Study: Gemini leans on business websites, but its answers rarely repeat

What happened?

Steady Demand, a local SEO firm, published an analysis of 14,472 citations drawn from 1,487 local service queries run across 50 large United States metros and 10 service categories. Business websites accounted for close to 60 percent of the citations, more than every directory, forum and review platform combined. Reddit alone drew more citations than the entire local service directory category. The firm ran the same queries through ChatGPT for comparison, and the two engines cited the same domains only 8 percent of the time.

Why does it matter?

The more useful finding is how unstable the answers were. Repeating the same query produced overlapping cited sources only about 40 percent of the time, and the same top business came back in roughly 7 percent of repeats. The same design run against the ordinary Google local pack returned the same top listing about 90 percent of the time, which points at the way the answer gets generated rather than at the underlying business data. One check, of one engine, on one day, tells you very little about how visible you are.

Should I do anything?

If you have ever asked an assistant about your organization once, seen a poor result, and concluded you have a visibility problem, ask it again. Take your single most important question, put it to the same engine three times in one sitting, and write down what comes back each time. If the three answers disagree with each other, you are looking at normal variation rather than a verdict on your website. Only the patterns that survive repeated asking are worth spending your time on.

Learn more

• Steady Demand: the AI Citation Ledger study
• MarTech: business websites dominate local citations
• Our guide: local visibility audit
• Our guide: check your organization in Gemini