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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← 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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