What ChatGPT cites when Australians ask who to hire

Why a fixed panel

Traffic tells you who is reading. It cannot tell you who is being cited. The only way to know is to ask the engines the questions people ask and look at what they cite. To make that repeatable, the questions are fixed, the panel file is hashed, and the same bytes are sent every month.

The engines are reached by API with web search on, which approximates the consumer products closely enough to be useful and repeatable. It is not a recording of what a person saw in ChatGPT that day, and we do not describe it as one.

The result

ChatGPT: 13 of 26 Australian answers carried a citation to a network page and named it in the answer text. Claude: 8 of 26 answers retrieved a network page during web search.

The questions where a network page was cited share a shape: a category, a place, and a need. Best roofer in Brisbane. A barber in Maroochydore who does fades. Those are the questions the network is built to answer, and they are the questions people actually ask.

The shelf

On the same questions, the sources the engines reached for most were Yelp, Reddit, The Urban List, Time Out, Word of Mouth, Airtasker, Oneflare, Yellow Pages. Every page we publish is competing with those pages for a place in an answer. The way to win the place is to be more specific, more current and more traceable than they are.

What gets a business named

Across the cited answers, the businesses that were named had three things in common on the cited page: a specific service, a specific place, and a fact the engine could repeat. A licence number. A rating with a count behind it. An opening hour. A business with a name and an adjective was summarised away.

A single run is a baseline. Answers move week to week. We call a change real only when it holds across repeated runs of the identical panel, and we publish the number whether it rises or falls.