For years, the local-SEO advice for a Fort Wayne plumber, dentist, or auto shop was some version of the same thing: claim your directory listings, chase reviews, and pray the Google Map Pack puts you in the top three. A new dataset suggests that when the question is asked to Google's Gemini instead of Google Search, the rulebook changes — and in a way that actually favors the businesses willing to build real, specific web pages.
A study called the AI Citation Ledger from Steady Demand analyzed 14,472 citations pulled from 1,487 local search queries across the 50 largest U.S. metro areas and 10 service categories. As Search Engine Land reported, the headline finding flips the usual assumption on its head: nearly 60% of Gemini's local citations point directly to a business's own website — more than directories, review platforms, and forums combined.
That is genuinely good news if you're a small business in Northeast Indiana. It means the surface Gemini quotes most often is the one you fully control. But the same study also found that Gemini is far less consistent than a traditional ranking — a wrinkle the researchers call “grounding drift” — so a single win is not a durable one. This playbook walks through what the data says and what a Fort Wayne business should actually do about it.
Key Takeaways
- Nearly 60% of Gemini's local AI citations point to business websites — more than all directories and forums combined.
- Reddit alone earned 13.7% of citations, outperforming every local-service directory (Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor) put together at 10.3%.
- “Grounding drift” means identical Gemini queries returned the same sources only ~40% of the time and the same top business just ~7% of the time — versus ~90% for Google's local pack.
- Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same domains only 8% of the time; you cannot assume a win on one engine transfers to another.
- Citation patterns vary sharply by industry — there is no single playbook that works for every service category.
- Your own well-structured service and city pages are the highest-leverage asset you actually own.
Why does Gemini cite business websites more than directories?
The traditional local-search hierarchy put aggregators near the top. Directories like Angi, HomeAdvisor, and the Better Business Bureau spent a decade building the kind of domain authority that outranked the small businesses they listed. The Steady Demand data suggests Gemini treats the landscape differently: it samples business websites first.
According to the Steady Demand analysis, business websites accounted for roughly 59.9% of Gemini's local citations, while all local-service directories combined landed at about 10.3% and general directories at 10.4%. In its coverage of the study, MarTech put the website figure at 59% and framed it the same way: brands cannot assume success on one AI platform transfers to another. The researchers cast this as a direct contradiction of the “AI killed SEO” narrative — on-site content is not obsolete; for Gemini's local answers, it is the single most-cited category.
There is an important nuance under that number. The study found that AI-recommended businesses averaged 4.75 stars, essentially matching the 4.84-star average of a plain Google search baseline. In other words, Gemini didn't invent a new quality bar — it inherited the one Google's search layer already built. And review volume barely moved the needle once a business reached local visibility: the study reported a near-zero correlation (r = 0.013) between citation frequency and star rating. That is a useful reality check. Chasing your 400th review is unlikely to be what earns a citation; publishing a genuinely useful page might be.
For a small business, the practical read is straightforward. The asset Gemini rewards most is the one a directory can never give you: your own crawlable, specific, honestly written service pages. This is the same logic behind building hyper-local content that earns AI citations — depth and specificity on pages you own tend to travel further than a generic listing on someone else's platform.
What is “grounding drift” and why should it worry you?
Here is the honest counterweight to the good news. Gemini is not a stable ranking system, and treating it like one will mislead you.
The Steady Demand researchers ran identical queries repeatedly, with zero wording changes, and measured how often the results matched. The cited domains overlapped only about 40% of the time. Even more striking: Gemini recommended the same top business on a repeated identical query only around 7% of the time. For comparison, the study used Google's local pack as a control — it returned the same top listing roughly 90% of the time.
They named this instability grounding drift, and their testing pointed to its source: it comes from Gemini's own stochastic search-generation process, not from the live web changing underneath it. Same-day and next-day repeats showed similar volatility, so it isn't simply that your competitor published something new overnight.
Steady Demand co-founder Ben Fisher summarized the implication plainly, telling reporters that “a single AI search should be treated as a snapshot, not a reliable measure of long-term visibility.”
For a Fort Wayne business, this changes how you should measure success. Asking Gemini “best HVAC company near me” once and seeing your name is not proof of anything — and not seeing your name once isn't proof of failure either. You have to test across many phrasings and over time to get a real signal. This is closely related to the ghost citations and attribution gaps problem: AI can influence a customer's decision without leaving a clean, repeatable trail you can screenshot. Building a repeatable monitoring habit — for example, learning to monitor your AI visibility with Microsoft Clarity alongside manual spot-checks — matters more than any single lucky result.
Why did Reddit outrank every directory?
One of the study's more surprising findings is a gift for businesses willing to participate in real communities. Reddit alone accounted for 13.7% of Gemini's local citations. That single forum outperformed the entire local-service directory category — Angi, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor combined — which sat at about 10.3%. The researchers noted they used bootstrap resampling to confirm the gap was real and not statistical noise.
The takeaway is not “go spam Reddit.” Gemini appears to be sampling authentic discussion — real people asking “who's a reliable electrician in my area?” and real answers naming businesses. That kind of signal can't be bought through a listing fee, and it can be actively harmful if you try to fake it. The durable path is genuine participation: answering questions in local and industry subreddits, being transparent about who you are, and being the business people actually recommend. We've written a fuller guide on how to earn authentic Reddit mentions without tripping the platform's self-promotion rules.
There's a critical caveat here about not over-generalizing. The study found citation sources vary dramatically by vertical:
| Service category | What Gemini tends to cite most |
|---|---|
| Personal injury lawyers | Legal directories (Best Law Firms, Super Lawyers); minimal Reddit |
| Dentists | Healthcare marketplaces (Zocdoc, Healthgrades) |
| Auto repair | The most Reddit-dependent vertical by far |
| Home trades (HVAC, plumbing, electrical) | A more balanced mix of owned sites, directories, and social |
So a Fort Wayne dental practice and a Fort Wayne auto shop should not run the same playbook. The study's own recommendation was to audit what actually gets cited in your specific category rather than blanket-claiming every directory. This vertical-specificity is a core theme of modern local SEO for LLMs — the winning tactics are narrower and more evidence-based than the old “list everywhere” advice.
Can you win on Gemini and ChatGPT at the same time?
Short answer: not automatically, and probably not with the same content strategy. The study compared the two engines on identical queries and found they barely agree.
According to the citation-source breakdown, Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same domains only 8% of the time and recommended the same top business just 4.2% of the time. Their source preferences were almost mirror images:
| Source type | Gemini share | ChatGPT share |
|---|---|---|
| Business websites | 59.9% | 15.9% |
| General directories | 10.4% | 34.6% |
| Social / community forums | 14.4% | 41.7%* |
| Local-service directories | 10.4% | 3.0% |
*The study noted ChatGPT eliminated Reddit citations entirely between the initial collection and an August 20, 2026 re-run, redistributing that share to business sites and directories. Gemini was unaffected. This is itself a reminder of how quickly these systems shift.
Gemini leans on your website; ChatGPT leaned heavily on directories and community sources (until it abruptly dropped Reddit). That divergence means “optimizing for AI search” is not one project — it's several, and they can pull in different directions. If your growth depends on ChatGPT specifically, it's worth understanding how ChatGPT chooses which businesses to cite, because the levers are different from Gemini's website-first behavior.
The honest trade-off: you can't fully optimize for a moving, engine-specific, probabilistic target the way you once optimized for ten blue links. What you can do is invest in the fundamentals that help across engines — a fast, crawlable, richly specific website — and then manage each engine as a separate visibility channel rather than assuming one win covers them all.
How should this fit into a broader local strategy?
Search Engine Land recently framed the bigger shift as “Local 5.0” — the stage where machines no longer assume relevance but demand verifiable evidence before recommending a location. Under that model, visibility depends on whether AI systems can discover, understand, trust, and recommend your business from connected, validated context across everything you publish.
That maps cleanly onto the Gemini findings. If your own website is the most-cited surface, then the “evidence” AI needs has to live there in a form it can parse. Practically, that means:
- Specific, answer-shaped service pages. Not “We do HVAC,” but the exact questions a customer asks — do you service weekends, which brands, which neighborhoods, what a typical repair costs.
- Structured data and clean crawlability. Gemini can only cite what it can read and trust. Schema markup and a consistent name/address/phone across the web reduce the conflicting signals that lower AI confidence.
- Genuine community reputation as a distinct channel, given Reddit's outsized citation share.
- A monitoring habit that accounts for grounding drift — repeated, multi-phrasing checks rather than one-off screenshots.
None of this is a guarantee, and we won't pretend otherwise. AI local citations are a probabilistic surface, not a rankings ladder you can climb and hold. But the study's central point is empowering: the highest-cited asset is the one you own outright.
What does this mean for a Fort Wayne business specifically?
Northeast Indiana service businesses are almost a perfect match for the study's model — the 10 categories it analyzed (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, dentists, auto repair, pest control, and more) are exactly the trades that define Allen County's local economy. And the competitive picture here is friendlier than in a top-50 metro.
The study found that only about 2.0% of the 4,410 businesses it tracked appeared across multiple metros, and those were mostly national franchises like the big pest-control chains. The long tail stayed distributed: 4,410 distinct businesses and 3,611 unique domains were named, with most appearing just once or twice. Translation for Fort Wayne: national brands do not have a lock on Gemini's local citations. A well-built Auburn or Fort Wayne service business can earn a direct citation without a directory acting as gatekeeper — if the on-site content is specific enough to be worth quoting.
That's the opportunity. A local HVAC company that publishes a genuinely useful “furnace repair in Fort Wayne winters” page — with real detail about older Allen County housing stock, typical costs, and honest timelines — is building exactly the kind of evidence Gemini samples. This is the local-content thesis we've long argued in our Fort Wayne SEO work, and the Gemini data now gives it a sharper, AI-era justification. The businesses that win won't be the ones with the biggest ad budget; they'll be the ones who wrote the most useful, most specific, most honest pages about the work they actually do.
Where to start
If you're a Fort Wayne or Northeast Indiana business trying to show up in AI answers, the priority order is clear: build owned service-and-city pages that answer real customer questions, make them technically clean so Gemini can read and trust them, cultivate authentic community reputation, and monitor visibility across multiple engines over time rather than trusting a single query.
If that sounds like more than you want to take on alone, our Answer Engine Optimization services are built around exactly this shift — structured content, schema, and AI-visibility measurement grounded in data, not hype. You can also talk directly with our Fort Wayne team about what a citation-earning content plan looks like for your specific service category. We'll be honest about what's a durable investment and what's just chasing a probabilistic surface.
Want to Earn AI Citations for Your Business?
Button Block helps Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana businesses build the specific, crawlable service pages that Gemini and other AI engines actually quote — plus the monitoring to prove it's working across engines, not just on a lucky query.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does Gemini really cite small business websites more than directories?
- Yes, at least according to the Steady Demand AI Citation Ledger study of 14,472 local citations. It found roughly 60% of Gemini’s local citations point to business websites, compared with about 10% each for general and local-service directories. For local queries, your own website is the single most-cited source category — which makes on-site content your highest-leverage investment.
- What is grounding drift in AI search?
- Grounding drift is the tendency of an AI engine to return different sources and recommendations for the identical query when it’s repeated. In the study, Gemini returned overlapping sources only about 40% of the time and named the same top business just ~7% of the time, versus ~90% consistency for Google’s local pack. It means a single AI result is a snapshot, not a stable ranking, so you should test across many phrasings and over time.
- Why does Reddit get cited so often by Gemini?
- Reddit earned 13.7% of Gemini’s local citations, more than all local-service directories combined. Gemini appears to sample authentic community discussion where real people recommend real businesses. The practical implication is to participate genuinely in relevant local and industry communities rather than to fake mentions, which platforms actively penalize.
- Will optimizing for Gemini also help me in ChatGPT?
- Not reliably. The study found Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same domains only 8% of the time and named the same top business just 4.2% of the time. Gemini favors business websites while ChatGPT has leaned toward directories and community sources. Treat each engine as a separate visibility channel rather than assuming one strategy covers both.
- How many reviews do I need to get cited by AI?
- Probably fewer than you think. The study found a near-zero correlation (r = 0.013) between how often a business was cited and its star rating once it reached local visibility, and AI-recommended businesses averaged 4.75 stars — slightly below the 4.84-star Google baseline. Reviews still matter for trust and conversions, but past a healthy baseline they aren’t the lever that earns AI citations. Specific, useful website content is.
- Can a Fort Wayne business compete with national brands in Gemini’s local citations?
- Yes. The study found only about 2.0% of the 4,410 tracked businesses appeared across multiple metros, and those were mostly national franchises. Citations stayed distributed across 4,410 distinct businesses and 3,611 domains, most appearing only once or twice. That leaves real room for a well-optimized local Fort Wayne business to earn direct Gemini citations — if its owned service and city pages are specific enough to be worth quoting.
Sources & Further Reading
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/business-websites-gemini-citations-local-ai-search-study-485506 — Business websites — not directories — dominate Gemini's local AI citations, study finds.
- Steady Demand: steadydemand.com/ai-citation-ledger — The AI Citation Ledger.
- MarTech: martech.org/business-websites-dominate-geminis-local-ai-citations — Business websites dominate Gemini's local AI citations.
- Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com/local-5-ai-search-seo-485160 — Local 5.0: The next evolution of local SEO.