Citation engineering · Local business
From the studio
Original research on what makes AI engines name local wellness, beauty, and lifestyle businesses. Written for owner-operators, not marketers.
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How do I get my business listed on ChatGPT
There is no listing to submit. ChatGPT builds local answers out of pages other people wrote, so getting named means getting onto those pages.
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Your robots.txt is fine. Your firewall is the problem.
We checked 55 local business sites that ChatGPT already names in its answers. One blocks AI search crawlers in robots.txt. Nine return 403, 418 or 429 before that file is ever read, and their owners have no idea the door is shut.
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Which AI is more likely to cite your own site?
A 356,019-citation study across four AI engines finds Gemini and Perplexity send most credit to the business's own site, while ChatGPT splits it almost evenly with directories. Different engine, different fix.
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ChatGPT's AI browser is dead. What it did to your website isn't.
OpenAI shut down Atlas in early August. The "anti-web browser" effect it exposed never went away — it runs through every version of ChatGPT now, with or without a dedicated browser.
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Search Console's new AI report only sees Google. Here's the blind spot.
Google's new AI Overview impressions tab tells you nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. A live audit shows what that blind spot actually costs a business.
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You're #1 on Google Maps. Google's own AI still might skip you.
A 1,120-search study found 28.5% of businesses that win Google's local pack are missing from Google's own AI Mode answer for the same query, and the businesses that show up only in AI Mode carry far more reviews.
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OpenAI's Astra: what actually changes for local business AI visibility
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra today and called it a possible arrival of AGI. Here's what the announcement actually claims, and why it doesn't change how we test whether ChatGPT names your business.
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Your AI traffic is hiding in GA4's "Direct" bucket — here's how to find it
ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity referrals mostly land in Google Analytics as unlabeled Direct traffic. Here's why, what GA4's new AI Assistant channel does and doesn't catch, and how to recover most of the gap in one afternoon.
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How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT
If your clients now start their search with ChatGPT, not Google, you have a new problem — and a new opportunity. Here is the exact playbook we use to make AI models name yoga studios in La Jolla and North Park.