Do AI assistants favour local suppliers inside Singapore, and the measurement that settles it
Six firms named, all of them Singaporean, no overseas supplier named once in 64 readings, and what a foreign supplier should do about it.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026
Yes, measurably, in this market and on these two engines. Across 64 blind readings taken for Singapore on 22 October 2026, every agency named in the answer prose was a Singapore firm and no overseas supplier was named once. That is a clean result and it needs its limits stated immediately: it is two engines, one date, and the preference appears to track which pages are visibly about this market rather than where a company is registered.
The measurement, with its method
We put 33 batches of buying questions to ChatGPT and Gemini with Singapore written into the text of every question. The market had to go in the prompt because the search interface we use accepts a country parameter, a language parameter and a location parameter, returns HTTP 200 for each, and ignores all three. The snapshot taken that evening holds 64 blind readings, 32 on each engine, with the brand batch excluded because a question that names us is a ceiling rather than a result.
| What was named | Readings, of 64 | Where it is based |
|---|---|---|
| First Page | 17 | Singapore |
| MediaOne | 12 | Singapore |
| Impossible Marketing | 11 | Singapore |
| OOm | 10 | Singapore |
| Clickr | 2 | Singapore |
| Verz | 1 | Singapore |
| Any overseas agency | 0 |
The tools named were a different story and the contrast is the key to the whole thing. Semrush appeared in 13 readings, HubSpot in 12, Ahrefs in 9, Profound in 5, Peec in 3, Otterly in 3, Yext in 2, BrightLocal in 2, SE Ranking in 2 and Brandwatch in 1. Not one of those is a Singapore company.
What the contrast actually shows
The engines are not applying a nationality rule. They applied a local preference to the agency question and no local preference at all to the tool question, in the same readings, on the same day. The difference is in the question: an agency is a local service and a tool is not, so a local answer is the correct answer to one and not to the other.
That reframes the finding usefully. What the engines favour is not Singaporean ownership. It is a page that is obviously the right answer for a Singapore buyer. A foreign agency with no Singapore specific published work fails that test and a foreign tool with a global product does not need to pass it.
What the engines read to get there
Of 757 distinct hosts returned across the 64 readings, 161 carried a Singapore domain. The hosts returned most often were small Singapore specialist sites: marketingagency.sg in 19 readings, mediaplus.com.sg in 13, digitalmarket.sg in 12, singaporedigitalmarketing.sg in 11, firstpagedigital.sg in 7, bestseo.sg in 7, addure.sg in 7. Alongside them, non Singapore domains carrying Singapore specific pages appeared at similar rates, including digimau.com in 10 readings, stridec.com in 9 and digitalmarketingsingapore.com in 7.
Those last three are the evidence that the suffix is not the mechanism. A .com page about marketing in Singapore was returned as often as most of the .sg sites. Thirty nine distinct Singapore government hosts also appeared 90 times across 19 readings, with imda.gov.sg in 10 and sso.agc.gov.sg in 8, which tells you the engines reach for local authority when a Singapore question has a compliance edge.
What a foreign supplier should do with this
- Publish the Singapore page, not a dropdown. Name the market, the currency, the local conditions and the regulator where it applies. A global page with a country selector is quotable for nobody.
- Put a Singapore reference on it. One, contactable, with permission. It converts the page from a claim into an answer.
- State the tax and currency position in a line. A price with no tax position reads as evasion, and this is a market that checks.
- Do not fake a presence. A forwarded number and a mailbox address presented as an office are discoverable in minutes and cost more than the absence would.
What this measurement does not establish
It is an observation across 64 readings on two engines on one date, not a controlled experiment. We did not publish matched pages from a local and a foreign domain and compare them, which is the test that would settle the mechanism properly, and nobody we can check has published that test either. Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews were not in this run, so this says nothing about those three. And there is no per industry rate here, because the questions spanned sectors rather than sampling one.
Two hosts in the raw set are our own data provider's fetch infrastructure rather than publishers, ccn.web.tr and a long reverse proxy mirror of Google's developer documentation, and they are resolved back to the pages they serve before any count is taken. One other, staging.clutch.co in 4 readings, is a directory's staging environment and not something anybody intended to publish.
Questions about local preference in AI answers for Singapore
Does this mean a foreign agency cannot win Singapore work
It means a foreign agency with no Singapore specific published work is not in the machine answer. Our page on how a foreign company wins customers without a local office sets out the six substitutes for a local presence, and publishing the market specific page is the one that applies here.
Would a .sg domain fix it
Unlikely on this evidence, because non Singapore domains with Singapore pages appeared at similar rates to the local ones. The page subject is doing the work.
Does the same preference apply to software
No, and that is the clearest part of the result. Every tool named in these readings was a foreign company, in the same answers that named only Singapore agencies.
How often should a foreign supplier retake this reading
Monthly, because the thing being measured is which pages the engines can reach and that changes as you publish. Our own scorecard was rewritten during the evening we read it.
Is being named the same as being cited
No, and they fail for different reasons. A page can be cited as a source while the answer names somebody else entirely, which is why we report the two separately and never add them together.
The tool column that disproves the nationality theory
If the engines were applying a rule about Singaporean ownership, the tool answers would look like the agency answers and they do not. In the same 64 readings that named six Singapore agencies and no overseas one, the tools named were Semrush in 13 readings, HubSpot in 12, Ahrefs in 9, Profound in 5, Peec in 3, Otterly in 3, Yext in 2, BrightLocal in 2, SE Ranking in 2 and Brandwatch in 1, and not one of those is a Singapore company. Same questions, same day, same engines, opposite outcome. So what is being favoured is the right answer to a local service question rather than a local passport, and a foreign supplier is kept out by its pages rather than by its registration. We are one of those foreign tools by that measure and we did not make the list either, appearing in zero of the 64. AI Knows Us runs a fixed question list per market across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, reports named and cited separately, and writes the market into each question because the location parameters answer 200 and do nothing.