Generative engine optimization · Original data
Two out of three business pages ChatGPT cites put the city in the page title
When people talk about getting cited by AI, the advice usually stays at the whole-business level: rack up reviews, get yourself listed. All of that holds up. But what ChatGPT actually links to is a page, with a title sitting there at the top of the browser tab, and we wanted to know what those titles share.
So we dug back into a dataset we'd already built. Late August, we logged every source ChatGPT and Perplexity attached to 200 local-service questions: ten categories (dentists, gyms, plumbers, hair salons, med spas, optometrists, auto repair shops, chiropractors, personal injury lawyers, veterinarians) across five cities ranging from Tulsa to New York. That netted us 1,423 citations. This time we ignored the domain and looked only at the page title each engine reported.
What the titles say
We split those 1,423 citations into two stacks. About 452 went to recognized directories and review aggregators, the Healthgrades and Zocdoc layer that sits between customer and business. The other 971 went to everything else: mostly individual business websites, plus scattered hospital systems, city agencies and general guides. Those 971 pages came from 809 different domains, so we're not looking at a handful of sites on repeat.
Of those 971 pages, 66.6% carry the city name in the title. Expand to any location marker at all, whether a state abbreviation, a neighborhood like Wicker Park or Brickell, or shorthand like NYC, and the share climbs to 78.2%. Roughly four out of five pages the engine chose to link announce where they are before you've even clicked.
The directory pages do this even more consistently, at 86.3%, which tracks. A directory page for "chiropractors in Tulsa" exists for exactly one reason, and its title says so.
What surprised us more was what the business-page titles leave out. Only 1.5% include "near me". Directories use it five times as often, at 7.5%, and even there it isn't common. "Best" shows up in 4.7% of business-page titles versus 56.2% of directory titles. So the pages ChatGPT picks from actual businesses are rarely dressed up as rankings or keyword bait. They read like "Emergency Veterinary Care in Chicago, IL" or "Personal Injury Lawyer NYC" or "Where to Get Botox in Chicago". The place is in the title because the page genuinely serves that place.
It varies by category, quite a lot
The city-in-title share isn't uniform across the ten categories. For med spas, 80.6% of cited business pages name the city. Plumbers hit 78.8%, auto repair 70.9%, dentists 69.7%, hair salons 68.0%, chiropractors 64.4%, gyms 62.4%, optometrists 58.9%, veterinarians 57.0%, and personal injury lawyers bottom out at 52.6%.
The lower end gets interesting when you look at the actual pages. For lawyers and eye doctors, a solid chunk of citations without city titles weren't small businesses at all. They were pages from Rush, Northwestern Medicine, UI Health, a state Department of Financial Services, a university eye center, institutions with enough authority that the engine cites them by name and doesn't need the location spelled out. A single-location practice doesn't get that pass. When we filtered no-city titles down to what looked like independent businesses, we found titles like "Cartec Automotive Services" or "Venelle", a company name and nothing else, and they were the minority within an already small group.
Question type mattered too. On "where can I get a dental implant in Denver", 70.6% of cited business pages had the city in the title. On "my tooth hurts, where in Denver can I be seen today", it dropped to 63.6%, because urgent questions pulled in more general medical and how-to pages. And on plain "best dentist in Denver" queries, the engine barely cited business pages at all: 271 of 281 citations went to directories. We've written about that pattern before, and it shows up again here from a different angle.
Where this fits with what others found
Two outside pieces line up with this. In June, AIVO Research ran 138 casually phrased ChatGPT queries three times each and found that on local-intent questions like "whos a good dentist in miami", 71% of responses cited at least one list-style source, and 92% of those lists included the current year in the title. Our numbers agree on the shape: the list-style sources in our set were overwhelmingly directories, and within business pages themselves only about 6% had list-type titles ("best", "top", "ranking"). The rest were ordinary service pages that happened to say where they were.
The second is Cyrus Shepard's analysis for Zyppy Signal in May, which scored 23 possible citation factors by how consistently they held across 54 experiments and studies. One top-scoring factor, at 9.2 out of 10, was what he called query-answer match: the page title, subheadings, and body should closely mirror both the question someone typed and the kind of answer the engine would build from it. Someone asking a local question has already typed the place into it, so a page whose title carries that same place is a closer match than one that doesn't, which is exactly the pattern we see in our titles.
What we can and can't claim
We measured the pages that got cited. We didn't build a matching set of pages that didn't get cited, so this describes winners without proving that adding your city to the title will win you a citation. It's entirely possible the businesses with city-named pages also have more reviews and more mentions, with the title riding along. The AIVO study is small, and Shepard's scoring synthesizes other people's work rather than running fresh experiments. Treat all three as pointing one direction rather than handing down a formula.
What we'd still say with some confidence is this. If your service pages carry just your business name and nothing else, you're in the minority of what ChatGPT links to for local questions, and the pages in the majority didn't get there by stuffing "near me" or "best" into the title. They got there by having a page about one service in one place, and saying so plainly at the top.
You can check where your own pages stand in about thirty seconds.
Source: AIVO Research, "Are Listicles the AI-Search Silver Bullet? A ChatGPT Study" (June 2026): 138 ChatGPT queries from 46 conversational prompts, 3 runs each, US market. Cyrus Shepard, Zyppy Signal, "AI Citation Ranking Factors Analysis" (May 7, 2026): 23 factors scored across 54 experiments, patents and case studies. Our own figures come from askchat.studio's GEO probe database: 1,423 citations across 10 local-service categories and 5 cities, collected August 26-27, 2026; title matching done on the page title reported by the engine, case-insensitive.