Data report · updated as the scan corpus grows
Where AI Gets Its Answers
When an AI assistant recommends a business, it read something first. We recorded every source the assistants cited across 187 real brand scans: 24,124 citations pointing at 798 distinct domains, and classified where the answers actually come from. The result upends most local-marketing instincts.
Dataset window June 12, 2026 to September 6, 2026
Finding 01
AI doesn’t send customers to directories. It cites websites.
85%of every citation we recorded points at a business’s or product’s own website. Yelp, Angi, BBB, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, TripAdvisor and every review platform we track combined account for 11%. A decade of “get on the directories” advice inverts in AI search: the assistants read your site, or they read your competitor’s.
- Business & product websites84.5% · 20,395
- Directories & review platforms10.6% · 2,562
- Community & social (Reddit, Facebook…)2.1% · 508
- Press & publishers0.7% · 174
- Government & education2.0% · 485
Finding 02
The handful of platforms that still break through
When AI does cite a third-party platform, the list is short and stable. These are the non-business domains that earned the most citations in our corpus, worth a presence, but note how small their share is against businesses’ own sites above.
- 01angi.com595 citations
- 02yelp.com486 citations
- 03reddit.com468 citations
- 04bbb.org299 citations
- 05consumeraffairs.com231 citations
- 06homeadvisor.com222 citations
- 07thumbtack.com218 citations
- 08tripadvisor.com190 citations
- 09cslb.ca.gov151 citations
- 10irs.gov69 citations
Finding 03
Every industry has its own source graph
What AI trusts depends on the vertical. Lawyers are cited through legal directories and the state bar; contractors through license boards; tax and payroll software through irs.gov; medical and dental practices almost entirely through their own sites. Below, the most-cited sources for the largest industry categories in the corpus.
| Industry | Top cited sources (citations) |
|---|---|
| plumber | rotorooter.com (1,980) · sacramentoplumbingsolutions.com (1,260) · armstrongplumbing.net (795) |
| plumbing | rotorooter.com (187) · angi.com (108) · bbb.org (53) |
| HVAC | consumeraffairs.com (67) · reddit.com (65) · thecoolingco.com (64) |
| luxury inn | maccallumhouse.com (227) · stanfordinn.com (213) · nicholsonhouse.com (200) |
| home services | angi.com (111) · mrhandyman.com (86) · bbb.org (73) |
| med spa | ljcmedspa.com (44) · marasmedspa.com (33) · rejuvemedspa.com (32) |
| orthodontics | delrayortho.com (74) · sunriseorthodontics.com (72) · americanriverorthodontics.com (63) |
| law firm | justia.com (39) · attorneys.superlawyers.com (29) · calbar.ca.gov (29) |
| veterinary | vcahospitals.com (42) · sniderveterinaryservices.com (40) · westend-vet.com (38) |
| roofing | driftwoodbuildersroofing.com (36) · austinroofingcompany.com (25) · roachroofing.com (24) |
| bed and breakfast | theblacksmithinn.com (78) · baileysharborinn.com (56) · baileysharbor.com (34) |
| resort | enchantmentresort.com (76) · travelandleisure.com (59) · lauberge.com (40) |
Finding 04
Regulators are citation magnets
Government sources are only 2.0% of citations overall, but they cluster exactly where trust matters: license boards for contractors, the state bar for lawyers, the IRS for anything touching tax documents. If your industry has a regulator, AI is reading it. Being verifiable there (license current, registration listed) is part of being recommendable.
- cslb.ca.gov151 citations
- irs.gov69 citations
- calbar.ca.gov29 citations
- tdlr.texas.gov21 citations
- guides.sll.texas.gov21 citations
- dli.mn.gov19 citations
Finding 05
Reddit threads are quietly feeding AI recommendations
In oneof the corpus’s largest categories (HVAC), reddit.com sits among the top five cited sources. Community threads where real customers name real companies are training-adjacent material the assistants keep reaching for. What r/HVAC or your city’s subreddit says about you is now part of your AI visibility.
Finding 06
Left unchallenged, AI defaults to the franchises
From our separate leaderboard corpus (21 local trades × 40 U.S. metros), the same national names appear in market after market. When a franchise is named in 40 of 40metros, the independents in those cities aren’t losing on quality. They’re invisible in the sources AI reads.
- TerminixPest Control Companies40 of 40 metros
- Two Men and a TruckMoving Companies40 of 40 metros
- A1 Garage Door ServiceGarage Door Companies39 of 40 metros
- H&R BlockAccountants & CPAs39 of 40 metros
- The Cleaning AuthorityHouse Cleaning Services38 of 40 metros
- OrkinPest Control Companies38 of 40 metros
- Valvoline Instant Oil ChangeAuto Repair Shops36 of 40 metros
- Planet FitnessGyms & Fitness Studios34 of 40 metros
Methodology
How we measured this
- Real citations, not estimates. Every figure is computed live from 187stored brand scans in our production database. A “citation” is a source domain an assistant either formally cited (web-search citations) or linked in its answer text; each scan tallies domains across all of its answers.
- Unprimed prompting. Scans ask real buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity (plus Google AI Overviews and AI Mode on paid scans) without suggesting any business, so citations reflect what the models reach for on their own.
- Classification is a curated heuristic.We classify domains against maintained lists of major directories, review platforms, social and community sites, and publishers; .gov/.edu is classified by TLD; everything unrecognized counts as a business or product website. Long-tail platforms we don’t recognize would slightly overstate the business-site share, which is why we publish the platform lists’ combined shares alongside it.
- Limits we’re honest about. The corpus is the set of brands scanned on MentionedOn, weighted toward local services plus the software categories our users monitor, not a random sample of the economy. Industry categories come from scan metadata and are normalized but not manually audited. Citation counts measure what AI read, not business quality.
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