Guide
AI search for local businesses
People now ask chat tools for a shop the way they used to ask Google. The answers are assembled from public pages. Cited checks those pages for your name and domain. We do not query ChatGPT or Gemini live.
What people ask chat tools
The prompts are plain. Best dentist in a city. Who should I call for an HVAC company. Recommended plumber near me. Is this clinic any good. Chat tools answer by pulling from pages that already exist: listicles, directories, reviews, forum threads, and the business site if it ranks.
Cited is built for dentists, HVAC shops, plumbers, clinics, lawyers, and med spas. The same eight-prompt check works for each of those trades.
Why public sources matter
If your name is not on the pages a model can read, you are easy to leave out. That is not a ranking we invent. It is a simple presence check: does this public page mention the shop for this prompt, mention it weakly, or not mention it.
We do not claim a live ChatGPT or Gemini query unless we ran one. v1 searches the public web. That is a promise we can keep.
- Local news and best-of lists that rank shops in a city
- Review sites that show up in web search, including Yelp
- Trade directories: Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Avvo, Angi, RealSelf, BBB
- Public forum threads, including Reddit city threads
- The business website, if it ranks for the prompt
How Cited checks them
You enter the shop name, city, category, and an email. We search public sources for eight common best-in-city prompts. The free preview lists all eight and, when the live scan is up, scores three. The free diagnostic is limited to a small public-web preview. It is not a paid report or an AI assistant query.
Cited now offers an implementation sprint for qualified independent HVAC companies. Cited is a Tecshala product.