How this data was produced
Every scan this product runs asks assistants real buyer questions, unprimed, and records every source domain they cited or linked. The tables below aggregate all of it, live, at the moment you loaded this page. It is not a survey, not a panel, and not an estimate. It is a tally of what the assistants pointed at.
The classification into buckets is ours, and it is a heuristic: known directories, community platforms, press domains, and government or education domains are recognized by name, and everything unrecognized counts as a business or product website. The long tail is overwhelmingly individual business sites, but that is a judgment call and we would rather state it than hide it.
The three things owners get wrong
- They over-invest in directories. Paid directory listings are the reflex answer, and directories are a minority of citations in our corpus. One or two of the majors is sensible. Twelve is money spent on a bucket that does not dominate.
- They under-invest in their own site. The largest bucket is business and product websites. A service page that states plain, checkable facts is the cheapest citation you will ever earn.
- They ignore the trade-specific pattern. The sector table below shows the top domains differ sharply by trade. The right sources for a dentist are not the right sources for a roofer.
How to use the sector table
Find the sector closest to yours. Its top three domains are the pages an assistant is most likely to be reading when someone asks about your trade. Being described accurately on those three is worth more than being present on twenty others.
Turning the table into a task list
Once you know which domains matter for your trade, this is the sequence that closes the gap fastest.
For each top domain in your sector
- Search the domain for your business name. Are you there at all?
- If you are, check that the category, service list, and phone match your Business Profile exactly.
- If you are not, find out whether it is a claimable listing, an editorial roundup, or a community thread. The route in is different for each.
- For editorial roundups, note the author and the last-updated date. Recently-updated roundups are worth approaching. Abandoned ones are not.
For your own site, which is the biggest bucket
- One page per service, named the way customers say it.
- A plain-text service area list.
- At least one number or specific commitment per service page that nobody else in town publishes.
- A real, visible date on anything you want treated as current.
What not to bother with
- Bulk directory submission packages. The corpus does not support them.
- Paying for placement on a page that does not itself rank for your trade and city.
- Any vendor promising to add you to an AI index. No such index exists.
23,926
citations recorded in AI answers
798
distinct source domains cited
85%
of them point at a business's own website
Top cited sources, by trade
The three domains most often cited in answers about each category. Find the row closest to your trade.
| Category | Most-cited domains | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| plumber | rotorooter.com · sacramentoplumbingsolutions.com · armstrongplumbing.net | 10,785 |
| plumbing | rotorooter.com · angi.com · bbb.org | 1,626 |
| HVAC | consumeraffairs.com · reddit.com · thecoolingco.com | 1,617 |
| luxury inn | maccallumhouse.com · stanfordinn.com · nicholsonhouse.com | 1,406 |
| home services | angi.com · mrhandyman.com · bbb.org | 1,352 |
| med spa | ljcmedspa.com · marasmedspa.com · rejuvemedspa.com | 619 |
| orthodontics | delrayortho.com · sunriseorthodontics.com · americanriverorthodontics.com | 552 |
| law firm | justia.com · attorneys.superlawyers.com · calbar.ca.gov | 540 |
| veterinary | vcahospitals.com · sniderveterinaryservices.com · westend-vet.com | 438 |
| roofing | driftwoodbuildersroofing.com · austinroofingcompany.com · roachroofing.com | 387 |
| bed and breakfast | theblacksmithinn.com · baileysharborinn.com · baileysharbor.com | 358 |
| resort | enchantmentresort.com · travelandleisure.com · lauberge.com | 357 |
Computed live from 182 stored scans covering 23,926 citations across 798 distinct domains. Assistants were asked real buyer questions unprimed; every source domain they cited or linked was recorded and classified. Full method and sample.
You are looking for the term
Citations and share of voice
In this field the sources an answer draws on are called citations, and the proportion of them that point at you rather than a competitor is your share of voice. Citations behave a little like backlinks did for search: they compound, and the ones that come from pages already trusted for your topic are worth far more than volume.
- Is this data representative of every market?
- It is representative of the businesses and categories we have scanned, which skews toward local service trades in US metros. We publish the sample size and date range on the full report rather than claiming it is universal.
- Should I pay for a directory listing?
- One or two of the majors for your trade, if they rank for your trade and city. Beyond that the evidence in our own corpus does not justify the spend.
- 01Overview of OpenAI crawlersOpenAI
- 02Perplexity crawlersPerplexity
- 03Google's common crawlersGoogle Search Central
- 04GEO: Generative Engine OptimizationAggarwal et al., arXiv
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
See what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity say about your business
The free scan runs the buyer questions for your trade and city across all four assistants, shows who gets named instead of you, and lists the sources those answers came from. No signup, about thirty seconds.
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