Hello Lunch Break. Rybakina and Sabalenka were on the TV this past weekend. Both tennis players, both great and yet they themselves could not be more different. You’re watching pin drop quietness vs an electric, high-octave roar for 2 hours. That's what I'm talking about this week. Every AI engine is playing the same game, but each one has its own “style” for sources.

Alright. Clock's ticking. Back to work.

THE GAME CHANGED

Conductor pulled every Google AI Overview citation from US searches between June 15 and August 15, 167,867,680 in all, and checked each one against the organic results for the same search. A page ranking first was cited in the AI Overview 24.9 percent of the time. By position ten that fell to 10.2 percent. And 57 percent of all the citations went to pages outside the organic top 10.

What this says: Ranking helps at every position. Most of the time though, Google's own answer skips past Google's own top result.  

What to do about it: Keep doing the SEO but stop equating rankings as visibility success. Instead, search your three most important customer questions and discover whether the AI answer names you.

Source: AI Overviews and Organic Rankings: 57% of Citations Come From Outside the Organic Top 10, Jia-Rong Li, Conductor, updated September 10, 2026.

THE WINDOW IS NOW

Bill Widmer built his own tracker this summer and logged 13,184 citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, running 72 buyer questions every week. The engines almost never agreed. Out of 1,792 pairings of a question and a cited site, all four cited the same site for the same question only 30 times.

What this says: Each AI engine reads differently. Perplexity pulls about 19 sources per answer and leans on LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit. ChatGPT pulls about four and a half and prefers primary sources like documentation and pricing pages. Claude pulls fewer still, favors review sites, and across hundreds of answers never cited Reddit once.

They don't even agree with themselves. Widmer reran the same questions two days apart and Claude kept only 30 percent of the pages it had cited. Perplexity, the steadiest, kept 65 percent.

Why the window is open right now: You can’t rely on one AI visibility score averaged across engines. Measure each engine separately and evaluate monthly. But Widmer's conclusion isn't four strategies. It's one. Find the outside pages that keep getting cited instead of you, that’s who they trust and you’ve got to get on them. 

Source: I Tracked 13,184 AI Citations Across 4 LLMs, Bill Widmer, Orbit Media Studios, September 2, 2026.

YOUR COMPETITORS ARE ASLEEP

The city says the Althea Gibson Tennis Complex at Empie Park has 24 lighted courts. One tennis directory says 19, unlit. Nobody has likely focused on fixing it because for the last decade our industry decided directory listings barely mattered. Guess what? AI tools are reading them again.

Miriam Ellis published Whitespark's citation playbook on September 10. In Whitespark's survey of local search experts, the top rated factor for AI visibility is being on expert curated "best of" lists, and citation factors fill the top 20 out of 187. 

1. Google your business name. Note which directory and review sites show up in the first five pages. Do the same for your top competitors.

2. Ask the AI tools. Your business by name, then your category. Note every directory or review site they cite, especially any you've never managed.

3. Get listed where they are and you aren't. Same name, phone, address and hours everywhere. Update every listing when anything changes.

4. Rewrite the description field. Who you are, what you do, who you help, the problems you solve, what you specialize in.

What to do about it: Most listings in your category have been left alone for years. It’s time to bring yours back to life. It's step nine of our local visibility plan.

Source: 2026 Playbook: How to Optimize Citations for AI Visibility, Miriam Ellis, Whitespark, September 10, 2026. 

WHAT’S THE PROMPT

This checks every outside listing for your business, shows you the sites your competitors are on that you're not, and writes the description you paste into all of them.

Run the prompt

Then copy the same prompt into Gemini and Perplexity. The source lists won't match, but that's what we’re after. We are looking to identify any site that shows up in two or three of them.

Every listing marked MATCH. You're clean. Spend the time on the missing sites.

One or two MISMATCH. Fix those first. A wrong phone number on a site the engines cite is worse than no listing.

Mostly COULD NOT TELL. The engines can't find enough about you to check. 

Want this run across every engine and every question your customers ask? That's what our audit does. Start with the audit.

CITED

AI Says: Affordable Roofing & Construction, Wilmington

I asked all three engines “who should I call in Wilmington to fix a roof leak and help with the insurance claim, and which sites did you use to decide”. 

Three different engines and the only roofer named more than once was Affordable Roofing & Construction, and it got there two very different ways.

Perplexity put Affordable first and pointed to a CEDUR list of the 20 best roofers in Wilmington. That list runs in alphabetical order, Affordable down to Wilmington Roofing Services, and it's published by a company that sells synthetic shake shingles. Affordable sits at the top because its name starts with A.

ChatGPT checked the BBB, Angi, a local review roundup and the roofers' own sites, put IBC Roofing first, and placed Affordable third with a note that it couldn't find much evidence tying the company to insurance claims. Fair call. Affordable's homepage covers repairs, replacements and FORTIFIED roofs and doesn't mention insurance claims. 

Gemini named one roofer, Modern Roofing, in wording that tracks Modern's own Wilmington page almost line for line, a page whose headline promises roofing without the insurance headaches. That's the question I asked in the prompt and it was answered in the words I used.

This was one run per engine, so read this as directional, not a verdict on any roofer.

See you next Thursday.

- Anna

Want to know what your own site is telling them? The AI Visibility Audit checks exactly this.

THE POLL