The problem this solves
When someone asks an AI assistant for the best plumber, dentist, or agency in their city, the assistant answers with names - a short list, confidently framed, drawn from directories, review profiles, and local pages the engines trust. For a service business, absence from that short list is invisible lost demand: no impression data, no ranking report, no trace. Most local operators have never once checked what the assistants say about their market, and their marketing still optimizes surfaces the answer engines barely read.
Local answers are unusually winnable. They lean on a small, identifiable set of citation sources - the directories, review platforms, and local pages the engines consult for that geography and trade - and the businesses being recommended are rarely optimizing for it deliberately. A focused effort on the right sources can move these answers faster than almost any competitive SEO play, but only if you know exactly which sources feed your cities' answers.
How the mission runs
- Capture the answers in your cities. AI Visibility asks the live engines the best-service questions for each of your three cities, across the phrasings buyers actually use. Every response is captured: who gets recommended, in what order, and how each business is described. This is the ground truth the plan sets out to change.
- Trace the citation supply chain. For each answer, the agent identifies the sources behind it - which directories, review platforms, and local pages the engines drew on. Web Research profiles those sources, and SERP shows how they rank for the same local queries, mapping the full supply chain of recommendation.
- Audit your presence at each source. The agent checks your business against every influential source: listed or absent, information accurate or stale, reviews thin or strong, category and geography correctly attributed. Each gap is scored by how much the source appears to influence the answers you want to win.
- Deliver the citation-building plan. The plan lists, in priority order, the exact directories and pages to claim or fix per city, what each entry needs, and the review-generation focus that would move your standing. Each item names the answers it targets, so effort maps directly to visible outcomes.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
A per-city report showing exactly how the assistants answer your best-service questions today and who wins them, the ranked list of citation sources feeding those answers, your audited presence at each source with gaps flagged, and a sequenced action plan naming every directory, page, and profile to fix. It is written to be executed by an office manager or a local agency without further translation.
Make it yours
- Add neighboring suburbs and near-me phrasings to the question set when your service area is wider than the three core cities.
- Run the same capture on your two strongest local rivals to see which citation sources power their recommendations and where you can intercept them.
- Re-run every quarter after executing the plan and track your appearance rate per city as the single success metric that matters.
Frequently asked questions
How are the local questions chosen?
From how buyers actually phrase them: best-in-city, near-me variants, and the trade-specific phrasings SERP data shows people use in your markets. You can add your own high-value questions, and the set is recorded so every future run measures against the same panel.
Which citation sources end up mattering most?
It varies by trade and geography, which is the point of tracing rather than assuming. The engines reveal their sources in the captured answers, and the plan reflects what your cities' answers actually rely on - typically a mix of major directories, review platforms, and a few local pages.
How long until the answers change?
Directory fixes and review momentum typically get re-read by the engines over weeks rather than days, and timelines vary by market. The honest measure is the quarterly re-run: same questions, same cities, tracked appearance rate. The citation audit usually improves before the answers themselves do.