A homeowner in Tampa asks ChatGPT who fixes a slab leak, and the answer names two or three companies and cites a handful of sources. Which directories fed that answer? Yelp? Angi? Reddit? The BBB? You'll find a dozen blog posts that rank the directories with total confidence. Almost none of them can source the claim. Here's what the public record actually supports, and where the honest answer is that nobody has measured it.
Which directories have actually disclosed a deal with an AI engine?
Only a few, and they're the strongest evidence in the whole conversation. Yelp disclosed a data-licensing agreement with OpenAI in its Q4 2025 earnings in February 2026, which is a company disclosure, not a blogger's guess. Reddit signed a content-licensing deal with Google reported at about $60M/year, announced February 2024 and confirmed in Reddit's S-1, plus a separate OpenAI partnership announced May 2024 that's estimated at roughly $70M/year, a figure Reddit never officially disclosed. And Google feeds its own surfaces directly. If a directory has publicly signed paper with an AI company, it belongs in the top tier by default.
Does Google's Business Profile news mean Gemini now recommends you?
No, and this is the most misread announcement of the year. Google announced a Google Business Profile integration in the Gemini app on June 10, 2026 (Google's own blog). Read the scope carefully: it lets Gemini help a business owner manage their profile and get operational suggestions. It is not a documented change to how Gemini cites or recommends businesses to the homeowner asking the question. Anyone telling you Gemini now pulls recommendations from Business Profile data is reading a management feature as a ranking signal.
Which directories get cited a lot but have disclosed no deal?
This is where most of the well-known names sit: Angi, Facebook, and Houzz show up in citation counts, but no data-licensing agreement between them and any major AI company has been published. The most-quoted evidence here is a vendor number, so treat it as one. In an analysis of 267,280 AI citations drawn from its own clients' local-marketing campaigns, the SEO tool Local Dominator found Yelp, Google, Reddit, Facebook, and Angi were the most-cited sources. That's a convenience sample from one vendor's book of business, with no disclosed industry mix, geography, or query design. The ordering is a useful hint. The raw counts are not a measurement.
Don't the big Reddit citation numbers settle it?
They settle less than they seem to, because none of them are about local trade searches. Reddit was about 40.1% of LLM citations across a broad keyword set (Semrush, June 2025, roughly 150k citations over 5,000 randomly selected keywords), and about 46.7% of Perplexity's top cited domains on commercial queries (Profound), a share that reportedly fell to roughly 24% by January 2026. Every one of those figures is general-keyword or commercial-intent scope. Not one of them measured a homeowner asking who to hire in a specific city.
So how should a contractor read all of this?
Start with the finding that your own property matters more than you'd guess. Across 6.8M citations in retail, financial services, healthcare, and food service, Yext found 86% of AI citations came from brand-managed sources, a bucket that combines owned websites at about 44% with managed listings like Yelp and Business Profile at about 42%. That scope isn't local or contractor-specific either, but the reading holds: your own site plus your listings together carry the answer, not your website alone and not any single directory. And the bottom tier, BBB, HomeAdvisor, and Nextdoor, has little or no evidence behind it. Nextdoor doesn't appear in the major citation studies at all.
- Tier 1, disclosed deals: Yelp (OpenAI), Reddit (Google and OpenAI), and Google's own surfaces. Public paper, highest confidence.
- Tier 2, cited but no disclosed deal: Angi, Facebook, Houzz. They appear in vendor citation counts; no licensing agreement has been published.
- Tier 3, little or no evidence: BBB, HomeAdvisor, Nextdoor. Nextdoor is absent from the major studies entirely.
Here's the honest bottom line no competitor will print: no one has published a study of which directories feed AI answers for local contractor queries specifically. Every number in circulation is either general-purpose or sampled from a vendor's own clients. That's exactly why the move isn't to trust a blog's ranked list. It's to measure your own market, on the engines your customers actually use, and see which sources get cited when someone asks about your trade in your city.
