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Free AI citation factor check.
Does your homepage show what cited sites show?
Which website factors go with AI citations for local businesses? In our October 2026 test of 40 factors on 880 Houston business websites, six held up in every test: a meta description, reviews or testimonials on the homepage, a specific business type in the schema, prices, years in business, and city pages. This free check looks for all six on your homepage with the study's own crawler and rules.
Enter your homepage. We read it the way the study's crawler did, as raw HTML without running JavaScript, and show what we found next to the study's numbers for each factor: how many cited and not-cited Houston sites had it, and how often Houston businesses with and without it were cited. Add your Google rating and review count, and it also compares your Business Profile with the ones Google AI Mode recommended. You get evidence, not a made-up AI score. The study shows which sites were cited, not what caused it.
03 / The evidence
Six factors held up.
Here is the evidence.
For each factor: the share of cited and not-cited sites that had it, the adjusted odds ratio, and the citation rate among Houston census businesses with and without it. An odds ratio above 1 means sites with the factor were more likely to be cited, after allowing for industry and link authority.
| Factor | Cited sites | Not cited | Odds ratio (95% interval) | Census sites cited, with / without |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta description | 96% | 79% | 5.9 (3.3 to 10.5) | 10.5% / 0.0% |
| Reviews or testimonials on the homepage | 75% | 46% | 3.4 (2.4 to 4.7) | 14.1% / 3.2% |
| Specific business type in the schema (Dentist, Plumber...) | 55% | 33% | 3.0 (2.1 to 4.2) | 15.3% / 4.7% |
| Prices on the homepage | 35% | 18% | 2.5 (1.8 to 3.6) | 14.6% / 7.0% |
| Years in business stated | 53% | 36% | 1.8 (1.3 to 2.4) | 12.6% / 6.0% |
| City pages in the sitemap | 69% (median 10) | 46% (median 0) | 1.6 per SD (1.4 to 2.0) | 14.1% / 3.2% |
492 sites cited by Google AI Mode or Perplexity against 388 not-cited Houston sites in the same 12 industries, crawled October 30, 2026. Census: 424 Houston businesses in those industries, 36 of them cited. Source: Houston AI Citation Study factor test (CC BY 4.0).
Count them up
Cited sites usually had several of the six, not just one. The median cited site had 4 of 6, and 62% had 4 or more. The median site that was not cited had 3, and 31% had 4 or more. Among the 424 census businesses, the more of the six a homepage showed, the more often it was cited by October 30:
These are small groups from one metro on one day. Read the pattern as a direction, not a forecast for any single site.
04 / Google AI Mode
AI Mode reads your profile.
Here is what its picks had.
No website factor held up for Google AI Mode: almost all of its picks came from Google Business Profile cards. So the check also compares your profile with the 398 profiles AI Mode recommended for "who is the best" questions: a median of 323 reviews and a 4.9-star rating across all 15 industries.
| Industry | Picks with a profile card | Median reviews | Middle half of reviews | Median rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO agencies | 20 | 27 | 12 to 88 | 5.0 |
| AC repair | 31 | 462 | 203 to 967 | 4.9 |
| Personal injury lawyers | 31 | 183 | 76 to 382 | 4.9 |
| Roofers | 29 | 211 | 94 to 348 | 4.9 |
| Dentists | 33 | 718 | 448 to 951 | 4.9 |
| Car detailing | 28 | 116 | 87 to 225 | 5.0 |
| Auto repair | 36 | 743 | 430 to 1,100 | 4.8 |
| Veterinarians | 29 | 475 | 287 to 603 | 4.7 |
| Chiropractors | 23 | 101 | 59 to 255 | 5.0 |
| Gyms | 21 | 403 | 117 to 1,200 | 4.7 |
| Med spas | 31 | 292 | 155 to 430 | 4.9 |
| Plumbers | 30 | 290 | 141 to 689 | 4.9 |
| Hair salons | 30 | 203 | 103 to 668 | 4.9 |
| Mexican restaurants | 20 | 1,900 | 827 to 3,425 | 4.5 |
| Real estate agents | 6 | 145 | 59 to 322 | 4.9 |
Google AI Mode answers to "Who is the best ___ in [city], TX?" for 8 Greater Houston areas, October 30, 2026: every recommended business that showed a Business Profile card with a rating and review count. The middle half runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile. Source: the study's recommendations data (CC BY 4.0). These are the businesses AI Mode picked; the study did not record the ones it passed over, so a count above the median does not guarantee a pick.
05 / How the check works
Same crawler,
same rules.
The study's factor crawl ran on a copy of the scanner behind this site's free tools. This check uses that scanner and the study's rules, so your homepage is measured the way the 880 study sites were.
- What we read: the HTML your server sends, without running JavaScript, up to 1.5 MB. Text counts when it sits in paragraphs, list items, headings, table cells, quotes, captions or FAQ summaries, the same tags the study used. Anything that only appears after scripts run is invisible to this check, as it was to the study's crawler.
- Meta description: a description tag in the page head that is not empty.
- Reviews or testimonials: the words review, reviews, testimonial, testimonials, 5-star or five-star in the readable text. The rule is broad because it is the study's rule, so we show you the exact text it matched. If your reviews come from a widget such as Elfsight, Trustindex or EmbedSocial, we name it and tell you when its reviews are missing from the HTML.
- Specific business type: a structured data type such as Dentist, Plumber, HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor, AutoRepair, Attorney or VeterinaryCare, rather than a generic LocalBusiness or Organization. Schema.org business types outside the study's 15 industries, such as AccountingService or Florist, also count, so other trades are not marked down.
- Prices: a dollar sign followed by a number in the readable text, such as "$89" or "from $129".
- Years in business: a phrase such as "since 1998" or "25 years" in the readable text.
- City pages: sitemap URLs whose path names a Greater Houston city or neighborhood from the study's list, or a city you enter. We find the sitemap the way the study did: Sitemap lines in robots.txt, then /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml and /wp-sitemap.xml, following an index into up to six child sitemaps (the study read up to eight). Unlike the study's crawler, the tool reads sitemaps only on your own site and its subdomains, and counts at most 50,000 sitemap URLs.
- Business Profile comparison: your industry, rating and review count stay in your browser and are compared with the Business Profiles Google AI Mode recommended in the study, from its published recommendations data.
- Also measured: business schema, question-style subheadings, a tap-to-call link and an llms.txt file. Each went with citations on its own but added nothing once the other factors were known.
06 / Honest boundaries
A measured check.
Not a citation promise.
- Association, not cause: businesses that do these things often do many other things well too.
- Google AI Mode is different. No website factor held up for it: it cited few business websites, because most of its citations were Google Business Profiles. For AI Mode, compare your Business Profile in the check above and work on reviews first.
- The factor test covered Google AI Mode and Perplexity. ChatGPT and Claude were added to the study later and were not part of it.
- The numbers come from Houston-area businesses in 12 industries on October 30, 2026. The rules work on any site; the benchmarks are local.
- One homepage, read once. We do not crawl your whole site, run JavaScript, ask an AI engine, or give you a rank.
- No page content is stored, and a bot check and per-visitor limits keep the tool fair to use.
07 / What did not hold up
Popular advice
that did not separate sites.
These did not set cited sites apart once the other factors were known. That does not make them useless; it means they are not the place to start.
- llms.txt: 46% of cited sites had one, against 33% of the rest, but the difference disappeared once content factors were in the model.
- Business schema, question-style subheadings and tap-to-call links: all more common on cited sites, all explained by the other factors. The specific business type carried the schema signal.
- Page speed: 60% of cited homepages responded in under 1.5 seconds, against 63% of the rest. No clear link.
- Domain age: cited sites were not older. The median was 10.2 years, against 12.5 for sites that were not cited.
- Firewall settings: 85% of cited sites let the AI crawlers through, against 81% of the rest, a gap that was not significant.
- Link authority: mixed. Cited sites had about the same median link rank as sites that were not cited; among established census businesses, the more-linked half was cited more often.
Questions
About the check.
What does the AI citation factor check test?
It checks one homepage for the six website factors that held up in our October 2026 test of 40 factors on 880 Houston business websites: a meta description, reviews or testimonials, a specific business type in the schema, prices, years in business, and city pages in the sitemap. It uses the same crawler and the same rules as the study.
Will adding these factors get my business cited by AI search?
Not guaranteed. In the study, cited sites had these factors more often, which is an association, not proof that adding them causes citations. They are honest improvements that the cited Houston businesses shared. For Google AI Mode, your Google Business Profile matters more: 96% of the businesses it recommended came from profile cards.
How many Google reviews do businesses that Google AI Mode recommends have?
In our October 2026 Houston study, the 398 businesses Google AI Mode recommended with a Business Profile card had a median of 323 reviews and a 4.9-star rating. It varies a lot by industry, from a median of 27 reviews for SEO agencies to 1,900 for Mexican restaurants. Enter your rating and review count in the check to compare your profile with the picks in your industry.
Why doesn't my review widget count?
Many review widgets load their reviews with JavaScript after the page opens. The study's crawler read only the HTML the server sends, the way crawlers that do not run JavaScript read a page, so it never saw that text. Add a few real review quotes as plain text on the homepage and keep the widget if you like it.
How is this different from the free AI visibility checker?
The AI visibility checker tests technical access: whether AI crawlers may fetch a page, whether its text is readable without JavaScript, and the basics of metadata, headings and schema. This check tests the six content and trust factors that went with citations in our study, with the study's numbers beside each one. Run both: access first, then the six.
My business is outside Houston. Is the check still useful?
The rules work on any public website, and you can enter the cities you serve for the city-page count. The benchmarks come from Houston-area businesses in October 2026, so treat them as a local reference point, not a national standard.
Is the check free, and what do you keep?
Yes. The six results and the study's numbers are free with no login. Enter your name and email to unlock the fix list and the download. We do not store your page content; a result is cached for 10 minutes so a repeat check is instant.
Next / Review
Want the six added for you?
We can add readable reviews, the right schema type, prices, a years-in-business line and city pages, then show you what Google AI Mode and Perplexity cite for your industry and city.