In Ahrefs’ 1 November 2026 snapshot for “dentist singapore”, Q&M Dental Group holds the top organic spot on Google. On our four-engine AI citation score, it ranks 16th of the 20 dental clinics we tracked. Nuffield Dental, which is not among Google’s recorded organic results for that search, has 53 listed citations across the 116 stored answers from the four engines we scored.
Dental is typical. Across our study of AI search in Singapore, Google and AI had different leaders in 11 of 13 sampled industries. We compared the highest-ranked business for one selected Google search term per industry with our citation score across four scored AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews), using Ahrefs Brand Radar’s stored answers from November 2026, in a headline set of 280 businesses. Five of the 14 headline panels are indicative, managed IT is excluded, and restaurants has no eligible Google business result. Measured, not modelled: we counted citations in stored answers and predicted nothing.
The full report, with all 15 industry chapters, is at State of AI Search in Singapore 2026.
Five numbers from 280 Singapore businesses
1. Google’s top business had the highest AI citation score in 2 of 13 industries. Where it has an AI rank (12 industries), its median competition rank is 12, counting equal scores as equal ranks. Seven of the 12 sit clearly below AI’s top ten, and one is tied across that line.
2. Businesses’ own websites get 33% of listed AI citations. That is 1,496 of 4,544 citations in the four engines’ top-15 domain lists. Under our classification rules, aggregators and publisher guides get 42% (1,906). Count food, lifestyle, beauty and parenting publishers as media instead and aggregators drop to 25.4%, while the businesses’ share stays at 33%. The spread between industries matters more: businesses’ own sites take 67% of 395 citations in dental and 3% of 854 in restaurants and cafés.
3. 55 of the 121 businesses from Google’s recorded results whose service the panels cover had no citation from any of the four engines. Across all 275 businesses the panels cover, from either side, 56 (20%) had none and 55 (20%) were cited by all four. Five preschool enrichment providers came in from Google, but the panel holds no enrichment questions, so we leave them out; with them it is 60 of 126. The sample favours visible businesses, so these shares do not describe the wider market.
4. None of the 279 assessed sites has a robots.txt rule barring an AI search crawler from the homepage. Most do fence off some paths, such as admin pages. 33 of 278 (12%) put some barrier in front of AI crawlers, mostly by refusing requests that identify as GPTBot. 122 of 276 (44%) publish llms.txt.
5. Domain Rating explains little. The correlation between Ahrefs Domain Rating and our AI score is r = 0.15 across the 275 businesses whose service the panels cover. The business with the highest Domain Rating sits clearly outside AI’s top three in 12 of 14 industries, and is tied across third place in one more.
Google rank does not carry over
Take tuition. In Ahrefs’ 6 October 2026 snapshot for “tuition centre singapore”, Club Math is the highest-ranked tuition business, second after an Instagram page. It has no citation from the four scored engines and shares the lowest score, 0, with three other centres. At the top, Ancourage Academy (20 citations) and EduFirst Learning Centre (19) are too close to call.
View the complete chart data
| Industry | Google-leading business | Google position | AI rank | Google (blue) → AI rank band (orange) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental clinics | Q&M Dental Group | 1 | 16 | |
| Aesthetic and dermatology clinics | The Hera Clinic | 1 | =15 (positions 15–20) | |
| Eye clinics and LASIK Indicative | Eagle Eye Centre | 3 | =5 (positions 5–8) | |
| Physiotherapy and chiropractic clinics Indicative | 2 | Google #1 business outside the 20 | ||
| Veterinary clinics Indicative | RehabVet | 1 | 1 | |
| Tuition centres | Club Math | 2 | =17 (positions 17–20) | |
| Preschools and enrichment | Little Footprints Preschool | 4 | =7 (positions 7–9) | |
| Interior design and renovation | The Interior Lab | 5 | =17 (positions 17–18) | |
| Family law firms Indicative | Yeo & Associates LLC | 1 | =15 (positions 15–20) | |
| Restaurants and cafés | null | Google #1 business outside the 20 | ||
| Fitness studios and gyms | The Flow Studio | 1 | =10 (positions 10–16) | |
| Hair and beauty salons | Chez Vous Hair | 2 | =12 (positions 12–14) | |
| Accounting and corporate secretarial services | Sleek | 1 | 1 | |
| Recruitment and HR outsourcing Indicative | Morgan McKinley | 1 | =12 (positions 12–13) |
Google positions count all organic results. AI ranks are within each panel: 20 businesses, except 15 ranked preschools. Equal scores share the = rank; orange brackets show the full tied band. Indicative panels are labelled; the Google marker has a dashed border.
Source: e-Alchemists analysis of Ahrefs Brand Radar and Ahrefs SERP data, Singapore, November 2026.
Read the full analysis and supporting data
Interior design is similar. The Interior Lab, the top design business on Google for “interior design singapore” (11 November 2026 snapshot), shares =17 of 20 on the AI score. MET Interior has both the highest score, 59.4, and the most citations, 19.
There are two exceptions. In vet clinics, RehabVet is first on Google and has the highest AI score, and in accounting and corporate secretarial, Sleek is first on both. Two out of 13 is not a pattern to plan around. Of the 275 businesses whose service the panels cover, 75 came into the study only because they rank in Google’s recorded results, and their median AI score is 0.
Backlink strength is a weak guide too. Q&M Dental Group has the highest Domain Rating of the 20 dental clinics, 46, and ranks 16th in AI. Trust Dental Surgery has a Domain Rating of 1.1 and 9 AI Overview citations.
Which websites AI answers link to
Do AI answers mostly link to directories and listicles? In some industries, yes.
View the complete chart data
| Industry / engine | Citation mix | Businesses | Aggregators | Government / public | Forums / social | Media | Other | Listed citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental clinics | 67.3% | 8.9% | 18.0% | 4.8% | 0.0% | 1.0% | 395 | |
| Aesthetic and dermatology clinics | 63.0% | 20.1% | 2.7% | 9.4% | 0.0% | 4.7% | 403 | |
| Eye clinics and LASIK Indicative | 50.8% | 17.5% | 25.4% | 5.1% | 0.0% | 1.1% | 177 | |
| Physiotherapy and chiropractic clinics Indicative | 62.1% | 21.4% | 9.7% | 2.8% | 1.4% | 2.8% | 145 | |
| Veterinary clinics Indicative | 32.0% | 26.1% | 0.0% | 5.2% | 15.0% | 21.6% | 153 | |
| Tuition centres | 20.0% | 71.7% | 0.0% | 4.0% | 0.0% | 4.3% | 445 | |
| Preschools and enrichment | 37.8% | 32.2% | 23.8% | 3.8% | 1.9% | 0.5% | 370 | |
| Interior design and renovation | 36.4% | 48.5% | 2.7% | 2.7% | 5.1% | 4.7% | 297 | |
| Family law firms Indicative | 37.7% | 11.7% | 38.3% | 6.2% | 3.1% | 3.1% | 162 | |
| Restaurants and cafés | 3.0% | 77.0% | 0.0% | 18.5% | 1.4% | 0.0% | 854 | |
| Fitness studios and gyms | 8.8% | 55.4% | 8.2% | 20.7% | 6.5% | 0.4% | 478 | |
| Hair and beauty salons | 20.4% | 49.4% | 0.0% | 18.4% | 6.1% | 5.7% | 245 | |
| Accounting and corporate secretarial services | 59.9% | 4.9% | 22.1% | 5.6% | 1.1% | 6.4% | 267 | |
| Recruitment and HR outsourcing Indicative | 46.4% | 19.6% | 21.6% | 5.9% | 0.0% | 6.5% | 153 |
Share of linked citations in the top-15 domain lists. Hatching marks indicative panels. AI Mode and Copilot are recorded, not scored.
Source: e-Alchemists analysis of Ahrefs Brand Radar data, Singapore, November 2026.
Read the full analysis and supporting data
In the five health industries, businesses take 59% of 1,273 listed citations and aggregators 17%. In dental, a clinic is the sole most-cited domain on two of the four engines; on ChatGPT the Ministry of Health leads.
In the three lifestyle industries it flips: aggregators take 66% of 1,577 citations and businesses 7%. In restaurants and cafés, Google’s late-August 2026 snapshots for “best restaurants singapore” and “cafes singapore” recorded no venue website among the organic results. Honeycombers’ guides alone have 91 listed citations. No single venue leads: MIYU has 9 citations, Colony and DOMO Modern Japanese 8 each.
Aggregators out-cite the businesses in 5 of 14 industries: tuition, interior design, restaurants and cafés, fitness studios, and hair and beauty salons. One caveat: we classed tuition’s tutor-matching agencies as aggregators, and they make up much of its 72% aggregator share, pooled across the four engines.
The source mix differs by engine
100 of the 219 cited businesses were cited by only one or two of the four scored engines, and the source mixes differ:
Recorded, not scored640 listed citations
Recorded, not scored764 listed citations
View the complete chart data
| Industry / engine | Citation mix | Businesses | Aggregators | Government / public | Forums / social | Media | Other | Listed citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 22.4% | 47.2% | 18.5% | 7.3% | 2.0% | 2.6% | 1418 | |
| Gemini | 53.7% | 36.2% | 2.7% | 2.5% | 0.2% | 4.8% | 525 | |
| Perplexity | 27.3% | 53.8% | 6.9% | 2.2% | 5.9% | 3.9% | 1319 | |
| Google AI Overviews | 41.9% | 26.4% | 4.9% | 24.0% | 0.4% | 2.4% | 1282 | |
| Google AI Mode Recorded, not scored | 32.7% | 30.6% | 12.8% | 19.5% | 1.1% | 3.3% | 640 | |
| Microsoft Copilot Recorded, not scored | 36.0% | 56.2% | 3.3% | 1.6% | 0.0% | 3.0% | 764 |
Share of linked citations in the top-15 domain lists. Hatching marks indicative panels. AI Mode and Copilot are recorded, not scored.
Source: e-Alchemists analysis of Ahrefs Brand Radar data, Singapore, November 2026.
Read the full analysis and supporting data
- ChatGPT leans on official sources. A government or public site is its sole most-cited domain in 7 of 14 industries.
- Gemini gives business websites the largest share of listed citations in this sample, 54% of 525.
- Perplexity gives aggregators 54% of 1,319 listed citations, the most of the four scored engines, and gives news media a larger share than any other engine.
- Google AI Overviews cites the most businesses, 168 of 275, and gives 24% of its 1,282 listed citations to forums and social links, led by Google Maps.
- Microsoft Copilot, which we recorded but did not score, gives aggregators 56% of its 764 listed citations.
A business can do well on one engine and be absent from another, which a single “AI visibility” number hides.
A gap in the IT panel
One industry broke our method. With the filters we tested, Ahrefs Brand Radar’s Singapore database returned no managed-IT or cybersecurity question with a Singapore or buying-intent word. The nearest are 7 general questions such as “What are managed IT services?”, which the engines answer with global vendors. 11 of the 18 Singapore IT firms we tracked had no citation.
An IT firm that wants to know where it stands needs its own consistently tracked buyer questions. The industry is in the scoreboard as indicative and kept out of every headline number.
What to do this quarter
These three moves start from the data, and each is a practical test rather than a proven fix. The full playbook has five, each with a way to check it worked.
- Answer the questions AI is asked. 178 of the 368 questions in our panels ask about price. Answer your industry’s questions on your own site, in plain text, with prices or price ranges where you can. We did not measure whether prices lead to citations, so track the result.
- Check that AI search crawlers can reach you. 27 of 276 sites refuse a request that names GPTBot, a training crawler, a pattern typical of bot-protection settings. Check access for the search crawlers relevant to you (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot) with their published verification procedures and your server logs, and treat training-crawler access as a separate choice.
- Measure each engine separately. A Google ranking report will not show where you stand. Track your citations engine by engine, every month, on the same questions.
How we measured this
We used industry-specific filters on Ahrefs Brand Radar’s stored Singapore questions and counted the citations to each business’s website in the stored answers: 368 questions and 1,468 stored answers across 14 industries. Ahrefs counts citations per web address, so where a site appears with and without “www” or on a subdomain we add the counts, and an answer linking to both can count twice. Most panels required local or buying intent, with documented exceptions. Answers were last updated between 19 August and 14 November 2026, and the Google snapshots for the comparison term date from 28 August to 11 November 2026. Each engine’s score is capped at 25 points, so “highest score” and “most-cited” can differ; equal scores share a rank, and neither judges quality. The full methodology has the details.
Is something about your business wrong? Email admin@e-alchemists.com and we will check it against the data and correct it within five working days.
See where your business ranks
Read your industry’s chapter in the State of AI Search in Singapore 2026 report, then request the measured scorecard if your business is among the 298 we measured. If it is not, we will confirm that and explain what a separate measurement would cover.
Source: e-Alchemists analysis of Ahrefs Brand Radar data, Singapore, November 2026.