We Tracked 492 AI Search Queries About SEO Agencies. They Cited Zero of Us.

We ran 492 SEO-agency queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini for three weeks. They cited zero of us. Here's the data, what it means, and what every BC business needs to do about AI search now.

By EVL PPL · · 8 min read

Last updated

Contents
  1. 492 queries. Zero citations.
  2. What we built and why
  3. What the data showed
  4. What this means for every BC business
  5. What gets cited (when something does)
  6. What we’re doing about it (and what you should do too)
  7. What’s coming next

492 queries. Zero citations.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been running an experiment.

Every Monday morning at 9:00 AM Pacific, a small server in our infrastructure runs 70 questions through four AI search engines — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Perplexity. The questions are the kind of things a real business owner might ask before choosing an SEO agency: “who are the leading agencies treating AI search as their primary channel,” “best exclusive-territory SEO firms in Canada,” “recommended SEO agency for roofers and home contractors,” “what’s a good SEO agency that only works with one client per industry per city.”

After three weeks of these runs, the results were tallied across all four providers.

492 total query responses. Zero cited EVL PPL.

We’re not embarrassed by this. We’re publishing it. Because the data tells a story that’s true for almost every BC business right now, and almost nobody is talking about it.

What we built and why

We built cite.evlppl.com — an internal citation tracker — for two reasons.

First, because we needed our own data to honestly tell clients what AI search is doing to their visibility. We weren’t going to recommend a strategy without measurement, and Google Search Console doesn’t show AI citations.

Second, because we wanted to know whether our own positioning was getting picked up. EVL PPL has a model nobody else we know of has: one client per industry per city. Sign with us in Kelowna for plumbing and we won’t work for any other Kelowna plumber for as long as the engagement lasts. That kind of exclusivity is unusual enough that we thought it should show up when somebody asks an AI search engine “are there any SEO agencies that don’t take competing clients in the same market?”

It didn’t. Across 492 query responses, our citation count was exactly zero. The same was true for most agencies. AI search engines mostly cite the same handful of large, established names — the ones with extensive third-party mentions across Reddit, industry publications, podcast interviews, and review platforms. New entrants — even ones with a clearly unusual product — are essentially invisible.

This isn’t a personal failure. It’s a market structure. And it’s affecting every BC business that hasn’t built third-party visibility yet, whether they’re an agency or a roofer.

What the data showed

A few patterns emerged across the 492 query responses.

Pattern one: AI search engines cite a narrow set of “safe” names. When asked “who are the top SEO agencies in Canada,” responses consistently named three or four large agencies — the ones with the most external coverage. Boutique agencies, regional specialists, and newer players were almost entirely absent, even when the question was clearly asking for them. “Boutique SEO agencies that take fewer clients — who’s best?” still surfaced the same big names with a brief caveat.

Pattern two: Trade-specific queries returned even narrower results. “Best SEO agency for plumbers in Canada” returned mostly generic local-SEO advice, not a list of specialised agencies. “Recommended SEO agency for roofers and home contractors” returned the same. The AI engines simply don’t have enough confidence in any specific trade-vertical specialist to recommend one.

Pattern three: Reddit and niche communities matter more than we expected. Queries that surfaced specific business names almost always referenced a Reddit thread, a Quora answer, a podcast appearance, or a directory listing. When a small agency was cited, it was usually because somebody had recommended them on r/SEO or written about them in a niche newsletter. Self-hosted content on the agency’s own site played a much smaller role than we’d assumed.

Pattern four: Citation rate was 0.0% across all four providers. Not low — zero. Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Perplexity all returned the same answer when asked about us: nothing. Each had access to different parts of the web (Perplexity actively crawls, Gemini uses Google’s index, ChatGPT and Claude rely heavily on training data plus retrieval), and none of them had us on file.

What this means for every BC business

The AI search citation game is brutal in a way that traditional SEO isn’t.

Google Search has a long tail. Page two of a Google result still gets some clicks. A business ranking position 14 for “plumber Kelowna” will get the occasional click, the occasional call, the occasional customer. It’s bad, but it’s not invisible.

AI search has no long tail. There are three or four named businesses in the answer, and then there’s everyone else. Everyone else is the same thing as not existing. If ChatGPT doesn’t mention you when someone asks “who’s the best plumber in Kelowna,” you don’t get a second chance. There is no page two.

This means every BC business owner needs to understand something most agencies aren’t telling them: AI search visibility is built on the external web, not the business’s own site. No amount of fixing your homepage will make an AI engine recommend you. The AI engines need to see you mentioned somewhere they trust — Reddit, Yelp, BBB, Clutch, a local news article, a podcast appearance, a trade-specific directory — before they’ll include you in an answer.

This is the gap we’ve been working with clients on closing. It’s also the gap we just walked into face-first ourselves.

What gets cited (when something does)

When AI search engines did cite a specific business in their answer — which happened roughly 30% of the time across our 492 queries, when the question was specific enough to have a clear answer — the citations almost always came from the same five types of sources.

  1. Google Business Profile data. Hours, phone, address, top reviews. AI engines treat your GBP as a trusted source of truth for what your business is and where it operates. An incomplete GBP is a confidence killer.

  2. Yelp reviews and mentions. Even in Canada, where Yelp adoption is lower, Yelp is a high-trust source for AI engines. Specifically: Yelp is one of OpenAI’s data partners, so ChatGPT pulls from it directly.

  3. Reddit threads and Quora answers. Particularly for service business categories. Anyone who’s been recommended on r/Vancouver or r/AskTradesmen is more likely to show up in an AI answer than a business with three times the website content.

  4. Industry directories. For agencies, Clutch and DesignRush. For trades, BBB Canada and local chamber of commerce listings. For health practitioners, RateMD and HealthLink BC. For most categories, the relevant directories are obvious if you think about where buyers actually look.

  5. News mentions, however small. A two-paragraph mention in a local newspaper, a quote in a regional industry publication, a feature in a community newsletter — these are surprisingly weighted in AI citation algorithms. The mention doesn’t need to be flattering or extensive. It just needs to exist.

When a business is cited by AI search, it’s almost always because two or more of these sources confirm the business exists and does what it claims to do.

What we’re doing about it (and what you should do too)

We’re not going to stand on a soapbox of “have you tried being more famous” and walk away. We just published our own backlink and outreach plan — yes, it’s literally a markdown file in our public repo, because we want the work to be transparent and we want to model what we’d ask a client to do.

The short version of what we’re doing for ourselves, and what we recommend for every BC business owner reading this:

Week one: free directory listings. Google Business Profile (done excellently, not just claimed). Bing Places. Apple Maps Business Connect. YellowPages.ca. Yelp. These are NAP citations — name, address, phone — that AI engines treat as identity confirmation. Two hours of work to set them all up.

Week two: agency or trade-specific directories. Clutch for agencies. BBB. The trade-specific listings for your industry — most have an obvious “main” one (HomeStars for trades, HealthLink BC for clinics, RealtorLink for real estate). One hour of work plus asking three customers for reviews.

Week three: editorial outreach. Pitch one local publication. Comment helpfully — not promotionally — on Reddit threads where someone is asking about your industry. Apply to be a guest on a podcast in your niche. The goal isn’t sales; it’s existence confirmation in places AI engines crawl.

This takes six to ten hours total. It’s free. It’s the actual work that moves the AI citation needle. Almost no agency is doing it for their clients because it’s slow and unsexy, and most clients don’t know to ask for it.

What’s coming next

We’ll re-run the same 492 queries every Monday for the foreseeable future and publish updates when the citation rate moves. Our own rate is 0.0% today. Our prediction is that it’ll move to 2-4% within 90 days as the directory listings and editorial work land. We’ll be wrong sometimes and right sometimes. We’ll publish both.

We’re also working on a version of the citation tracker that lets BC business owners check whether their own business is being cited by AI search — for free, on the public site. Until that’s ready, the closest you can get is our free Local Pack Scorecard, which audits the same Google Business Profile signals that AI engines use to decide whether your business is “real” enough to cite.

If you’ve been told by an agency that “AI search optimization” is something you can buy and turn on, the honest answer is more boring than that. It’s directories, reviews, mentions, and time. Anyone promising faster than 90 days is selling something.

Want to know whether your business is set up for AI search at all? Run our free Local Pack Scorecard — it audits the same signals AI engines use. Takes 30 seconds. Results are shareable. No email required to see the grade.