AI is reading local businesses' own websites, not their Yelp pages
We recorded the websites AI credited while answering 3399 real questions about local trades. 88% were a business's own website. Yelp never came up once.
- AI ran a web search before every single answer, so what is on your site today can reach a customer today.
- 88% of the websites it credited were a business's own. Yelp did not appear once.
- When it read a business's site, it recommended that business 73% of the time, in the same answer.
- It named another 5,698 businesses without quoting their website, so your site is one door in, not the only one.
Your website is what it reads. Make it say plainly what you do and where you do it.
- angi.coma directory
- homeadvisor.coma directory
- nexgenairandplumbing.comthe business
- socalclimatecontrol.comthe business
- vhpairconditioning.comthe business
When you ask an AI assistant who to call about a leaking pipe, it does not just know. It goes and looks, right then, and it builds an answer out of what it finds.
Until recently we could see that it searched, but not what it read. Now we can. We recorded website it credited across 3399 real questions in 71 local markets (Amusement Center, Architecture, Banking, Barbershop, Bolt Supply, Brewery, Business Lawyer, Cabinet Maker, Car Rental, Carpet Cleaning, Cat Grooming, Child Enrichment, Childcare, Comercial Real Estate, Construction, Crematory, Criminal Defense Lawyer, Daycare, Dentist, Dim Sum Restaurant, Dispensary, Electrical, Electrical Services, Executive Business Assessment, Financial Advisor, Financial Consulting, Graphic Design, Handyman, Human Resources, Hvac, Information Technology, It, Landscaping, Life Insurance, Machine Rentals, Manufacturing, Marina, Marketing Agency, Medicare, Mobile Car Detailing, Mortgage, Obgyn, Painting, Plumbing, Podiatrist, Podiatry, Promotional Products Marketing Solutions, Rc Sailboat Racing, Real Estate, Roofing, Seo Company, Solar, Veterinarian and Web Design, in Anaheim, Big Bear Lake, Boyle Heights Los Angeles, Burbank, Corona, Crestline, East Los Angeles, Fontana, Glendale, Long Beach, Los Angeles, New York, Norco, Oak Park, Ontario, Orange, Orange County, Pasadena, Rancho Cucamonga, Santa Ana, Torrance, Upland, West Covina and Yorba Linda), and the answer turned out to be simple.
It reads the businesses' own websites.
It goes and looks. Every single time.
The first thing worth knowing is that the AI goes and looks. On every one of the 3399 questions we put to it, it ran a web search before answering. 6,793 searches in total, because one question often turns into two or three searches.
It is still drawing on what it already knew as well, and the last section shows how much. But the search means today's web is part of every answer, so a page that went up this month can be in one.
The AI checks the web before it answers, so what is on your website today can reach a customer today. You are not stuck with whatever it learned last year.
When it quotes a source, the source is a business's own website
Here is the question we actually wanted answered. When the AI goes looking, does it read the big listing sites, or does it read the businesses themselves?
We counted the websites it credited, once each per answer: 11136 of them. 88% were a business's own website. 10% were a directory. And the directories that did show up are a short list, 30 of them across the whole study, none of them used much.
- Each mark: Each bar is a count of how many times the AI quoted that kind of website.
- Left to right: How many answers credited a website of that kind.
- Up and down: The kind of website the source was.
- What to look for: If AI mostly learned about local businesses from directories, the middle bar would be the long one. It is not.
Show the directories, all of them
| Directory | Answers it was a source for |
|---|---|
| expertise.com | 314.000 |
| facebook.com | 134.000 |
| threebestrated.com | 77.000 |
| weedmaps.com | 65.000 |
| angi.com | 64.000 |
| winnie.com | 49.000 |
| homeadvisor.com | 47.000 |
| medicareagentshub.com | 47.000 |
| mychamber.org | 43.000 |
| funeralocity.com | 29.000 |
| atly.com | 28.000 |
| zillow.com | 27.000 |
| reddit.com | 26.000 |
| resy.com | 26.000 |
| google.com | 23.000 |
| fastexpert.com | 21.000 |
| tebra.com | 19.000 |
| homeguide.com | 18.000 |
| themanifest.com | 18.000 |
| thumbtack.com | 14.000 |
| bbb.org | 10.000 |
| timeout.com | 10.000 |
| homelight.com | 9.000 |
| birdeye.com | 8.000 |
| houzz.com | 8.000 |
| iqsdirectory.com | 8.000 |
| upwards.com | 7.000 |
| listwithclever.com | 6.000 |
| parting.com | 5.000 |
| porch.com | 2.000 |
Your own website is the thing being read. Not your Yelp page, which never came up once. So the words on your site are the words the AI has to describe you with.
And when it reads your site, you are almost always in the answer
We can go one step further, because each answer records both the sites it read and the businesses it named. So we can check them against each other, inside the same answer.
Of the 9751 times the AI quoted a business's own website, 73% of the time it went on to recommend that exact business in the same breath. Reading and recommending are, very nearly, the same event.
If the AI opens your website while it is deciding, you are almost certainly going to be one of the businesses it names.
There is more than one way in
Reading a site is not the only route to being recommended, and the numbers show how much else is going on. Across every answer the AI named 12,956 businesses. 56% of those had their own website quoted. The rest it named from what it already knew, from a directory, or from pages it read without crediting them.
So a website is one door, and it is the one we can watch open. When the AI reads a site, that business gets named. What we cannot see is the rest of what it knows about your town, and there is clearly plenty of it.
Your website is one of the ways AI finds you, and the one you control. It is not the only one.
How we measured this
We ran 3399 questions of the kind a real customer types, across 71 local markets. For each answer we recorded three things: the searches the AI ran, the websites it credited as sources, and the businesses it named.
Sources are counted once per answer. If an answer credited three pages from one website, that is one source, because what we store is the website rather than each page. So "11136 sources" means 11136 times a website was behind an answer, not 11136 separate pages.
We then sorted each one into "a business's own website" or "a directory", using a hand-written list of directories rather than a rule of thumb. A rule like "anything quoted in several towns is a directory" would have labelled a franchise as a listing site, which would push a real company's website into the wrong column.
To check whether a site it read belonged to a business it named, we matched the web address against the business name. That matching is deliberately cautious: it needs two parts of the name to line up, so a generic address like "electricianinmytown.com" is matched to nobody. Being cautious means we under-count the pairs, which pushes our headline figure DOWN rather than up.
Scope
- 71 markets, Amusement Center, Architecture, Banking, Barbershop, Bolt Supply, Brewery, Business Lawyer, Cabinet Maker, Car Rental, Carpet Cleaning, Cat Grooming, Child Enrichment, Childcare, Comercial Real Estate, Construction, Crematory, Criminal Defense Lawyer, Daycare, Dentist, Dim Sum Restaurant, Dispensary, Electrical, Electrical Services, Executive Business Assessment, Financial Advisor, Financial Consulting, Graphic Design, Handyman, Human Resources, Hvac, Information Technology, It, Landscaping, Life Insurance, Machine Rentals, Manufacturing, Marina, Marketing Agency, Medicare, Mobile Car Detailing, Mortgage, Obgyn, Painting, Plumbing, Podiatrist, Podiatry, Promotional Products Marketing Solutions, Rc Sailboat Racing, Real Estate, Roofing, Seo Company, Solar, Veterinarian and Web Design, in Anaheim, Big Bear Lake, Boyle Heights Los Angeles, Burbank, Corona, Crestline, East Los Angeles, Fontana, Glendale, Long Beach, Los Angeles, New York, Norco, Oak Park, Ontario, Orange, Orange County, Pasadena, Rancho Cucamonga, Santa Ana, Torrance, Upland, West Covina and Yorba Linda. Enough to see the pattern, not enough to put a decimal point on it.
- We can only count sources the AI credited, which it did on 85% of answers. It certainly reads more than it cites.
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2ee53d5, data fingerprint 14e8288308b4b5b6. These are the numbers as of that date, on that corpus. The web is being rebuilt around how AI reads it, so they will move. When they move enough to change the advice, we publish a new study rather than quietly editing this one. See every study we have published.