AI search is quoting your directory's listing pages. Make them worth quoting

A scene

This is an illustration, not a real customer. Someone has hurt her shoulder and doesn't want to spend an evening reading reviews. She asks an AI assistant on her phone for a physiotherapist near her office who sees people before work and takes her insurance.

The answer names two clinics. Under each is a short reason: early appointments, a specialist in shoulders, accepts her plan. Next to the reasons are small citation links. One goes to a clinic's own website. The other goes to a listing page on a local health directory, the kind of page that has opening hours, a list of treatments, a few reviews and a booking button.

She taps the first clinic's phone number from the answer and books. Nobody visited the directory. The directory still made the introduction.

If you run that directory, this is the part of your business that's changing. The listing page used to be where someone compared options. Now, more and more, it's the material an assistant reads before it does the comparing for them.

What the study found

At Squarespace's Circle Day 2026, SEO manager Tom Smeaton presented research Squarespace did with Peec AI, an AI search analytics company. According to Squarespace's write-up, they analyzed 1.3 million linked citations in answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, across three kinds of service businesses: health and wellness, professional services, and training and education.

A few findings stand out for anyone running a directory or marketplace.

Directories and marketplaces are key discovery sources, especially in health and wellness and professional services.

In health and wellness, AI tends to recommend specific businesses rather than ranked lists, acting like an advisor and appointment booker. Yelp and Booksy were among the important sources, alongside YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

In professional services, recommendations drew on Clutch, Goodfirms, Upwork, DesignRush and "best-of" sites.

In training and education, niche platforms like Preply, Wyzant and Superprof appeared often, along with tutorials and forums.

Each assistant leans differently. More than 20% of ChatGPT's citations came from reference sources like Wikipedia. Listicles and rankings made up more than a third of Perplexity's cited sources. Across all three, 40% of cited sources were listicles or articles.

What an assistant needs from a listing

The study doesn't say exactly why a particular listing gets cited, and we won't pretend to know. But the scene above suggests what an assistant has to find on the page to give a useful answer: the specific facts a person asked about, stated plainly enough to quote.

That usually means:

What the provider actually does, in specific terms. "Sports injuries, shoulder and knee rehab" is quotable. "Holistic wellness solutions" isn't.

Where and when. Address, service area, hours, and whether they offer early, late or weekend appointments.

Practical constraints. Insurance or payment accepted, languages spoken, accessibility, whether they take new clients.

Proof. Credentials, years in practice and reviews from real customers, with dates.

Freshness. A visible "last updated" date, and information that's actually current. An assistant quoting last year's hours is a bad experience that lands on the provider and on you.

What we'd fix first, if it were our directory

Find your thinnest listings. Most directories have many pages with a name, an address and nothing else. Count them. Those pages give an assistant nothing to say.

Make it easy for providers to fill in the gaps. The best information comes from the business itself. A short prompt after sign-in, "Add your hours and the services you specialize in," does more than a long profile form nobody completes.

Structure the important fields. Hours, service area, accepted insurance and services should be real fields, not free text in a description box. Structured fields are easier to keep accurate, easier to show consistently and easier for any machine to read.

Keep reviews real and dated. Assistants, like people, put weight on what customers say. Fake or stale reviews damage the page for everyone.

Look at your listings as an assistant would. Ask a few assistants the kind of question your users ask, in your category and city, and see which sources come back. If your directory never appears, check whether your listing pages can be crawled at all and whether the key facts are visible without logging in or clicking through.

What to tell the businesses on your platform

The providers listed on your directory are reading about AI visibility too, and many of them are being sold services to improve it. You can be the useful voice in that conversation.

Squarespace's advice to service businesses came down to three things: be discoverable in the directories and marketplaces your audience already uses, get validated wherever people talk about and compare businesses, and create clear content about your services, expertise and credibility. Two of those three happen partly on your platform.

So tell them, plainly, what a complete listing looks like and why it matters now. Show each provider which of their fields are empty. Remind them that the details people ask assistants about, like hours, specialties and what payment they take, are exactly the details that go stale. Make updating them a two-minute job.

Be careful not to promise anything. Nobody, including us and the study's authors, can guarantee that a complete listing gets cited. What you can say honestly is that an empty one gives an assistant nothing to work with.

The business question underneath

If assistants increasingly make the introduction without anyone visiting your site, your traffic numbers may fall even when your listings are doing their job. It's worth thinking about what you measure, and what you charge providers for, in a world where the value is being cited and booked rather than being browsed. Bookings and calls that come through your listing, and how many listings are complete and current, may tell you more than page views. Providers will ask why they should keep paying for a listing if fewer people see it, and you'll want an answer built on numbers you can show them, not a guess.

If you run a directory or marketplace and want help with listing data, provider tools or the platform behind them, that's the work our marketplaces team does. Talk to us.

Related work: Paddle8.