I sell AI visibility. Keep that in mind, because by the end you will have a good reason to be suspicious of anyone who does, including me.
The question buyers ask has changed shape. It used to be a search. Ten links, and you made up your own mind. Now it is a question, and you get three names. There is no page two. You are in the answer or you are not in the conversation.
So I ran the obvious test on my own category, then did the part almost nobody does. I went and pulled the source.
Who’s the best marketing agency in San Diego?
Three answers, three completely different behaviors
ChatGPT gave a ranked shortlist: Ignite Visibility, Power Digital, Siege Media, Traina, 2POINT Agency. It cited Clutch on nearly every line, with each shop’s Clutch position and review count.
Gemini built a table. Ignite Visibility, Power Digital, Siege Media, Bop Design, Mindgruve Macarta, WISE Digital Partners, each slotted into a “best for” category. No sources at all.
Claude refused to rank anyone. It said nearly every “best agency in San Diego” list is published by an agency that put itself on it, named three of them, then offered two shops it considered defensible and asked what I actually needed.
Three agencies appeared in all three answers: Ignite Visibility, Power Digital, Siege Media. That is the consensus set. Everything else was one model’s opinion, which should tell you how sturdy “the AI recommends us” is as a claim.
Then I went and opened the Clutch page ChatGPT had been reading.
The receipt
The page still carried ChatGPT’s fingerprint. One of the links on it came through tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. That is not inference. The model went to that page, and the page knew it.
Here is what is at the top of it.
The first four listings are Featured. SmartSites, Jives Media, Hotspex Media, MassMedia. Their links route through Clutch’s ad server and carry a sponsor flag. Clutch is upfront about this, in a line sitting right above the results:
“We may earn a fee for some placements.”
Look at the location fields and it gets sharper. Those four say “Serves San Diego, CA.” The listings below them say “San Diego, CA.” The paid slots at the top of the San Diego page are agencies from somewhere else, buying their way onto it.
Now go back to what ChatGPT actually told me.
It named none of them. Not one of the four paid placements made the shortlist.
It didn’t just read the list either
This is the part I got wrong before I checked.
My assumption was that the model recites the directory. It doesn’t. Clutch’s organic San Diego order runs Ignite Visibility, REQ, (W)right On Communications, Storm Brain, Power Digital, and on down. ChatGPT gave me Ignite, Power Digital, Siege Media, Traina, 2POINT.
It skipped REQ and (W)right On, both of which are public relations shops with advertising as a sideline. It skipped Storm Brain, which is mostly web design. It reached down to Traina at ninth and 2POINT at fourteenth. It pulled Siege Media from a different Clutch directory entirely.
So it read the service mix on each listing and filtered for shops that actually match “marketing agency,” then ranked what was left. That is not recitation. That is judgment applied to a candidate pool.
Which reframes the whole thing.
Clutch was not the ranking. Clutch was the pool.
What that means, and it is not what the GEO pitch says
Two conclusions, and they cut in opposite directions.
You cannot buy the answer. Four agencies paid for placement on that page. The model looked straight past all four. Whatever those featured slots cost, they bought visibility to humans scrolling the page and nothing at all from the machine reading it.
You cannot be in the answer if you are not in the pool. Every single name ChatGPT gave me came off a Clutch listing with real verified reviews attached. Ignite has 175. Power Digital has 66. Traina has 46. The shops with “Not yet reviewed” on that same page, and there are many, were never candidates for anything.
So the play is not sponsorship. The play is being present, categorized correctly, and reviewed in the places your category’s answers get assembled from. Boring, slow, and unglamorous, which is presumably why so much money goes into the alternative.
One more thing worth noticing, since the whole post is about source discipline. ChatGPT told me Ignite had 165 reviews. The live page says 175. The model was working from a slightly stale read, which is a small error here and would not be small in a category where the numbers are close.
What nobody cited
Count the agency websites cited across all three answers.
Zero.
Not one model quoted an agency’s own site, case studies, service pages, or blog. Every source was third party: a marketplace listing, published listicles, Google Maps ratings, review counts.
Your website does not get you into the answer. It closes the deal once someone arrives. Two different jobs, and nearly everyone I talk to is funding the first and assuming it covers the second.
Before you copy anyone’s source list, know that it shifts by category. Broad studies of local AI citations put Yelp, Reddit, and Google far out front, with Clutch back around eleventh. For a B2B service category like agencies, Clutch and editorial listicles run the table instead. Go find yours rather than borrowing someone else’s.
About those listicles
Claude named Thrive’s list as an example of the self-serving kind, so I checked it, because a model asserting something is not a source.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, founded 2005, 160+ staff, operations across 34 states. Not a San Diego agency. They publish “11 Best Digital Marketing Agencies in San Diego,” and to their credit they publish the methodology in plain sight:
AI Visibility: 60%, based on tracking 200 prompts over the past year
Google search performance: 10%
Everything else: reviews, experience, reputation, website UX, services, market relevance, 5% each
Thrive ranks itself first at 97 out of 100. They also publish the Los Angeles version. Thrive ranks itself first there too, also 97 out of 100. Same methodology, different city, identical score.
Sixty percent of that score is how visible the agency already is in AI answers. Then the list gets published into the same pool the models read.
I want to be precise about what I can and cannot show you, since that is the whole point of this post. I cannot show you a model using that list to rank anyone. What I can show you is that the list exists, that it is scored mostly on AI visibility, that its publisher wins its own ranking in every city it covers, and that at least one model has read it. Whether the loop closes is an open question. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing at the same thing I am.
The uncomfortable part
Ignite Visibility sells GEO, which is optimization for exactly this kind of answer. They are also the most AI-visible agency in San Diego by every measure in this test.
Two honest readings. Either the service works and they proved it on themselves, or they are best at a game with circular scoring. I lean toward the first. I cannot rule out the second, and neither can anyone selling you either version.
Which brings me back to the top. I sell this too. So does Thrive, whose list ranks Thrive first. So does Ignite, whom the lists rank first. Self-interest is not disqualifying. It is load-bearing, and it belongs on the table where you can see it.
Run it on yourself
Ten minutes, and do the second half, because the second half is where everything is.
Ask all three models who the best [your category] in [your city] is. Then ask each one where it got that. Then go open the source and read it yourself.
That last step is the whole thing. The answer tells you who won. The source tells you what game was being played, whether the top of it is paid, whether you are in the pool at all, and what the model chose to ignore.
I would not have learned anything from the three answers alone. I learned it from the page underneath them.
If your name is not in there, that is not a verdict on your work. It is a verdict on where your work is written down, and that is fixable.
Run it. Tell me what came back, and what was underneath it. I read everything.
Sources
Clutch, Top Advertising Agencies in San Diego, featured placements and disclosure: https://clutch.co/agencies/san-diego
Thrive Agency, best digital marketing agencies in San Diego, methodology and self-ranking: https://thriveagency.com/news/best-digital-marketing-agencies-in-san-diego/
Thrive Agency, best digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles: https://thriveagency.com/news/best-digital-marketing-agencies-in-los-angeles/
Local Dominator, 267,280 AI citations across six engines: https://localdominator.co/case-study/ai-local-seo-citations-report/
Foundation, Yelp and AI local discovery, 28 million small business queries: https://foundationinc.co/lab/yelp-ai-local-discovery/