What Perplexity actually cites for wellness in San Diego
When someone in La Jolla asks Perplexity for the best yoga studio nearby, the answer doesn't come from your website. It comes from a small group of third-party sources Perplexity treats as authoritative — booking platforms, niche credentials, local press, review hubs. Your homepage rarely makes the citation list on the first pass.
That matters because Perplexity leans hard on freshness and source reputation. Recent benchmarks put AI-referral conversion at roughly 11x Google organic for service businesses — the user already trusts the recommendation by the time they click. Get cited, get the booking.
In September 2026 we put 100 wellness queries to Perplexity across ten San Diego neighbourhoods, from La Jolla to North Park, and logged every source it cited. All 100 ran, none failed, and they returned 1,988 citations across 817 domains.
The first thing in that data contradicts what most of this industry tells you. Your own website was cited in every single one of the hundred queries, and that means all hundred rather than most of them. Booking platforms, the ones usually sold as the way into AI answers, accounted for 16.7% of citations. Directories of every kind added another 25.9%. Put every third party together and you get 42%, while business websites carried 54.5%.
That matters because the picture flips with the size of the question. When we ran city-level queries for med spas in August, the business websites vanished and directories owned the answer. At neighbourhood level the business websites take the lead instead. So the honest advice depends on which question your customer asks, and most of them ask about their neighbourhood.
Here is what actually showed up, ordered by how many of the hundred queries cited each one.
Yelp
Yelp was cited in 74 of the 100 queries. Nothing else comes close, and no amount of disliking Yelp changes that. Claim the page, fill the service list in the words customers use, and keep the hours accurate.
ClassPass
ClassPass came up in 47 queries. Perplexity leans on it because it normalises pricing and class formats across studios, which gives an engine something concrete to quote. It earns a listing even when the economics annoy you.
Fresha
Fresha appeared in 44 queries and carried the highest citation count of any single domain, 132. It holds live booking data for salons and spas, and it costs nothing to list on. If you take one action from this post, take this one.
Tripadvisor
Tripadvisor showed up in 22 queries, mostly for spas and retreats rather than studios, and its review volume is what gets it quoted.
MapQuest
MapQuest also reached 22 queries, which surprised us. It rides on the same address data as the rest of the map layer, so the fix is making sure your address matches everywhere.
Reddit was cited in 18 queries. You cannot list yourself there, and pretending to be a happy customer will end badly. What you can do is be worth mentioning when somebody asks.
LocallyWell
LocallyWell reached 16 queries and Atly 14. These smaller wellness directories punch above their size in this metro, and both take free listings.
Wellhub
Wellhub, formerly Gympass, came up in 14 queries and covers the corporate wellness angle.
Healthgrades
Healthgrades was cited in 12 queries for anything with a medical component. YellowPages matched it at 12, which surprised us as much as it probably surprises you.
BookRetreats
BookRetreats appeared in 11 queries, which matters if you run retreats or workshops.
Groupon
Groupon reached 10 queries. The discount association is real, and so is the citation rate.
San Diego Magazine
San Diego Magazine appeared in 9 queries and the Better Business Bureau in 8. That puts local press and the BBB behind the directories, though still ahead of most of what usually gets recommended.
Want to know which of these already cite you?
Our free Quick Check runs your studio through the same Perplexity citation audit we used to build this list. You'll see which of these sources already cite you, which are missing, and the two highest-leverage fixes to make first.