82% of AI citations come from earned media, not your own site. And directories reach 46.3% of ChatGPT citations on "best of" queries.
In controlled testing the strongest lever measured was adding statistics — a 41% visibility lift. The practical list, and how to measure it.
The going rate is $1,500 to $12,000 a month, mostly for schema markup and llms.txt. The strongest test of that found no measurable effect.
ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of local businesses. Google's map pack shows 35.9%. What the evidence says — and what it says about the price.