95%
of AI Mode's picks were Google Business Profiles. In 101 of 108 answers with picks, every business came from a Business Profile card. Their median: 4.9 stars and 323 reviews.
Google AI ModeResearch / Houston AI Citation Study
Houston AI Citation Study
October 2026.
Which local businesses do AI search engines recommend, and why? We asked Google AI Mode and Perplexity 232 questions about 15 local industries in 8 Greater Houston cities and traced 3,102 citations and 937 recommendations. The two engines work differently: 95% of the businesses AI Mode recommended came straight from Google Business Profiles, while Perplexity relied on business websites and directories. Websites still count: Houston businesses whose sites passed four AI-ready basics in our October 2 crawl were 4 times as likely to be cited four weeks later.
This is the follow-up to the Houston AI Visibility Index. The Index measured what AI crawlers can read on 3,014 local websites. This study measures what AI answers actually cite, then joins the two.
01 / Key findings
What AI answers cite for local businesses.
232 questions, asked once on each engine on October 30, 2026 (464 answers). Perplexity was asked every question a second time to test stability. Intervals and sample sizes are in the downloadable data.
4x
more likely to be cited with the AI-ready basics. Of Houston business sites that passed all four basics on October 2, 5.9% were cited four weeks later, against 1.4% of sites that did not.
Both engines49%
of Perplexity's citations for "who is the best" questions were business websites. Directories and ranking sites took 45%. Reddit and social media took under 1%.
Perplexity8%
same top pick on both engines. For the same question, AI Mode and Perplexity named the same first business only 9 times in 108, and shared any source on 25% of questions.
Both engines80%
of cited business pages named the city. For "best ___ in [city]" questions, 4 in 5 cited business pages had the city in the URL or title. City pages were the most-cited page type.
Business websites22%
of AI Mode's price citations were booking pages. Square, Tekmetric, Vetstoria and similar booking pages with public prices were cited as often as Business Profiles on cost questions.
Google AI Mode02 / Two engines, two playbooks
AI Mode reads your profile.
Perplexity reads your site.
Share of all citations by source type. "Who is the best" questions ask for a recommendation; price questions ask what a service costs in that city.
| Source | AI Mode, best | AI Mode, price | Perplexity, best | Perplexity, price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profiles | 79% | 21% | 0% | 0% |
| Local business websites | 3.5% | 24% | 40% | 39% |
| Chain and franchise websites | 1.8% | 11% | 7.6% | 15% |
| Booking pages (Square and similar) | 4.2% | 22% | 0.1% | 0.4% |
| Directories, review and ranking sites | 9.3% | 11% | 45% | 29% |
| National how-to and cost guides | 1.3% | 7.9% | 1.4% | 13% |
| News and city guides | 0.2% | 0% | 3.1% | 0.4% |
| Reddit and social media | 0.2% | 0.6% | 0.8% | 0.4% |
| Business sites outside Houston | 0% | 2.1% | 1.4% | 2.9% |
- AI Mode cites few sources. It averaged 3.4 citations per answer against 10 for Perplexity, and most AI Mode citations on recommendation questions were the Business Profile cards of the businesses it named.
- Perplexity backs each pick with a source. A business's own website was among the sources for 38% of the businesses Perplexity recommended. The other 60% rested only on third-party pages such as Yelp, Zocdoc, Best Lawyers or HAR.com.
- Reddit barely appears. It was cited in 9 of 464 answers. For local service questions, both engines went to businesses, directories and Google's own listings instead.
- City names get confused. 9 of 58 answers about Pasadena, Texas cited businesses in other states, mostly Pasadena, California.
03 / Does an AI-ready website help?
Cited sites pass the basics
twice as often.
We ran every cited local business homepage through the same checks as the Index and compared them with 1,531 Houston business sites in the same industries that were not cited.
| Check | Cited by AI | Not cited | Adjusted odds ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| All four AI-ready basics | 65% | 32% | 3.6 (2.9 to 4.5) |
| 120+ words readable without JavaScript | 97% | 82% | 5.4 (3.1 to 9.4) |
| Business schema | 81% | 56% | 3.1 (2.4 to 3.9) |
| FAQ or Q&A schema | 46% | 17% | 3.4 (2.7 to 4.3) |
| Question-style subheadings | 68% | 35% | 2.8 (2.2 to 3.5) |
| Exactly one H1 | 76% | 56% | 2.6 (2.0 to 3.3) |
| AI search crawlers allowed | 98% | 95% | 3.4 (1.7 to 6.9) |
| llms.txt published | 45% | 29% | 2.0 (1.6 to 2.4) |
- The order of events holds. We also looked only at the 1,580 census businesses in these industries, using checks measured on October 2, before any question was asked. 5.9% of sites passing all four basics were cited by October 30, against 1.4% of the rest (adjusted odds ratio 4.6, 95% interval 2.3 to 9.2). FAQ schema (7.4% against 1.9%) and question-style subheadings (5.6% against 1.4%) showed the same pattern.
- Links do not explain it. Cited sites were not more linked-to than the census: their median Common Crawl rank was 18.2 million, against 14.5 million for the census (a higher number means fewer links). The gap held in every authority quarter, from 81% against 32% among the most-linked sites to 55% against 26% among the least-linked.
- We then tested 40 factors. Against Houston sites in the same industries, cited sites still passed all four basics more often (68% against 41%, odds ratio 3.0). Of 40 commonly recommended factors, six held up in every test: reviews on the homepage, a specific business type in the schema, prices, years in business, city pages and a meta description. See which AI citation factors matter.
- This is association, not proof. Businesses that fix the basics often invest in their site and reviews in other ways too. A controlled test by Ahrefs found that adding schema to pages that were already cited did not raise citations; our data covers a different case, local sites that AI had not necessarily seen before.
04 / Google Business Profiles
What AI Mode's picks
have in common.
AI Mode listed 421 businesses in answers to "who is the best" questions. 398 came with a Business Profile card showing the rating and review count.
4.9
median star rating. 95% had 4.5 stars or more and 81% had 4.8 or more. The lowest rating recommended was 3.9.
398 profiles323
median review count. 78% had at least 100 reviews and fewer than 1 in 10 had under 50. The first business named had a median of 416.
398 profiles27
median reviews for SEO agencies. Review counts varied by industry, from 27 for SEO agencies and about 100 for chiropractors to over 700 for dentists and auto repair.
By industry05 / The pages that get cited
City pages, real prices,
plain answers.
We crawled 1,313 business-website pages that the answers cited. 1,266 were readable.
- City and location pages were the most-cited business pages (40%), ahead of homepages (21%), service pages (16%) and pricing pages (14%).
- For "who is the best" questions, 80% of cited business pages named the city in the URL or title, and 61% named it in the H1.
- For price questions, pricing pages carried the business. 41% of the business pages AI Mode cited on cost questions were pricing or cost pages. Two in three pages cited for price questions had FAQ schema.
- Cited pages were substantial. The median cited page had 1,235 words readable without JavaScript; 73% had business schema, 57% had FAQ schema and 67% used question-style subheadings.
06 / "Best of" lists
Ranking yourself
did not help.
Some businesses publish "Best plumbers in Katy" posts that list themselves first. We flagged every cited page titled or addressed as a "best" or "top" list.
- Self-ranking posts were rare: 4.2% of the business pages Perplexity cited and almost none in AI Mode.
- They gave no measurable edge. When a business's own "best of" post was cited, Perplexity recommended that business 47% of the time, about the same as for businesses whose other pages were cited (45%).
- Third-party ranking sites matter more. "Best ___ in [city]" lists on directories and ranking sites made up 20% of all Perplexity citations. Being listed on them is a better use of effort than writing your own.
07 / Ask twice
Same sources,
different names.
We asked Perplexity every question again, a median of 10 minutes later.
- The sources barely moved. The cited domains overlapped 98.5% between the two runs.
- The top pick usually held: the same business came first in 82% of answers.
- The full list shifted. Only 69% of the recommended businesses overlapped between runs, so a business on the edge of a list can appear one minute and drop out the next. One check is not a measurement; track a set of questions over time on more than one engine.
08 / By industry
Where each industry
gets its citations.
Both engines, both question types. Business sites include chains; directories include review and ranking sites. The full table is in the data.
| Industry | Business sites | Directories | Business Profiles | Top directory | Median reviews, AI Mode picks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO agencies | 73% | 19% | 6.6% | Clutch, DesignRush, Semrush | 27 |
| AC repair | 62% | 13% | 17% | HVACService.io | 462 |
| Personal injury lawyers | 55% | 37% | 4.1% | Best Lawyers | 183 |
| Roofers | 53% | 23% | 12% | Woodlands Online | 211 |
| Dentists | 52% | 20% | 15% | Zocdoc | 718 |
| Car detailing | 51% | 20% | 15% | CeramicCoating.com | 116 |
| Auto repair | 49% | 28% | 9.3% | RepairPal | 743 |
| Veterinarians | 45% | 23% | 16% | Pawlicy | 475 |
| Chiropractors | 42% | 32% | 16% | HealthHives, Zocdoc | 101 |
| Gyms | 38% | 25% | 24% | Yelp | 403 |
| Med spas | 38% | 35% | 18% | The Clinic Compass | 292 |
| Plumbers | 32% | 32% | 8.2% | Angi | 290 |
| Hair salons | 27% | 44% | 18% | Fresha | 203 |
| Mexican restaurants | 19% | 44% | 22% | Restaurantji, Tripadvisor | 1,900 |
| Real estate agents | 15% | 72% | 5.8% | HAR.com | 145 |
09 / What to do
Seven moves, from the data.
Ordered by how many answers they touch. Each one maps to a finding above.
- Treat your Google Business Profile as your AI Mode landing page. Pick the right primary category, list services and prices, and keep reviews coming. AI Mode's picks had a median of 4.9 stars and 323 reviews.
- Pass the four AI-ready basics. Real text without JavaScript, business schema, one clear H1, and no AI search crawlers blocked. Sites that passed were 4 times as likely to be cited. Our free scanner checks all four.
- Publish one page per city you serve, with the city in the title and H1 and details only a local business would know. Four in five cited business pages for "best ___ in [city]" questions named the city.
- Put real prices on a page AI can read, and keep the price list on your booking page public. Pricing pages and booking pages carried most business citations on cost questions.
- Answer the questions customers ask with question-style subheadings and matching FAQ schema. 57% of cited business pages had FAQ schema, against 17% of the Houston business homepages in the census. Our answer readiness tool scores a page.
- Get listed where AI looks for your industry: HAR.com for agents, Best Lawyers and Justia for attorneys, Zocdoc for dentists and chiropractors, Fresha for salons, RepairPal for auto repair. Directories carried 45% of Perplexity's recommendation citations.
- Skip self-ranking posts and measure on more than one engine. "Best of" posts about yourself gave no edge, and the two engines agreed on the top pick only 8% of the time.
10 / Method
How we measured.
Every number on this page is computed by the published scripts from the raw answers.
- Questions: 15 industries in 8 areas (Houston, Katy, Sugar Land, Spring, The Woodlands, Pasadena, Clear Lake and Humble). Each industry had a "Who is the best ___ in [city], TX?" question and, except restaurants, a price question such as "How much does AC repair cost in Katy, TX?". 232 questions in all.
- Engines: Google AI Mode, collected through SerpApi with the search located in Houston, and Perplexity Sonar through its public API. Each question was sent alone, with no system prompt and no brand named. All answers were collected on October 30, 2026 between 12:46 and 13:17 UTC; Perplexity's second run followed a median of 10 minutes later.
- Citations: every source URL each answer cited, counted once per answer: 3,102 in the main run (5,422 including Perplexity's second run) from 1,034 domains. Each domain was coded by hand or by rule into a source type; local business sites were confirmed through the Index census, a Texas address or phone in their schema, or a match to a recommended business. Business sites with a non-Texas address were coded as outside Houston.
- Recommendations: AI Mode's Business Profile cards and named list items, and the bold business names in Perplexity's answers, with the sources each answer attached to that name. A hand check of 55 random Perplexity recommendations found 53 correct names; the two name errors and four website-matching errors it found were fixed before the final analysis.
- Website checks: cited local business homepages and every cited business page were crawled on October 30, 2026 with the same engine as the Index (October 2, 2026). Link authority is the domain's harmonic-centrality rank in the Common Crawl web graph for August to October 2026. Odds ratios come from logistic regressions with industry fixed effects; percentage intervals use a bootstrap over answers.
- Limits: one day, one metro, two engines, and API or scraped results rather than a logged-in person's screen. AI Mode's citations come from its reference list, which may not show every source it used. The census covers businesses listed with a website in OpenStreetMap, not every business. ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews were not included.
- Disclosure: Marketing & AI is a Houston SEO and AEO agency, and SEO agencies were one of the 15 industries. We were not cited or named in any answer.
11 / Data & citation
Use the numbers.
The data is free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0: every question, every citation, every recommended business, and the tables behind this page. Answer text and per-site check results are not published.
- All 5,422 citations (CSV): question, engine, run, rank, URL, domain, source type and page type.
- All 1,460 recommendations (CSV): business name, rank, Google rating and reviews where AI Mode showed them, and the source types behind each pick.
- All 40 website factors (CSV): odds ratios and verdicts per engine, from the factor test.
The full dataset, with the questions and answers tables, a methods note and the analysis scripts, is archived with a permanent DOI on Zenodo, and also published on Hugging Face and Kaggle.
Cite as: Rusic, A. (2026). Houston AI Citation Study, October 2026 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23820176
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Next / Your business
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Questions
About the study.
Where do AI search engines get local business recommendations?
It depends on the engine. In our October 2026 study of 232 Houston questions, 79% of Google AI Mode's citations on "who is the best" questions were Google Business Profiles. Perplexity cited business websites (49%) and directories or ranking sites (45%), and almost never Reddit.
Does Google AI Mode use Google Business Profiles?
Yes. 95% of the businesses AI Mode recommended in our study came from Google Business Profile cards. Those businesses had a median of 4.9 stars and 323 reviews, and 95% had at least 4.5 stars.
Does an AI-ready website help a local business get cited?
In our data, yes, as an association. Houston business sites that passed four AI-ready basics on October 2, 2026 (AI crawlers allowed, 120+ words without JavaScript, business schema, one H1) were 4 times as likely to be cited by Google AI Mode or Perplexity four weeks later: 5.9% against 1.4%.
Do AI search engines agree on which local business is best?
Rarely. Google AI Mode and Perplexity named the same top business for only 8% of the same questions and shared any cited source on 25%. Asked again ten minutes later, Perplexity kept its top pick 82% of the time but changed about a third of the businesses it listed.
Do self-promotional "best of" blog posts help?
Not in our data. They made up 4.2% of the business pages Perplexity cited, and the business that wrote one was recommended 47% of the time, about the same as other cited businesses (45%). Third-party ranking sites carried 20% of Perplexity's citations.