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.
-
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.
-
ChatGPT will name your studio. Getting an actual link is the rare part.
We asked ChatGPT about 20 San Diego pilates and yoga studios by neighborhood. Fifteen got named. Only six got an actual link, ClassPass carried the rest, and franchises with no local address still crowded out independents.
-
ChatGPT cited the business's own site in 2.5% of answers. Perplexity did it in 20%.
160 live answers from our free check. GPT-4o cites about five sources per answer and the business's own site made it in 1 of 40. Perplexity cites fifteen and made room for it in 23 of 115. A short list leaves no slot for you, a long one leaves some.
-
The top brand in a category gets 31% of AI citations. We checked who wins.
An 8,400-prompt study found AI citations more concentrated than Google search ever gets. We checked our own citation database, and 87.5% of businesses ever named got mentioned exactly once. The ones named again and again are almost always chains.
-
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.
-
43% of Google's AI Overview citations point back to Google itself
A new synthesis report finds Google's AI answers cite Google-owned properties almost as often as anyone else. Our own ChatGPT and Perplexity data shows a smaller, but similar, structural tax from directories.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We ran a real Miami med spa through ChatGPT 46 times. Named 13 times, cited once.
Named first in 11 of 46 questions, but its own website was cited as a source only once. A live audit of one real business shows where the AI sends traffic instead.
-
Do ChatGPT and Gemini use the same sources?
We ran the exact same 8 owner-anxiety questions through ChatGPT and Gemini. 134 source mentions, 129 unique domains, only 5 shared, and zero overlap in 7 of the 8 questions.
-
Only 38% of AI Overview citations rank in Google's top 10
Ahrefs analyzed 4 million AI Overview citations across 863,000 searches. Only 38% of cited pages also rank in the top 10. YouTube alone accounts for 18% of the citations that don't rank at all.
-
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.
-
The AI search glossary for local business owners
GEO, AEO, hallucination, RAG, citation, trust threshold: 20 AI search terms explained for the owner of a local business, not a marketer.
-
A bank just said "Generative Engine Optimization." Here's what that actually means for you.
JPMorgan's 2026 tech trends report names GEO directly and sizes the AI browser market at $76.8 billion by 2034. We checked the report against its own source, found a viral stat about it that isn't actually in there, and cross-checked what's left against our own zero-citation data.
-
AI names $22 billion of Botox and fillers by brand. Your med spa's name splits what's left over.
A 2026 index found the top 15 medical aesthetics brands take 62% of AI citation share in a $22 billion category. We checked our own zero-out-of-ten med spa testing against it and found the same wall.
-
ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of local businesses. Your star rating is the cutoff.
A 2026 benchmark of 350,000+ locations found ChatGPT names a local business 1.2% of the time, versus 35.9% for Google's local 3-pack. The rating behind that gap isn't a ranking signal, it's a cutoff, and it matches what we found testing 50 real med spas and day spas.
-
Health and wellness scored worst of five industries in a 2026 AI-visibility benchmark
A benchmark of 200+ U.S. service businesses put health and wellness dead last for AI search visibility, at 27 out of 100. We checked our own probe data against it and found the same gap, for the same reason.
-
How many local businesses does AI actually cite?
A 60,970-query study found 93% of domains AI cites are individual businesses, not directories. We checked our own smaller dataset and found the same shape hiding underneath: a handful of sites still eat most of the citation volume.
-
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.
-
How ChatGPT chooses which businesses to recommend
We sorted 1,423 real AI citations by question type. Broad questions pull directory sources 96% of the time. Narrow questions drop that to 11% and open the door for a business's own page.
-
Is SEO dead for local business in AI search?
We tested the backlinks-and-keyword-density playbook against our own citation data. Almost none of it predicts who ChatGPT and Perplexity actually mention, and the traffic that playbook wins is shrinking too.
-
Your Google Business Profile isn't what gets you cited by AI
We checked 1,423 real AI citations across ten local niches and five cities for anything pointing to Google Maps or a Google Business Profile page. We found zero.
-
ChatGPT picks different sources in the API and the browser
Twenty-five citations from the API, six from the live browser interface, and not a single shared domain across three real owner questions.
-
Where AI actually finds local businesses (it's not Yelp, YouTube, or LinkedIn)
We counted 1,423 real AI citations across ten local niches. Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn showed up zero times combined. Reddit alone beat them by a wide margin.
-
One word decides whether ChatGPT cites Mayo Clinic or your business
Same question, same day, same model. We added a city name and the sources flipped from Mayo Clinic and Harvard Health to five named local practices. Four more questions confirmed the pattern.
-
We ran the same AI search across six local trades in ten cities. Only three answers named a real business.
Med spas, dentists, salons, gyms, and injury lawyers, sixteen runs in ten cities. Thirteen answers came back built entirely from directories, with no business website among the sources. Here's what the three exceptions had in common.
-
We asked ChatGPT and Perplexity for a boutique salon in Miami. Perplexity named none.
GPT-4o named three real boutique salons in Miami. Perplexity, checking the exact same ten businesses, named zero. Here's what separates the three that got named from the seven that didn't.
-
Does schema markup get you cited by AI? We tested it on 11 med spas
We checked the structured data on 5 med spas ChatGPT named and 6 it didn't. The richest schema markup and the only working llms.txt with 20+ types belonged to the clinic AI never mentioned.
-
How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business
Most owners have never actually asked ChatGPT about their own business. Here's what our free 30-second check shows you, using a real med spa search where every business came back invisible.
-
How to improve your brand visibility in AI search
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found unlinked brand mentions correlate with AI citation 3x stronger than backlinks. We saw the same pattern in our own reverse-citation audit of 100+ wellness queries.
-
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.
-
Why is my business not on ChatGPT or Perplexity?
We ran the same "best [category] near me" question through GPT-4o and Perplexity across 50 real wellness and spa businesses in five cities. The two engines named the same business together only 10% of the time.
-
Day spas get cited by AI twice as often as med spas — here's why that's not the win it sounds like
We tested 10 real San Diego day spas against ChatGPT and Perplexity. Five got cited — twice the rate of med spas. But look at who actually got named, and the win stops looking like one.
-
We tested 10 real med spas in LA against ChatGPT and Perplexity — zero got named
We ran 10 independently-owned Los Angeles med spas through GPT-4o and Perplexity. Neither AI named a single one — and the two engines didn't even agree with each other on who to recommend instead.
-
Will Instagram get your business cited by ChatGPT?
The chain spa with a half-empty Instagram is showing up in ChatGPT recommendations. You, with your beautiful grid, are not. Three structural reasons Instagram-only marketing fails when AI is the gatekeeper — and the three fixes that change the math for solo spa, salon, med spa, and retreat owners.
-
How to get your business to show up in ChatGPT
If 37% of your potential 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.
-
5 GEO mistakes keeping your pilates studio invisible in AI search
Most pilates studios in Encinitas are doing four of these five wrong. We audited 40 San Diego studio sites last quarter, and the same patterns kept appearing. Fix these and you will start showing up in Perplexity within a month.
-
What I told my AI: a La Jolla yoga owner's Perplexity experiment
A 14-year yoga studio owner in La Jolla wanted to know what Perplexity actually says when someone asks "best yoga in San Diego." So we ran a 30-day experiment — here is what happened, including the screenshots and the citations she earned along the way.
-
The 14 directories that feed Perplexity's wellness recommendations
Perplexity does not pull from your website first. It pulls from third-party directories AI models consider authoritative. Here are the 14 we have identified through reverse-citation tracking — and which ones matter for yoga, pilates, beauty, and wellness coaches.
-
Original data vs blog posts: what actually earns AI citations in 2026
Generic blog posts about "5 benefits of yoga" no longer earn AI citations. Original studio-specific data — your client demographics, neighborhood trends, behavioral patterns — earns them 3× more. Here is the format we use for our clients.