The research

We don't count mentions. We rebuild the questions a real buyer asks, put them to AI, and find out why the answer came out the way it did.

Resonate Labs studies how AI describes a company to the people deciding whether to buy from it. Atlanta is the first time we've pointed that at a whole city, where the "buyers" are founders, students, investors, engineers and companies choosing where to build.

How we approach a market

  1. Map the market first. Before we write one question we build a map: who the players are, who they are up against, who is asking and what each of them is trying to decide. Facts about a player are checked against its own site. For Atlanta the map holds 63 organizations and eight publications, 26 cities it gets compared with, and 24 kinds of people with a reason to ask.
  2. Become the buyer. We turn the map into people: a founder raising a seed round, a student choosing a campus, a company weighing a move to Georgia. Where a client has sales calls and customer interviews, we build from their customers' own words. Where there are none, as here, we build synthetic buyers from the map, each with a job to do, a decision in front of them and something in the way.
  3. Ask what they would really ask. Each buyer produces the questions that come right before a decision: who should I talk to, which of these two, is this worth it. Every question records who is asking, what they are deciding and what kind of answer it calls for, and none of them names an organization, so nobody is handed the answer. Then we ask all of them in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and keep every word and every source.
  4. Find the gap, and the reason for it. We read who was named, who was recommended, what was said about the ones passed over, and which pages the answer was built from. What comes out isn't a score. It is a short, ranked list of pages to fix, publish and link, and the same questions asked again ninety days later to see what moved.

For Atlanta: 13 organizations each have a full study of their own buyers' questions, and everyone is measured on two shared studies, 150 questions about US startup cities and 190 about Atlanta's ecosystem. Collected September 2026.

2,290 questions, 9,160 answers, 63,532 citations traced, 4 AI engines.

Every question, every answer

Both shared studies are public in full: 340 questions and 1,360 answers, exactly as the engines gave them in September 2026. Open the query explorer.

How the top-five counts are made

There is no single headline number. How often Atlanta makes AI's top five depends on what is asked, so here it is for each kind of question, with the questions themselves.

What was asked
125 questions about US startup cities, none of which names Atlanta, asked of four engines: 500 answers. The head-to-head questions, which name the cities they compare, are counted separately.
Which answers count
204 of the 500 answers put cities in an order. Atlanta had a place in 142 of them, was named without a place in 16, and was absent from 46.
How a place is read
Where the answer is one numbered list, the place is read straight from its numbering: 61 of the 142. Where the ranking is laid out another way, a second reading of the answer by a model assigns the place: 81. Where both read the same answer they agreed on 58 of 60. On the numbered lists alone Atlanta is in the top five in 38 of 61, 62%.
The rate
Atlanta was in the first five places in 81 of those 142 answers: 57%. The same count for every city ranked at least 60 times puts Atlanta 8th of 13.
The stricter version
37 of the 142 lists had five places or fewer, where any city listed is in the top five. On the 105 longer lists Atlanta made the top five in 44, 42%. Counted that way for every city, Atlanta is still 8th.
By engine
ChatGPT 50 of 81, Claude 9 of 18, Gemini 10 of 13, Perplexity 12 of 30. ChatGPT ranks cities most often and supplies 81 of the 142 lists, and the counts for the other engines are small, so the headline is the total across all four.
Counting the lists that leave it off
Atlanta is in the top five in 81 of all 204 lists, 40%. That is the count shown for each kind of question above. The comparison between cities uses only the lists a city is on, for the reason below.
Why we don't compare how many lists a city is on
Some of these questions set the biggest hubs aside on purpose ("outside California and New York", "in the Southeast", "rising hubs"), and others are about a sector or a strength where they are not the natural answer. In those answers the engines often mention them as the benchmark without giving them a place. So San Francisco Bay Area and New York City are named in more answers than Atlanta (422 and 406, to 339) and have a place in fewer lists (111 and 127, to 142). That count reflects the questions, not the cities. What we compare is the rate inside the lists, where they make the top five almost every time.
Without the home-field questions
Some questions were written around Atlanta's own strengths. Leave them out and it is 70 of 126, 56%.

How we count

  • The unit is one answer: one question asked of one engine.
  • A city or organization named in the question itself isn't counted on that question.
  • Cities are compared on the questions that aren't head-to-heads.
  • A publication isn't scored on being named or recommended. It is placed by how many of the 1,360 shared answers cite it as a source.
  • Every answer was read twice: an exact scan for every tracked name, then a model that coded how each was described. Names and quotes it returned had to appear in the answer.
  • "Picked" means the answer singles it out as a top recommendation. Reasons are our coding; quotes are the engines' own words.
  • On the map, a line joins two organizations when the same answer names both; the more answers, the stronger the line.
  • Rows built on fewer than 30 answers are marked as direction.

What this can't tell you

  • One snapshot. Answers vary from run to run and the engines update their models; the re-measure repeats the same questions.
  • A citation shows an engine listed a page as a source, not that the page produced a particular sentence.
  • City results are being checked against answers collected from outside Atlanta.

Published by PursueATL. Research by Resonate Labs. Data collected September 2026.