ORBT Labs
AI-citation audit · La Mesa, CA

AI-citation audit in La Mesa.

See what ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity say about your La Mesa business right now. Free as a self-serve tool, or hire me to close the gaps and prove the change ninety days out.

Start a brief Or email hello@orbtlabs.com
01 — Why this, here

The Village runs on walk-ins. The newcomers ask an AI first.

La Mesa's downtown Village trades on charm and foot traffic, and the rest of town runs on family retail, healthcare, auto, and small services. The people who already live here know where to go. But East County keeps gaining new residents — someone moves to Mt Helix or near Grossmont and the first thing they do is ask ChatGPT "good family dentist near La Mesa" or "auto shop near the Village I can trust." If the model names someone else, that household is gone before you ever had a shot at it.

The audit shows you exactly what is being said. I run the prompts a real local buyer would use, across every model that matters, and hand back a plain snapshot: where you get cited, where a competitor gets the recommendation, and where the category sits open with nobody owning it. The maddening cases are the long-standing La Mesa businesses everyone in town knows — and the AI has somehow never heard of. Those are the cheapest to fix.

A note on scope. My sister studio XALA handles AI-citation work for clinics, dental practices, and real-estate brokerages — separate playbooks, clean hand-off if that is you. Family retail, auto, dining, and small services across La Mesa run through me.

02 — What we build

Free tool first. Paid engagement when the answer is ugly.

  • The free tool — run the audit yourself in about thirty seconds. Same model panel we use in client work; no email gate, no upsell prompt.
  • Paid engagement: a deepened prompt set tuned to your La Mesa buyer, run against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, with answers archived and diffed.
  • A gap report — where the models cite you, where they cite a competitor instead, and where the category has a vacuum nobody owns yet.
  • Schema, entity, and source-credibility fixes shipped directly to your site or handed off as a clean diff for your developer.
  • Day 30, 60, and 90 follow-up snapshots run on the same panel — you see what moved, in plain side-by-side English.
  • A short readout written for a non-technical owner, so the conversation with your marketing person stops being theater.

From Free tool, $1,500 paid engagement · 1 to 3 weeks · Owner-operated.

03 — What this looks like

Three composite scenarios from this market.

A family-owned restaurant in the Village. Twenty years on the same block, named on "La Mesa restaurants" in ChatGPT but silent on "casual dinner with patio seating near La Mesa Village." I deepen the audit, find the menu lives in a single image, ship Restaurant schema with the actual cuisine and a readable menu, and seed two primary-source dining listings. The day-90 snapshot lands them in two of four answers for the patio prompt.

An auto shop near Grossmont. Decades of repeat customers, invisible to Perplexity for "trustworthy mechanic near La Mesa." The free tool returns a chain. I run a paid engagement: a services-and-specialties page in readable text, AutoRepair and LocalBusiness schema, and two primary-source directory entries. By day 90 they show in Claude and Perplexity for two of three queries.

A small-services business serving Mt Helix. Booked on referrals, absent when a new homeowner asks Claude "reliable handyman near La Mesa." I rewrite the site around named service areas in plain text, add Service schema, and land a primary-source profile. The day-60 panel quotes them by name.

04 — Honest scope

This is an audit and a focused remediation, not a brand overhaul. I do not promise a citation count and I do not run paid ads. If the site has structural problems that block AI crawlers entirely, I name them in the report and either fix the load-bearing pieces inside scope or quote a separate rebuild. The free tool tells you most of what you need before you ever pay me.

San Diego is studio headquarters, and La Mesa is inside thirty minutes through East County. I can meet in person in the Village or near Grossmont; most of the work runs remote, but the first conversation can be wherever is easiest.

This page was drafted from a structured brief and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.

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