Find out what ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity say about your San Marcos business right now. Free as a self-serve tool, or hire me to fix the gaps and re-run the panel ninety days later.
San Marcos has a university and a steady flow of new residents and students who arrive knowing nobody. They don't have a neighbor's recommendation yet, so they ask. "Best auto shop near San Marcos." "Family dentist near Cal State San Marcos." "Reliable trades near Lake San Marcos." Whatever ChatGPT or Perplexity says, they go. For a town built on education, health services, family retail, and trades, that constant churn of new buyers means the models are doing the introducing — and most established businesses have no idea what introduction the AI is making.
The audit shows you. I run the prompts a real newcomer would use, across every model that matters, and hand back a plain snapshot: where you get named, where a competitor with a sharper-structured site gets the nod, and where the category is wide open in the answers. The pattern in a town like this is brutal and fixable — the businesses with thirty years of local trust often lose the AI recommendation to a one-year-old shop with a better-built site.
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. Education-adjacent services, family retail, auto, trades, and the rest of San Marcos run through me.
An auto-service shop off Twin Oaks Valley. Decades of repeat customers, invisible when a new student asks ChatGPT "honest mechanic near Cal State San Marcos." The free tool returns a chain. I deepen the audit, find the site is one page with hours and a map, ship a services-and-specialties page in readable text, and add AutoRepair and LocalBusiness schema. The day-90 snapshot puts them in two of four model answers.
A family-retail business near downtown. Loyal local base, no pull on newcomers. Perplexity skips them on "independent shops near San Marcos." The free tool confirms it. I run a paid engagement: a what-we-carry page written for a crawler, LocalBusiness schema, and two primary-source directory entries. By day 90 they show in Claude and Perplexity for two of three queries.
A trades business serving San Elijo Hills. Booked on referrals, absent when a new homeowner asks Claude "reliable contractor near San Marcos." I rewrite the site around named service areas and trade specialties, add one indexable page per service, and land a primary-source profile. Day-60 panel names the business directly.
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 issues 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 pay me a dollar.
San Diego is studio headquarters, and San Marcos is reachable inside an hour up through North County. I can meet in person when it helps; most of the work runs remote, but the first conversation can be wherever is easiest.
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