AI Bots Cite Dentists More Than Fortune 500s. The Data Surprised Us
A recent analysis revealed that AI bots are more likely to cite small businesses, such as local dentists and niche service providers, rather than Fortune 500 companies. The study found that the top 0.1% of sites crawled by AI bots have significantly higher technical readiness scores compared to the bottom 90%. This suggests that AI search engines prioritize structured data and machine-readability over brand recognition.
- ▪AI bots cite small businesses more frequently than Fortune 500 companies.
- ▪The top 0.1% of sites crawled by AI bots have an average of 38.8 crawls each, while the bottom 90% average only 1.3.
- ▪Nearly 30% of the top cohort sites have an AEO score of 8 or higher, compared to only 0.4% in the bottom cohort.
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Engagemii |
| Canonical URL | https://engagemii.com/blog/dentists-vs-fortune-500-ai-citations |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:39:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T12:52:07.634Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T12:52:07.634Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | s5Ww3nALYctk |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
← Back to BlogResearchBy Gregory Pellitteri·May 30, 2026·6 min readAI Bots Cite Dentists More Than Fortune 500s. The Data Surprised Us.When you ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to recommend a dentist in Portland, an ecommerce store for outdoor gear, or a mortgage broker who works with first-time buyers, the answer comes from a small group of sites the AI bots have decided are worth citing. We wanted to know which sites those are. So we cohorted the crawl data and looked.What we found was not what we expected.We analyzed about 1.2 million brands in the Engagemii directory. Of those, around 395,000 had been crawled at least once by a major AI bot. We sorted that crawled population by total crawl volume and split it into cohorts.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engagemii.
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