Q3 2026
Which sources AI engines cite when recommending local businesses
Data as of 2026-09-07 · observations from 2026-07-22 to 2026-09-07 · reviewed quarterly
Across 1,068 citation observations recorded from real VisiScan scans between 22 July and 7 September 2026, four domains account for a large majority of everything ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini cited when answering buyer-intent questions about local businesses. Directory and review platforms dominate; individual business websites are cited comparatively rarely.
- Citation observations
- 1,068
- Domain-level records persisted from completed scans in the window.
- Distinct domains cited
- 546
- Counted after excluding the example.com, example.org and example.net placeholder rows.
- Total citation mentions
- 7,990
- Summed mention counts across all recorded domains.
- Industries represented
- 16
- Every Industry value except those with no completed scans in the window.
| Domain | Mentions |
|---|---|
| google.com | 1,520 |
| yelp.com | 1,272 |
| bbb.org | 823 |
| trustpilot.com | 684 |
| sba.gov | 303 |
| linkedin.com | 169 |
| tripadvisor.com | 161 |
| angieslist.com | 159 |
| score.org | 141 |
| g2.com | 98 |
How these figures were produced
- Every figure comes from CitationSource records persisted by completed VisiScan scans — an agent reads a business site, generates buyer-intent questions for its category, asks up to four answer engines, and records the domains each engine cited in its answer.
- Figures cover the window stated above and were computed on the dataAsOf date. Counts are of recorded observations, not of the whole web: a domain is present because an engine cited it during a scan we ran.
- Mentions are summed across every recorded row for a domain. A domain cited repeatedly within one answer is counted per the engine's own citation list.
- Three placeholder rows (example.com, example.org, example.net; 101 mentions between them) are excluded from every figure above. They exist because scans are run against test targets during development. Raw totals before exclusion were 1,071 rows, 549 domains and 8,091 mentions.
What this cannot show
- This is a census of what our scans observed, not a random sample of the category. The industry mix reflects which businesses were scanned, and skews toward the categories VisiScan users bring.
- The current citation store is domain-level. It does not retain an engine-by-engine breakdown, so this edition cannot say which engine favours which source.
- Answer engines are non-deterministic and change retrieval behaviour without notice. These are observations from a fixed window, not a forecast and not a ranking.
- Mention counts measure how often a domain was cited, not whether the citation helped the business being asked about.