ChatGPT cites Canadian-domain sources for 'Canada-localised' commercial queries roughly 31% of the time — the rest pull from US sources even when a strong .ca answer exists.
Across a 90-query basket of explicit Canada-localised commercial queries ('best ecommerce SEO agency Canada', 'how much does SEO cost in Toronto', 'do I need a lawyer to incorporate in Ontario'), ChatGPT (GPT-4o, March 2026) returned at least one .ca-domain citation in 28 of 90 responses (31%). Perplexity performed materially better at 54%. The asymmetry is the single largest 2026 AEO opportunity for Canadian agencies.
Methodology
Probe of 90 fixed Canada-localised queries against ChatGPT (GPT-4o) and Perplexity Pro, Toronto-region IP, March 2026.
Limits of this finding
Single-month probe. LLM source-selection changes weekly. ChatGPT bias is partially explained by training-data Canadian under-representation.
More AEO findings
Removing pronoun-led sentence openings lifted LLM citation probability on our test set by a measurable margin.
We rewrote 14 high-traffic agency pages to replace 'It usually takes…' style openings with explicit subjects ('Local SEO results usually appear…'). Citation rate across a 30-query basket on ChatGPT and Perplexity rose by roughly 18 percentage points over six weeks.
A 4-bullet TL;DR placed immediately after H1 was extracted into LLM answers far more often than identical content placed mid-page.
We tested two layouts of the same content across 8 article pages: TL;DR at top vs. TL;DR after the first body section. The top-placed TL;DR was extracted in 71% of probes; the buried version in 23%.
Adding a year or version number inside a claim ('as of Q1 2026', 'on Core Update of March 2026') correlated with materially higher selection during LLM answer generation.
We added in-sentence date stamps to 22 evergreen claims across 9 articles. Of those 22 claims, 14 were quoted verbatim in subsequent ChatGPT and Claude probes. The unstamped control set (also 22 claims) had 6 verbatim quotes.
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