Generative engine optimization · Citation concentration
The top brand in a category gets 31% of AI citations. We checked who wins.
Try "best plumber near me" in ChatGPT across ten cities and you'll spot something weird. The AI doesn't give you ten different local plumbers. It hands you the same handful of names again and again, and everything else gets a single mention, then vanishes.
A study that dropped this year put a number on that pattern. We ran our own data to see if it holds. It does, and the specifics surprised us.
The number
A research shop ran 8,400 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini: 600 per sector, 14 sectors total, all collected in February 2026. They logged every brand named and split the citations.
The top brand in a sector grabbed 31.4% of all brand citations on its own. The top three combined took 64.7%. The remaining roughly 25 brands that got mentioned at all divided the last third between them, most scraping by with crumbs.
For context, the authors noted regular Google search looks nothing like this. There, the top 15 domains for a typical commercial query might share 20% of traffic. AI citation, by their tracking, is the most concentrated discovery surface they've seen.
That's vendor research rather than peer-reviewed academic work, so treat the percentages as directional. But the shape was simple enough to test against something we already had sitting around: our own citation logs.
What we found when we checked
We've been recording every business ChatGPT and Perplexity name across ten local categories: plumbers, med spas, veterinarians, the works. Pull out directories and review sites, and 809 individual businesses got named at least once.
708 of them, 87.5%, got named exactly once and never appeared again.
The other 101 businesses own every repeat citation we logged. And when we looked at who actually shows up multiple times, the February pattern held nearly line-for-line. In plumbing, Roto-Rooter alone hit 10 citations across our sample, more than any cluster of independents combined. In veterinary, VCA Hospitals grabbed 7 mentions, VEG another 5. In optometry, Visionworks, MyEyeDr, and Target Optical together out-cited every independent practice we tracked. In chiropractic, The Joint pulled 6 mentions to any single independent's one or two.
That's the chain formula: hundreds of near-identical location pages, bulletproof directory consistency, review volume no solo shop can touch. The AI isn't choosing a local gem. It's recognizing a pattern it's seen a hundred times in a hundred cities, and defaulting hard.
It's not exclusively chains, and we should say that straight rather than squeeze the story for a cleaner headline. A couple of independent plumbers in Tulsa each cracked three citations, and one Denver salon did too, businesses that built enough footprint across enough queries to repeat. And in two categories where names repeated most, med spa and dentistry, the top spots went to RealSelf and ClearChoice, which behave more like a directory and a franchise network than any single local business anyway.
Why this matters more than "get more reviews"
The advice everywhere says stack reviews and complete your Google profile, and that's not wrong, just incomplete. It frames AI visibility as a fixable checklist, when the concentration numbers tell a different story: most answer space in any category is already occupied by a small club before you even show up.
That doesn't write off the other 87.5%. It means getting named once, in one city, on one query, is a genuine achievable win, and most local businesses never bother checking if they've already pulled it off. The bar isn't "outrank the chain." The bar is "appear at all," and more than four in five businesses that ever get mentioned only clear it once before dropping out of answers entirely.
What to actually check
Two tasks, five minutes each. First: have you ever been named, for any query, in any answer? If not, the cause usually isn't mysterious. Thin or scattered listings, review counts dwarfed by chains, a website that doesn't answer the specific question a customer actually asks.
Second, if you have been named once, look at what unlocked it. Was it a tight, specific query, "emergency plumber open now" rather than "best plumber," a treatment name instead of "med spa near me"? That's typically the door that opened. Moving from one-time to repeat means doing more of whatever got you through instead of restarting with generic SEO playbooks built for Google's blue links.
A free check shows where you already stand before you start guessing.
Source: Visionary Marketing, "AI Search Visibility Statistics 2026" — 8,400 prompts across ChatGPT-5, Claude 4.7, Perplexity Sonar, and Gemini 2.5, 14 commercial sectors, February 1-28, 2026 (vendor research, directional). Our own figures come from askchat.studio's GEO probe database: 1,423 citations across 10 local categories, non-directory domains only.