Where ChatGPT picks the words for its answer about your business

Reddit, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia run a third of the AI answer feed

Reddit drives 11.29 percent of the citations inside AI assistant answers. LinkedIn drives 11 percent. Wikipedia drives 9.53 percent. Those three numbers come from a Semrush research team that analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited by ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity across 325,000 prompts submitted in January and February of this year. The study puts hard numbers on something AI search advice keeps trying to bury: when a customer asks an assistant a question, the words for the answer come from a small set of third-party sites long before any AI tool looks at your homepage. Together, the three sites named above run through about a third of the AI answer market your dental practice, medspa, or HVAC shop does not own.

The advice you have been reading about AI search (sometimes called GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization) treats your homepage as the main job. Add schema. Rewrite the services page. Reformat the FAQ. That work matters, but only at the confirmation step at the end of the AI assistant's process. The assistant builds its answer first by reading the third-party sites, and only checks your homepage at the end to confirm the business is real.

If you run a service business, the practical translation is this: two hours of work this week on three specific places will move your AI search score more than another month of homepage rewrites. The three places are one Reddit thread, one LinkedIn long-form post, and one Google Business Profile description.

What the data says about where AI assistants actually pull citations

The Semrush study breaks the picture down by assistant. ChatGPT Search cites LinkedIn URLs in 14.3 percent of responses. Google AI Mode cites LinkedIn in 13.5 percent. Perplexity cites LinkedIn in 5.3 percent. If your buyers ask ChatGPT or Google AI Mode the question "best dentist for kids near me" or "what does an HVAC tune-up actually include," every seventh answer they read leans on a LinkedIn post written by either a creator or a brand.

Two other findings matter for SMB owners. First, long-form content (newsletters and articles) accounts for 60 percent of all LinkedIn citations. Second, about 75 percent of cited LinkedIn authors post 5 or more times in a four-week window. A weekly newsletter clears that bar. ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode also favor individual creator posts 59 percent of the time over company-page posts. The takeaway: your most senior technician posting from their own LinkedIn profile drives more AI citations than your business page does. Twice over.

Reddit works differently. Reddit threads carry customer-language. When a homeowner types "is a dental implant worth the price" into ChatGPT, the assistant often pulls a sentence from a Reddit AskDocs or DentalImplants thread because that is where real patients describe real experiences. Two-thirds of AI citations across health and wellness queries point at a Reddit URL of some kind. Even an unflattering thread drives citations when the assistant trusts it as the source for the customer question.

Wikipedia covers the category questions. "What is a medspa," "what does an HVAC technician do," "in-home care vs assisted living." If Wikipedia covers your business category, the assistant uses Wikipedia for the topic setup before it looks at the local options.

The website still matters, just for a smaller job

None of this means your website does not matter. The website is the check at the end. Once the assistant has built its answer from third-party sites, it looks at your homepage to confirm the business is real, finds your phone number, and decides whether to include you in the answer.

This is why Duda's 2026 AEO Report analyzed 858,457 small-business websites and found AI-visible sites get 320 percent more human traffic, 270 percent more form fills, and 250 percent more click-to-call actions than non-optimized sites. Visitors who arrive at your site from ChatGPT book at 15.9 percent, from Perplexity at 10.5 percent, and from Claude at 5 percent. The baseline conversion rate for regular Google organic search is 1.76 percent. A ChatGPT click converts at roughly 9 times the rate of a Google click.

So the homepage matters, but in a specific way: it needs to confirm what the third-party sites said, and it needs to make the booking step short. A weak homepage gets you dropped at the confirmation step. The third-party trail gets you into the answer in the first place.

Three concrete actions for the next two hours

Here is the work for this week, in order.

Action one. Find the Reddit thread that already ranks for your highest-intent customer question, and post once. Search "site:reddit.com [your service category] [your customer's question]" on Google. The top result is the thread the AI assistants are reading. Read it. If a relevant comment is missing a real answer, post once as the practice owner with a real name and a real explanation. Do not pitch. Do not link to your website. Answer the question the way you would answer it on the phone. AI assistants pick up the comment within two weeks of posting if the comment carries weight.

Action two. Have your most senior technician write one 600-word LinkedIn newsletter this week, tagging the practice. ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode cite individual creator posts 59 percent of the time over company-page posts. The assistant cites the individual author rather than the company brand. Pick the senior technician, dental hygienist, lead esthetician, or HVAC service manager who has the most hands-on knowledge of the question your customer types. Have them write 600 words explaining the answer in their own voice. Publish it as a full LinkedIn newsletter rather than a short post. Tag the practice account in the body. Run it once.

Action three. Rewrite the first 200 characters of your Google Business Profile description. AI Overviews quote Google Business Profile descriptions verbatim. Most SMB descriptions were written for the Google Maps three-pack era and read like a brochure. Rewrite the first sentence to answer the customer question directly. If your customer asks "what does an HVAC tune-up include," write the first sentence of the description as "We provide HVAC tune-ups that check refrigerant levels, replace filters, and test the thermostat across both heating and cooling cycles." The AI Overview will quote that sentence verbatim.

Why this matters for your phone-ring volume right now

The EMARKETER US AI Advertising Forecast 2026 published on June 9 projects that total US AI advertising spend will more than double from $32.03 billion this year to $68.25 billion by 2030. About 80 percent of that money lands next to AI-generated search content rather than inside chatbots themselves. The companies buying ads in 2030 are paying to sit next to AI answers instead of inside chatbots. That is where customer attention is going.

Your unpaid spot in the AI answer is now competing with paid spots in the same answer. Holding the unpaid spot means earning citations from the trusted third-party sites that assistants read: Reddit, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The fastest way to lose it is to spend another month adding schema to a homepage the assistant does not check until after the answer is built.

Two hours this week. One Reddit thread, one LinkedIn newsletter, one Google Business Profile rewrite. The customer typing the question at 8 PM on the couch will read the answer the assistant builds from those three places, with your homepage as the confirmation check at the end.