Almaty business is almost invisible to AI, directories decide for it

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini where to get an ultrasound or find a dentist in Almaty - and the service will answer, citing specific sites. The question is which sites he will name - and whether there are any Kazakh businesses among them, and not just directories.

The ooon.ai platform, a customer registration service for salons and clinics, for 36 days in a row, from July 27 to September 6, 2026, asked five AI services 84 everyday questions about Kazakh business: “where to get permanent eyebrow makeup done in Almaty,” “ultrasound of the abdominal cavity Uralsk price,” “ear cleaning Aktobe” — and recorded which sites each service called the source of the answer. Of the 2,943 responses received, a specific business site (not a directory or an aggregator) is not always named - and if it is called, it is mainly the same narrow circle of sites.

Almaty is an almost invisible city

For questions about Almaty (944 answers, 27 different wording), the service named its own website ooon.ai only in 2% of cases. For comparison: in Aktobe, a city several times smaller than Almaty, the share was seven times higher - 14.2%. In Uralsk - 8.5%. The fewer competing data sources there are in a city, the higher the chance of a particular site being included in the response. In Almaty, the competition for a place in the answer is thicker - there are more options from which the AI ​​can choose, and it does not primarily choose the websites of the establishments themselves.

Who does AI really quote?

Of the 944 responses about Almaty, the most frequently mentioned sites were not the sites of specific clinics and salons, but reference books and aggregators: 2GIS - in 281 responses, 103.kz - in 150, yandex.ru - in 135, doq.kz - in 123, chocolife.me - in 64. Websites of individual establishments are a rarity: too few have structured information that AI can quote directly - current prices, range of services, free appointment time.

The difference between the services is also noticeable

The share with which different AI services generally name specific business sites varies by multiples: for Gemini - 4.8%, for ChatGPT - 4.1%, for Groq - 2.2%, for Google AI Overview - only 1.6%. None of the services does this often - but Google AI Overview, built directly into the search results, is less likely than all the others to link to something outside of the already known aggregators.

What does this mean for business?

The main conclusion is not the most comfortable: the fact that a company exists and has a website does not guarantee anything in a world where the answer to the user is generated not by search results, but by a model that chooses what to link to. Structured data wins, and not the very fact of presence on the Internet - and such data is still available mainly from directories and aggregators, and not from the companies themselves.

The data and measurement methodology are provided by ooon.ai, a customer recording service for salons and clinics, which conducts its own daily measurements of AI assistant responses in the Kazakh market. All figures for the material were independently recalculated by the editors based on the raw measurement download and a full list of 103 questions, broken down into general and niche/brand formulations.