Glossary

AI Citations

AI citations are the sources an assistant links or names to justify its answer — the pages it actually read before recommending businesses. They are the most actionable data in AI visibility, because they reveal which sites are deciding who gets named in your market.

When ChatGPT recommends three plumbers and cites Yelp, Reddit, and one plumber's own site, it has told you the evidence hierarchy for that answer. Change what those sources say and you change future answers; ignore them and you are optimizing pages nobody is reading.

Citation patterns differ sharply by trade. In our five-metro study, legal answers leaned on directories for 30–43% of citations — the heaviest reliance we measured — while med spa answers cited directories just 8–15% of the time, reading businesses' own sites instead. Knowing which regime your trade is in decides where the work goes.

The single most surprising result across all 2,840 citations we recorded: the most-cited domain was not a directory at all. Reddit accounted for 5.7% of every source assistants reached for, roughly double Yelp's 2.9% and ahead of the BBB, Angi, and Expertise.com. Assistants treat unpaid discussion as strong evidence about local service quality, which is uncomfortable for any business whose only presence is advertising it bought. You cannot optimize a Reddit thread, but you can be the company people describe well in one, and you can notice when a thread naming your competitors is quietly deciding your market.

Reading your own citation set is a concrete exercise. Ask an assistant the questions your buyers ask, expand every source it lists, and sort them into three piles: pages you control, pages you can influence through a profile or a correction, and pages you can only earn. Most businesses find the first pile nearly empty — which is the finding, not a failure of the method. The free report runs this for a single business and returns the sources with the answers.

Related terms
  • AI Visibility AI visibility is how often and how favourably AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a business when people ask them for recommendations.
  • Grounding (Web Search) Grounding is an AI assistant's use of live retrieved sources — usually web search — to answer, instead of relying on training memory alone.
  • Local Citations Local citations are mentions of a business's name, address, and phone on other websites — directories, maps services, industry associations, chambers of commerce.

See where your business stands.

The free AI visibility report shows what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say when buyers ask about your market — with the sources behind every answer.

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