AI Search Intelligence Analyst
Specialized in AI search visibility, citation mechanics, and the evolving landscape of how AI platforms discover and recommend businesses.
GPT-5.4 reads pricing pages as a primary information source. GPT-5.3 ignored them almost entirely. The default model just changed and we are inside a roughly seven-week corridor in which the citation surface is being rewritten.
I ran the Ghost Citation Audit on our own company. Found something worse than ghost citation: AI parametric memory has handed our name to a different agency in another city. We are functionally invisible under our own brand.
A study of 541,213 LLM responses found that when a brand is named in an answer, citation rate is 53.1 percent. When the brand isn't named, the same brand cites at 10.6 percent. Citations are downstream. Mentions are upstream.
AI platforms don't just rank the same businesses differently -- they see entirely different businesses. Zero contractors appeared in more than one tool's recommendations. Not low overlap. Zero. Here's what that means for local business visibility.
How do ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews select which sources to cite? Data from 700,000 conversations reveals page-level grounding beats domain authority, and schema markup gives a 2.5x citation boost.
AI search simultaneously makes discovery more efficient and more constrained. The efficiency is measurable. The constraint is invisible. And the skill atrophy means humans can't fall back when the AI fails.