Where AI gets its answers about local businesses.

Source: KKV Labs, Google AI Mode answers captured 15 Sep 2026, 123 answers across 6 industries.

1. 01google.com/maps119 of 123
2. 02yelp.com40 of 123
3. 03justia.com13 of 123
4. 04m.yelp.com11 of 123
5. 05zocdoc.com11 of 123
6. 06superlawyers.com9 of 123
7. 07facebook.com8 of 123
8. 08thumbtack.com7 of 123
9. 09healthgrades.com7 of 123
10. 10reddit.com6 of 123
11. 11angi.com6 of 123
12. 12thejoint.com5 of 123
13. 13nakedmd.com3 of 123
14. 14attorneys.superlawyers.com3 of 123
15. 15dashboard.boulevard.io2 of 123

The capture

123 answers, one query per city, "best <industry singular> in <City, State>," asked in Google AI Mode from the account owner's own Chrome (the in-app browser throttled on a prior attempt), one query every 10 to 30 seconds. Every industry reached 20 or 21 cities. Capture date 15 Sep 2026 for every city in this run.

Separating the answer from Google's own page chrome

AI Mode's page always carries a fixed set of Google utility links (sign out, search personalization, Travel and Finance shortcuts, Policies, Support articles, the map scaffolding) regardless of the query. These were excluded by an explicit allowlist of Google host and path prefixes, not by where the link sits on the page, because the collection step kept only a deduped set of link tokens, not their position in the DOM. google.com/maps and maps.google.com/maps were deliberately kept out of that exclusion list and counted as citations, since a Maps link points at a specific business named in the answer, not at page chrome.

Domain classification

Every surviving link token's host is matched against a fixed list of directory and community domains (Yelp, Avvo, Justia, FindLaw, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Angi, HomeAdvisor, BBB, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, YouTube, Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers), a small news-domain list, or the business's own domain, matched against the business names Google itself named for that city. Anything left over is bucketed as an unclassified other directory or site.

Sample size, read this before you quote a row

20 to 21 cities per industry is a moderate, directional sample. Treat every percentage as plus or minus roughly one answer's worth of noise, about 5 points at n=20. A domain counted once in a 20-city sample can look larger or smaller than its true share in a bigger run; the counts, not just the percentages, are printed in every table on this page so a reader can judge the base for themselves.

What we are not claiming

This page does not say a citation is a ranking factor, or that a business missing from a directory is invisible to AI. It says which domains one set of AI Mode answers actually pointed to, on one day, across six industries.

• The AI Local Visibility Report 2026: every industry we have run, in one table
• What the businesses AI names do differently
• How we measure this: the prompts, the tier rules and the limits
• What we do about it, trade by trade