We asked six AI assistants 30 buyer-intent questions about Hong Kong aesthetic clinics and law firms, in English and Traditional Chinese, and recorded every domain they cited. Three findings: the English and Chinese top-20 source lists share only 3 domains out of 20; the aesthetics and legal top-20 lists share none at all; and directories and magazines take a large share of the citations that decide who gets recommended. The full dataset is below as CSV and JSON.
How this was measured #
Thirty discovery and comparison questions — the kind a real patient or client types, with no business name in the prompt, so every source cited is one the assistant chose on its own — were put to Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Qwen, ChatGPT and Claude, in English and Traditional Chinese, with web grounding enabled. That is 360 calls; 346 returned a usable grounded answer, and every one carried citations. A domain is counted once per answer that cites it at least once, so a page cited three times in one answer counts once. The www. prefix is stripped.
Two caveats. Assistants reached through provider APIs return answers close to, but not identical with, their consumer apps. And ChatGPT and Claude are geofenced out of Hong Kong, so their share of this dataset represents what an overseas or inbound prospect sees, not a local one.
English and Chinese answers barely share a source #
The top 20 domains cited in English answers and the top 20 cited in Traditional Chinese answers overlap on three domains: haldanes.com, deacons.com and gallhk.com — all three large law firms with substantial English and Chinese web presences. Everything else differs. English answers lean on whatclinic.com, legal500.com and firms’ own English sites; Chinese answers lean on cosmopolitan.com.hk, hkfindlawyer.com, inlifebeauty.com.hk and hellotoby.com.
The practical consequence for a Hong Kong practice is that its English and Chinese visibility are two separate problems with two separate fix lists. Being well represented on the sources that feed English answers does almost nothing for the Chinese ones, and a translated version of the same web page does not address it either, because the issue is which third-party sources carry you, not which language your own site is written in.
The two verticals share no sources at all #
The aesthetics top-20 and the legal top-20 have zero domains in common. This is less surprising than the language result but worth stating, because it rules out any generic “get listed on the big directories” advice. The directories that matter to a clinic (whatclinic.com, inlifebeauty.com.hk, hellotoby.com, tocarehealth.com) and those that matter to a firm (hkfindlawyer.com, legal500.com, hklawsoc.org.hk) are disjoint sets. Source strategy is per-vertical, and within a vertical, per-language.
The most-cited sources #
Share is the percentage of all 346 answers that cited the domain at least once.
| Domain | Answers citing | Share | Mostly | EN | 中文 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
haldanes.com | 47 | 13.6% | Legal | 24 | 23 |
whatclinic.com | 40 | 11.6% | Aesthetics | 39 | 0 |
cosmopolitan.com.hk | 31 | 9.0% | Aesthetics | 0 | 26 |
deacons.com | 30 | 8.7% | Legal | 20 | 10 |
inlifebeauty.com.hk | 29 | 8.4% | Aesthetics | 0 | 23 |
redefine.com.hk | 27 | 7.8% | Aesthetics | 0 | 25 |
hkfindlawyer.com | 25 | 7.2% | Legal | 0 | 24 |
gallhk.com | 22 | 6.4% | Legal | 9 | 13 |
drhealthbeauty.com | 21 | 6.1% | Aesthetics | 16 | 0 |
titus.com.hk | 21 | 6.1% | Legal | 7 | 14 |
tocarehealth.com | 20 | 5.8% | Aesthetics | 0 | 18 |
robertleelawoffices.com | 20 | 5.8% | Legal | 15 | 0 |
hellotoby.com | 19 | 5.5% | Aesthetics | 0 | 14 |
tannerdewitt.com | 19 | 5.5% | Legal | 19 | 0 |
ytt.com.hk | 19 | 5.5% | Legal | 0 | 19 |
legal500.com | 18 | 5.2% | Legal | 18 | 0 |
piannen.com | 17 | 4.9% | Aesthetics | 0 | 15 |
faceofangel.hk | 15 | 4.3% | Aesthetics | 10 | 0 |
psmedical.com.hk | 15 | 4.3% | Aesthetics | 13 | 0 |
cosmed.hk | 15 | 4.3% | Aesthetics | 0 | 10 |
cclee.com.hk | 15 | 4.3% | Legal | 0 | 15 |
bestagree.com | 14 | 4.0% | Aesthetics | 0 | 10 |
yansgroup.com.hk | 14 | 4.0% | Aesthetics | 14 | 0 |
skinoptimahk.com | 14 | 4.0% | Aesthetics | 14 | 0 |
hgzrt.com | 13 | 3.8% | Aesthetics | 0 | 9 |
Own websites are present but not dominant #
Several business websites appear high in the table — haldanes.com at the top, deacons.com, redefine.com.hk, drhealthbeauty.com, titus.com.hk. That is worth noticing in both directions. A practice’s own site clearly can become a cited source, which is not true in every market. But the aggregate weight sits with directories, listing platforms and magazines, and those are sources a business influences by being present and accurate on them rather than by publishing more of its own pages. The businesses whose own domains rank here are, without exception, ones that also appear across the third-party sources.
The dataset #
Top 50 domains with counts broken out by vertical, language and assistant surface. Published under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it with attribution.
- hk-ai-citation-sources-2026-08.csv — one row per domain, with vertical, language and surface columns
- hk-ai-citation-sources-2026-08.json — the same data plus the per-cut rankings
SimplyAI (2026). Sources cited by AI assistants for Hong Kong aesthetic clinics and law firms, August 2026. 346 grounded answers, six assistants, EN + 繁中. CC BY 4.0. https://simplyai.work/learn/which-sources-ai-cites-hong-kong/