The ad-restriction wedge
Most industries treat AI visibility as one channel among many. For dispensaries it's closer to the only open one: paid search and social are barred, billboards don't answer questions, and the big cannabis directories charge four figures a month to rent a ranking you never own. The engines, meanwhile, cite those directories and dispensaries' own sites — which means the citation the directory rents you is one your own pages can earn outright. Own the citation instead of renting it.
What decides the answers (from our panels)
We've run full measurement panels in multiple cannabis markets — the same frozen customer questions, repeated runs, across all six engines. The selection logic is unusually legible:
| Question type | What the engines reward |
|---|---|
| "Best dispensary" | Review volume, explicitly — we've watched an engine state its criterion as rating times review count, and print the counts |
| Product questions (edibles, flower, sleep) | Published menu depth: named brands and products on indexed pages, not a PDF or an embedded widget |
| Price questions | Published numbers — winners had printed specials and out-the-door prices; "great deals" language wins nothing |
| Deals questions | An owned, dated deals page — one dispensary's deals blog earned it recommendations on an engine that otherwise ignored it |
| First-timer and medical questions | Consultation framing: staff-knowledge review themes and beginner guides, where boutiques beat the volume leaders |
Two more findings worth knowing. Verifiable superlatives travel: we tracked one dispensary's published "largest selection" claim get picked up from its own site, carried into trade press, and quoted by engines for weeks — one published, checkable sentence doing the work of a campaign. And the brandless menu is a real failure mode: pages that list products without the dispensary's name in extractable form get read and quoted with the credit going nowhere.
Compliance stays yours, drafts stay approvable
Cannabis marketing runs under state rules — age gates, health-claim restrictions, promotion limits that vary by state. Every page we draft goes through a documented approval gate: you approve every word before it publishes, with a per-page log, a versioned archive, and drafting checks for health claims and cross-state promotion language. We never take your site credentials; your team publishes. Not legal advice; your compliance review stays yours.
The branded check
Ask an engine whether your dispensary is reputable and it will answer — from reviews, licensing records, news coverage, and your site. We've measured branded answers that surfaced a years-old regulatory flag on one run and omitted it the next. You don't choose which version a customer gets. Knowing what's in the deck is the point of measuring.
How we measure
Six surfaces, every money question run repeatedly, every run on file. Read the method →
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