When someone asks AI who to call, does your name come up?
The answer is assembled from your Google Business Profile, your listings, and your reviews — not your website — and most local businesses have never checked whether they appear at all.
This is early positioning in a small, high-quality channel — not a traffic source that pays for itself this quarter.
AI referrals are roughly 1% of web traffic today. Organic search is still around 53%. Google still holds about 80% of search. Anyone telling you to abandon Google is selling something.
What has changed is that AI-sourced visitors convert about 4.4× better than classic organic and engage roughly 31% longer per session, and the channel is compounding fast. The work that moves it is mostly the local SEO and review work you already need for the map pack — the new thing is proving it moved.
Three facts, not a new discipline
Listings and your own site, not a magic file
Listings and your own site account for 86% of AI citations for local queries. AI builds answers from the searcher's real-world location and context — not a generic view of your brand.
Mentions beat backlinks for AI Overviews
Branded web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664 versus 0.218 for backlinks — mentions matter roughly three times more than links now.
Being the source is the new ranking
Zero-click is 68% of Google searches and 83% on queries with an AI Overview, but brands cited inside the overview earn 35% more organic clicks.
The things every other agency is about to bill you for
- llms.txt as a product. Ahrefs studied 137,000 sites and found 97% of llms.txt files received zero traffic. SE Ranking analyzed roughly 300,000 domains and found no significant correlation with AI citations. Google's Gary Illyes confirmed Google doesn't support it; John Mueller compared it to the keywords meta tag. We will add one for free in twenty minutes. We will never bill for it.
- Markdown mirrors of your pages. The trick creates duplicate content at scale and does not buy you citations. We will not build them.
- An "AEO package" that is keyword content renamed. If the work is local SEO and reviews, we call it that.
- A guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend you. Model outputs are non-deterministic and citation patterns are volatile. Anyone promising otherwise is lying.
This section is the reason the page works. Everyone else is selling the thing we are telling you is worthless.
Four things, every month
Monthly prompt tracking
Twenty prompts a homeowner would plausibly type, run across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok — one hundred answers. How many named you. Which competitors appeared and how often.
Listings and entity consistency
Name, address, phone, categories, and hours matched across the sources AI actually cites. That is the same Get Found work — measured against whether the models use it.
Review velocity
Fresh Google Business Profile reviews keep feeding the answers. As of July 2025 there is no separate LSA review system — GBP reviews are what rank you in Local Services and what AI reads.
AI referral attribution in GA4
Conductor found 89% of brands cannot properly attribute AI traffic, and the median property undercounts it 30–40%. Setup is included in onboarding so you can see what the channel actually sent.
Included in Full Pipeline. First report free.
Monthly tracking across five platforms, plus the listings and attribution work that moves the number. On Lead Engine or standalone, add it at $297/mo.
Get your free AI visibility report
We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok who they'd recommend in your trade and your city — twenty ways. You get one page: how many of one hundred answers named you, which competitors appeared and how often, which sources the answers drew from, and one paragraph on why.
Get your free AI visibility reportMethodology is on the report: which platforms, which prompts, what date, run from what location. Month-over-month swings happen; the report says so before you ask.
What you get back
- Twenty prompts × five platforms = one hundred answers
- Your share of mentions versus named competitors
- Sources the answers drew from
- Run from a real consumer app view, dated and located — not an API substitute
The questions people ask before they try it
If yours isn't here, call and ask.
No. Organic search is still the majority of web traffic and Google still holds about 80% of search. AI referrals are roughly 1% today. Anyone telling you to abandon Google for an AEO package is selling a rename of the work you already need.
For local queries, AI answers are assembled mostly from Google Business Profile, map and directory listings, and reviews — Yext found 86% of citations came from sources the brand already controls. Your site still matters for branded mentions and as a source, but the map pack and listings are what decide whether you get named at all.
Citation patterns are volatile — ChatGPT's Reddit share collapsed from roughly 60% to 10% in a single month in late 2025. We measure monthly and report what changed. Expect early positioning, not a channel that pays for itself this quarter.
No, and anyone promising it is lying. Model outputs are non-deterministic and citation patterns shift without notice. We report what changed and what we did. That is the product.
Most of the work is the same Get Found and Review Engine work: GBP, listings, entity consistency, review velocity. AI Visibility is the measurement layer — monthly prompt tracking across five platforms and GA4 attribution — so you can see whether that work made the models name you. It is not a second SEO package.
Find out whether AI names you.
The first report is free. No pitch attached to the results.