Houston AI Citation Study, October 2026

What Google AI Mode and Perplexity cite and recommend when people ask about local businesses, and whether AI-ready websites get cited more. On October 30, 2026, 232 questions about 15 local industries in 8 Greater Houston cities (a recommendation question and a price question per industry and city) were sent to Google AI Mode (via SerpApi, searched from Houston) and Perplexity Sonar (API), with no system prompt and no brand named. Every cited URL was coded by source type, every recommended business was extracted with the sources attached to it, and cited local business websites were compared with the 3,014-site census of the Houston AI Visibility Index (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23130268). Headline findings. 95.5% of the businesses AI Mode recommended were Google Business Profile entities (median 4.9 stars, 323 reviews); Perplexity cited business websites for 49.4% and directories for 45.0% of its citations on recommendation questions. The engines named the same top business for 8.3% of questions. Census sites passing four AI-ready basics on October 2, 2026 were cited by October 30 at 5.9% against 1.4% (adjusted odds ratio 4.6, 95% CI 2.3 to 9.2); cited local business sites passed all four basics 65.2% of the time against 32.1% for the census (adjusted OR 3.6), and the gap held across Common Crawl link-authority quartiles. Files. questions (232), answers (696), citations (5,422), recommendations (1,460), summary tables with bootstrap 95% intervals, results by industry, website-check comparisons with adjusted odds ratios, a methods note (PDF), the report chart, and the scripts used for collection, coding and analysis. Answer text and per-site check results are not included. Full report: https://marketingandai.com/research/houston-ai-citation-study/ Disclosure: Marketing & AI is a Houston SEO and AEO agency; SEO agencies were one of the 15 industries. It was not cited or named in any answer.