How ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity Pick Agencies in Canada: What 91 Answers Cite

Ask ChatGPT for the best SEO agencies in Toronto and you don't get ten blue links. You get a short list of names, a sentence about each, and a handful of sources underneath. For a business owner, that list is starting to replace the first page of Google as the shortlist. For an agency or service business, it raises an uncomfortable question: where do those names actually come from, and why isn't yours one of them?

We wanted a real answer instead of a guess, so we tested it. This post covers what we asked, which sources the four assistants leaned on, and what a Canadian business can do with that information, whether or not it ever hires anyone to help.

How We Ran the Test

On September 10, 2026, we ran 23 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity with web search enabled and the market set to Canada, using the prompt-testing tool in OpenSEO, the open-source SEO platform we use for our own research. Fifteen prompts were about the services we sell on the automation side, such as "best AI automation agencies in Canada" and "best n8n automation agencies". The other eight were about search: "best SEO agencies in Toronto", "best local SEO agencies in Toronto", "best GEO agencies in Canada", and similar. Each prompt went to all four assistants, and one response didn't come back, which leaves 91 answers.

For every answer we recorded whether a given business was mentioned and which web pages the assistant linked as sources. We then counted how many of the 23 prompts each source domain showed up in. That tells you which sources the assistants return to across different questions, not just which one got linked many times inside a single answer.

The Sources That Showed Up Most

Counts are the number of prompts where at least one of the four answers linked the source. A single run on one date; see the limits section below.

Beyond that top group, the long tail was mostly individual agency websites and agency-written "top 10" lists, each showing up in one or two prompts. No single agency website came close to the reach of the directories.

Review Directories Carry More Weight Than Agency Websites

Clutch was the most consistent source by a wide margin, and its sister site The Manifest and competitor GoodFirms appeared as well. The answers often used these sites as the justification for a recommendation, with phrasing along the lines of "strong client reviews on Clutch". That makes sense from the assistant's point of view: a directory with verified reviews looks like independent evidence, while an agency describing itself as the best in Toronto does not.

Semrush's agency partner lists played a similar role for the SEO prompts. Those lists also rank near the top of Google for searches like "SEO agency Toronto", which is a pattern worth noticing: the sources AI assistants trust for these questions overlap heavily with the pages that already rank in regular search.

Lists Get Quoted Too, Including Paid Ones

Roundup articles were the other big input. Some were written by agencies ranking themselves among the best in their city. One Toronto publication's list that appeared in three prompts is labelled as sponsored content on its own page, and a press release hosted on a file-sharing CDN showed up in three more. The assistants didn't flag either as paid.

If you're a buyer, that's worth knowing before you treat an AI shortlist as neutral. If you're a business trying to get recommended, it explains why some firms with modest websites keep appearing: they're present in the lists the assistants read, whether those lists were earned or bought.

Reddit and Publications Fill In the Rest

Reddit threads came up in five prompts, usually discussions where someone asked for agency recommendations and other users answered. TechRadar appeared in seven, mostly through its roundups of tools and services. Neither is something a business controls directly, but both reward the same thing: being genuinely mentioned by people and publications outside your own website.

What This Means If You Want to Be Recommended

None of this requires a special "AI optimization" trick. The assistants are summarizing the web, so the practical work is about showing up in the parts of the web they summarize. In order of effort:

1. Run your own buyer prompts first. Ask the four assistants the questions your customers would ask, and note which directories and lists they cite for your category and city.
2. Get listed on those directories and keep the details identical everywhere: business name, city, services, and pricing.
3. Collect real reviews from real clients on the platforms that came up. Nothing else in this list substitutes for them.
4. Make your service pages answer the obvious questions directly: what you do, where, for whom, and roughly what it costs.
5. Ask to be considered for genuine roundups in your industry, and take part in community discussions honestly, without dropping links.
6. Re-run the same prompts every month or two, so you can tell whether any of it changed the answers.

If you manage visibility for several clients, a monitoring tool can handle step six at scale; we compared a few of them in our post on AI visibility tools for agencies. Monitoring only measures the gap, though. The listings, reviews, and page fixes are what close it.

What We're Doing About It Ourselves

Leonyx AI was named in zero of the 91 answers. That isn't surprising for a young agency, and we'd rather publish the honest baseline than pretend otherwise. Our Clutch and GoodFirms profiles are live, and we're cleaning up inconsistent details across our listings and adding our SEO services to them. We'll re-run the same 23 prompts in about two months and share what, if anything, changed.

This is also exactly the process behind our AI SEO and GEO service: test the prompts your buyers use, map the sources the answers rely on, fix what makes your business hard to find or understand, and earn mentions in the places that matter. It starts at $500 USD a month and sits on top of regular SEO for small businesses, because the pages that rank in Google are often the same pages the assistants cite.

The Limits of This Data

This was one run on one date. AI answers change between sessions, so the same prompt tomorrow could cite different sources. We counted source domains per prompt rather than weighting them by position or how prominently they were used in the answer, and the prompts reflect the services we work in, so other industries may show different patterns. Treat the table as a strong signal about where to look, not a ranking formula.

The Bottom Line

Across 91 answers, AI assistants built their agency recommendations mostly from review directories, lists, publications, and community threads, with Clutch leading by a wide margin. If your business is absent from those sources, it's likely absent from the answer, no matter how good your website is. The fix is ordinary, slow, and legitimate: listings, real reviews, clear pages, and genuine mentions.