behind something we've watched play out with Omaha and Council Bluffs businesses for years: the businesses people already recognize don't get found the same way as everyone else. They get found first — because customers skip the category search entirely and type the business's name.
The study's headline findings, in plain English:
When people know your brand, they don't search the category — they search for you. Nobody who already trusts a specific roofing company types "roofers near me." They type the company's name. Every competitor's ad and every map listing gets skipped.
Your share of those name searches today predicts your market share 6 to 12 months from now. The study found that Share of Search — the percentage of category searches that are for your name specifically — moves ahead of revenue. It's a leading indicator: growth shows up in search behavior months before it shows up in sales reports. (Credit where due: the Share of Search concept was originally developed by researchers Les Binet and James Hankins, and it has held up under repeated independent testing since.)
Awareness built today compounds. The study found that the better known a brand already is, the more efficiently each additional point of awareness converts into search demand. Recognition is one of the few marketing assets that gets cheaper to grow as it grows.
Why this matters more for a small business than a big one
Here's the part of the research most coverage skips. In any category, only a small fraction of buyers — the study's researchers put it at roughly 5 to 15% — are actually in the market at any given moment. The other 85 to 95% aren't buying today. They're buying in six months, when the furnace dies, the lease ends, or the marketing budget resets.
Big brands can afford to be forgettable to that 90% and still win on ad spend when buyers finally show up. A small business in Omaha or Council Bluffs can't outspend anyone. What it can do is be the name that comes to mind — and gets typed into the search bar — when its future customers finally enter the market.
That's not a feel-good branding argument. Per this research, it's a measurable search behavior with a 6-to-12-month head start on your competitors' sales reports.
We've watched this play out in Omaha — at Porky Butts BBQ
If you want to see this research walking around in real life, look at Porky Butts BBQ in West Omaha.
Owner Blane Hunter is a world champion pitmaster — an American Royal winner with more than 85 top-ten competition finishes, raised on South Texas barbecue before bringing it to Nebraska. As his reputation grew, something changed in how people found his restaurant: they stopped searching the category and started searching the name. Nobody who knows the Porky Butts story types "BBQ near me." They type "Porky Butts."
And here's where it gets better than anything a keyword tool can measure: "near me" stopped mattering entirely. People regularly drive from Kansas City and Des Moines to eat there. In one story that made the barbecue press, five friends from Dallas — barbecue lovers who'd heard a former Texan had become a world champion with a restaurant in Omaha — loaded up the car and drove nearly 600 miles to try it. They would never have come to Omaha otherwise.
No local search algorithm sent those women north. A three-hour drive from Kansas City doesn't come from ranking well in the map pack. That's brand — awareness so strong it doesn't just win the search, it replaces it. And it's exactly the mechanism the Google/Tracksuit study measured: when people know your name, the category search never happens, and every competitor gets skipped along with it.
Most Omaha businesses will never need customers driving in from Dallas. But the lesson scales down perfectly: the goal isn't to rank for "your category + near me" forever. It's to become the name people type instead.
The new wrinkle: your customers aren't only asking Google anymore
Everything above describes how search has worked for a decade. Now, layer on what's changed in the last two years.
A growing share of your future customers isn't typing anything into Google at all. They're asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's own AI Overviews questions like "who's the best HVAC company in Council Bluffs?" — and getting a direct answer with two or three names in it.
The marketing industry is starting to call this Share of Model: how often AI tools name your business when they answer questions in your category. And here's the connection to the awareness research — AI models learn who to recommend from the same signals that build human awareness. Consistent presence. A complete, accurate Google Business Profile. Real reviews. Being written about, cited, and mentioned by name across the web.
In other words, the businesses that invested in being known are now being recommended by AI. The ones that stayed invisible to humans are invisible to the machines too — and the machines are increasingly making the shortlist before a customer ever sees a search results page.
What an Omaha small business should actually do about this
You don't need a national ad budget. You need to be deliberately, consistently findable — by people and by AI. In practice, that looks like:
Own your name first. When someone searches your exact business name, you should dominate that results page — your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your social profiles, all accurate and all telling the same story. If your own name-search is messy, nothing downstream works.
Keep your Google Business Profile genuinely current. Hours, services, photos, review responses. This is the single data source that feeds Google Maps, the local map pack, and increasingly the AI-generated answers about local businesses.
Get named in places AI reads. Local coverage, industry mentions, real citations of your business by name. AI tools recommend businesses they've seen recommended.
Track the leading indicator, not just the lagging one. Revenue tells you how you did two quarters ago. Searches for your name — and now, whether AI tools mention you at all — tell you how you're going to do. Most Omaha businesses have never once checked what ChatGPT says when asked about their category. That's a five-minute exercise worth doing this week.
The honest bottom line
The Google/Tracksuit research confirms the old logic: awareness leads, market share follows. What's new is where that awareness now has to live — not just in your customers' heads, but in the training data and live retrieval of the AI tools they're asking for recommendations.
The window here looks a lot like early local SEO did fifteen years ago: most businesses haven't started, the ones that start early compound an advantage, and waiting until it's obvious means competing when it's expensive.
If you're curious where your business stands, start with the five-minute test: ask an AI tool who it recommends in your category in Omaha or Council Bluffs. If your name isn't in the answer, that's not a verdict — it's a starting line.
Joseph Kenney is the President of 316 Strategy Group, an Omaha-based business growth and marketing firm, and the founder of Bullseye AI. 316 works with businesses across Omaha, Council Bluffs, and the surrounding region on visibility in traditional search, the local map pack, and AI-generated answers.
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