Citation surfaces: where AI engines look

The fifth layer, and the one where most of the answer about you is written by someone else.

Your site is one input among several

An assistant assembling a recommendation draws on directories, review platforms, comparison and roundup sites, forums, local press, association and supplier pages, and your own domain. For commercial queries, a large majority of the retrievable material is content the business does not own.

That reframes the work. A plan consisting entirely of improving your own pages is addressing the smaller part of the surface, and it explains the common experience of a well-built site that assistants never mention.

The set differs by trade and by place

There is no universal list, and assuming one is how effort gets spent on surfaces nobody consults. The directories that matter for a plumber in Georgia are not the ones that matter for a specialty retailer in the UK.

We identify them per market and per category by looking at what the assistants actually cite when asked the twelve buying questions, which is a measurement problem before it is a content problem.

Most of the work is correction, not publication

Wrong specifications on a marketplace listing. An outdated description on a comparison site. A review platform profile nobody ever completed. A supplier page listing a phone number you stopped using.

Unglamorous, slow, and frequently the highest-return work available, because it removes contradictions rather than adding volume.

Building a citation trail

The trail is the path from a general question to naming your business specifically: the mentions, links and corroborating references that let an engine confirm you are a real, established, appropriate answer.

It is built deliberately and it takes quarters, not weeks, because it depends on sources you do not control updating on their own schedule.

Read in order, or jump

Twelve chapters, in the order the work has to happen. The first four are the spine; the platform chapters at the end include two surfaces we deliberately do not score, and say why.

01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample it

See where you actually stand

A free Visibility Check runs the measurement described in this guide on your own business.

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