I repair the sentence behind the footnote

In a composite case, a plumber’s page gave me six photos, three warm paragraphs, and one sentence that said “quality work for every need.” Three clicks away, a national directory had the trade, city, emergency radius, opening hours, and a clearer service label. Perplexity had no moral reason to prefer the business. The directory made the fact easier to footnote, so it became the source.

I am from France, from a place where everyone knows which artisan to call, which clinic moved, which office changed its hours, and which name belongs to the real practice rather than the booking platform. That local knowledge is strong in conversation and weak on the page. Before this work, I edited service pages for small firms, reviewed local business descriptions, compared owned websites against directories, rebuilt factual sections, and kept citation logs for French and bilingual queries. I learned to look for the sentence that survives extraction: role, place, service scope, proof, date, and entity boundary in one compact unit.

Now I study how Perplexity chooses numbered sources for French business queries. I separate citation behaviour from ordinary SEO ranking and from broad chatbot recommendation language. A directory citation is useful evidence: it shows the fact your own page failed to state cleanly. My stance is plain: a business needs public facts arranged so the answer engine can cite the business itself without merging it with a neighbour, a branch, an aggregator, or a generic category.