mainstream paid search or social channels available
Google and Meta both prohibit cannabis ads
Dispensaries
Google and Meta will not sell you an ad at any price.
Both prohibit cannabis advertising outright, which leaves organic, the menu platforms, and whatever AI engines decide to say about you. 45% of consumers now ask AI for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. AI returns one to five names. There is no second page.
best dispensary in Austin
Here are some well-reviewed options:
mainstream paid search or social channels available
Google and Meta both prohibit cannabis ads
of consumers now ask AI for local recommendations
up from 6% a year earlier
businesses named in a typical AI answer
there is no page two
2 services
Citation sources we audit
Each engine reads a different set of sources. These decide whether a dispensary gets named in your category.
| Source | Primarily feeds |
|---|---|
| Weedmaps | All engines |
| Leafly | All engines |
| Google Business Profile | Gemini / AI Overviews |
| Bing Places | ChatGPT / Copilot |
| Yelp | ChatGPT / Copilot |
| Foursquare | ChatGPT |
| Reddit — state and city cannabis subs | Perplexity |
| Local editorial roundups | All engines |
6 services × your markets
Drawn from how customers actually ask, not from keyword tools. A full engagement tracks fifty per market across 4 engines.
How it starts
We run fifty real customer prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for your markets, and show you exactly who gets named instead of you.
We fix the sources those engines actually read — listings, structured data, review velocity, third-party and community presence — in the order that moves your score fastest.
Every month the score is re-measured and reported, with the citation source behind each mention. You watch the number move and you know what moved it.
Before you ask
"You cannot actually measure this."
Fifty prompts, four engines, three runs each — logged with the source every engine cited. The number is reproducible and you get the raw log, not just a summary.
"We already have an SEO agency."
The work barely overlaps. Theirs happens on your website. Around four fifths of ours happens off it — directories, review platforms, community and editorial. We will tell you plainly if we think you are paying twice.
"This is too new to spend on."
Forty-five percent of consumers now ask AI for local recommendations, up from six percent a year earlier. The question is not whether it arrives, it is whether you are named when it does.
"Show us it works first."
Every engagement opens with an audit. You see your score, your competitors’ scores, and the gaps — before committing to a retainer. If the number is already good, we will say so.
Comparison
Not a criticism of SEO — it still matters. These are simply different jobs, and most operators are only buying one of them.
| Traditional SEO agency | First Five | |
|---|---|---|
| Engines covered | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot | |
| Where the work happens | Almost entirely on your website | Roughly four fifths off it, where citations come from |
| What success looks like | A position on page one | Being named in a list of five |
| Primary data source | Google Search Console | Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, review platforms |
| How reviews are treated | Reputation management | A primary input to whether you get named |
| Monthly deliverable | A traffic report | A score, a per-engine breakdown, and a citation source map |
| When you are not cited | No visibility into why | The exact source that produced a competitor mention instead |
| What compounds | Rankings reset with each core update | Presence in the sources engines read |
Every row above is checkable. If your current agency covers a row we have marked, tell us and we will correct it.
Already working with someone?
Each comparison names the situations where the other option is the better one. If your current provider already covers this, the audit will show it and you should keep them.
What an SEO retainer covers, what it structurally cannot, and why the two jobs share almost no inputs.
Read the comparison →A full-service growth marketing agency working across beauty, ecommerce, healthcare and med spas, SaaS, dental and several other c…
Read the comparison →Cardinal is an Atlanta-based healthcare marketing agency with an established SEO and paid media practice. Aesthetics is one of sev…
Read the comparison →Growth99 is a platform-plus-agency hybrid built specifically for aesthetics practices. It combines a CRM, marketing automation, on…
Read the comparison →9 questions
No. Both prohibit cannabis advertising and we will not try to work around a platform policy on your account — the downside is your account, not ours. That prohibition is the reason this work matters: the channels your competitors in other industries lean on are closed to all of you equally, so organic and AI visibility is where the category is actually decided.
Weedmaps ads rent you position inside Weedmaps for as long as you keep paying. This builds presence across the sources every engine reads, including Weedmaps, and it keeps working when you pause. The two are complementary, but only one of them is an asset you own.
For local queries, generally yes — "dispensary near me" and "best dispensary in [city]" return named businesses. Product and dosing questions often get declined. Coverage is patchier than in aesthetics or dental, so the baseline measures which of your prompts return a list at all before it measures whether you are on it. If the answer for your market is that engines mostly decline, we will tell you that rather than sell you a programme.
Usually yes, because the competitive set in a single market is small and the entry engagement is a fixed-price project rather than a retainer. If the measurement shows you are already named consistently, we will say so and stop there.
Each location is measured separately, because engines resolve them separately, and cannabis marketing cannot cross state lines. Multi-state operators usually have strong brand recognition and individual locations that engines fail to resolve as distinct entities — which is a fixable entity problem rather than a content one.
Nothing we do involves health claims, untargeted advertising, or anything aimed at under-21s. We work inside your state's advertising rules and the platform rules on top of them, and we will flag it when a tactic that is fine in one market is not allowed in yours. We are not compliance counsel and we will not pretend to be.
Directory claims and structured data can register within two to four weeks. Review velocity and third-party presence compound over three to six months. We report monthly either way, so you see progress before it is complete.
No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. No AI platform publishes how it selects sources. We work from measured output and correlations documented across the industry, we report honestly, and we re-baseline the source map quarterly because these systems change fast.
No. The monthly plans are cancel any time and the entry engagement is a one-time project with a fixed price. We would rather earn the next month than hold you to a contract. One caveat worth stating plainly: review velocity and third-party coverage compound over three to six months, so leaving at month two means paying for work you never saw finish.
Fifty prompts, four engines, your markets. You will see your score and exactly who is being named instead — before you commit to anything.
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