If you run a local business, you’ve probably noticed customers finding you through ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews instead of a plain list of blue links. Getting cited in those answers is quickly becoming as valuable as ranking on page one — but most of the advice out there assumes you have a digital PR agency and a five-figure monthly retainer. You don’t need one.
A recent survey of 500 business owners and marketing decision-makers found that 92% believe being cited by AI tools matters to their strategy, but only 15.5% are actually tracking whether it’s happening. That gap is the opportunity. Here’s what the same research says actually earns citations — and how a small business can do it without a PR budget.
What Actually Gets Cited: Expert Commentary and Original Data
The Bright Valley Marketing Digital PR Strategy Guide, based on that 500-business survey, ranked tactics by how often they led to being cited. Two came out well ahead of everything else: expert commentary (35.3%) and original data or research (29.9%). Guest posts, press releases, and generic outreach all trailed far behind.
That’s good news if you’re a small business, because both of those tactics are things you already have access to. You don’t need a national press list — you need to be the person AI systems recognize as having a real, specific answer.
Expert commentary means putting your actual professional judgment on the record: answering a customer’s question in detail on your site, weighing in on a local issue in your industry, or explaining a process step by step instead of describing it in vague marketing language. AI systems like ChatGPT are built to find and summarize clear, specific answers — a generic “we’re the best in Chula Vista” page gives them nothing to extract. A detailed explanation of how you actually solve a specific problem gives them something to quote.
Original data doesn’t have to mean a formal research study. It can be as simple as a small, honest dataset from your own business: average repair costs by season, the three most common questions customers ask before booking, or what changed after you tried something new. Original numbers are hard to find anywhere else, which is exactly what makes them worth citing.
A Case in Point: Building a Citable Source From Scratch
This is the same principle Villegas Digital uses to keep its own SEO knowledge base current — pulling recent, sourced studies and industry data on a regular schedule, tagging each figure by how trustworthy it actually is, and writing down exactly where every number came from before using it in a pitch or a post. It’s not a PR campaign. It’s a habit of sourcing carefully and being specific, applied consistently over time.
A local business can do the same thing on a smaller scale. If you’re a contractor, track how many jobs came from referrals versus search this year and publish the honest number. If you run a restaurant, publish which menu items actually sell best by season based on your own point-of-sale data. None of this requires a press contact. It requires being willing to show your own numbers instead of restating industry averages everyone else already has.
Why This Matters More in Mid-2026
AI search is citing sources at real volume now, not just experimenting. ChatGPT cites an average of roughly 15 sources per response, which means there’s real room for a smaller, well-sourced local page to get picked up — it doesn’t need to outrank a national brand, it needs to be the clearest, most specific answer available on a narrow question.
That’s also why the measurement gap matters. If 92% of business owners think AI citations matter but only 15.5% are tracking them, most of your competitors have no idea whether any of this is working for them. Checking your own site’s mentions in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews periodically — even manually, a few times a month — already puts you ahead of most of the market. It’s also worth remembering that AI citations don’t replace traditional SEO in San Diego — they sit on top of it. A page still has to be crawlable, well-structured, and genuinely useful before it has any chance of being cited.
Where to Start This Week
Pick one question your customers ask you constantly and answer it in full, specific detail on your own site, using your own numbers or your own stated professional judgment rather than a rewritten version of what’s already online. That single page, done well, does more for AI citation potential than a stack of generic blog posts ever will.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need a PR budget to get cited by AI search — you need to publish specific, original information that nobody else has already put online. Expert commentary and original data outperform every other tactic in the data, and both are things a local business already has if it’s willing to write them down honestly.
If you’d rather have this built into your site’s ongoing strategy instead of doing it page by page, that’s exactly what our AI search and answer engine optimization service is built for — we identify what your business knows that nobody else is publishing, and turn it into content AI systems can actually find and cite.
Related services: AI search optimization (AEO) · SEO in San Diego · Local SEO & Google Business Profile · SEO audits
Keep reading: What Is AI Search, and Why It’s Quietly Eating Your Website Traffic