How do industry-specific review sites affect reputation?

Industry-specific review platforms often matter more than Google within their verticals, because that is where the relevant buyer actually researches: software buyers on Capterra and G2, patients on Healthgrades and Zocdoc, legal clients on Avvo, real estate clients on Zillow. These platforms rank for category and named-provider queries, and the AI engines ingest them as the authoritative source for their domain, so a model answering ‘best lawyers for X’ or ‘top-rated software for Y’ is reading the vertical platform, not a general one. The mistake is treating them as secondary to Google. They deserve the same rigor: a claimed and complete profile, a structured response strategy, a compliant review-generation program tuned to the platform’s specific rules, and dedicated monitoring, since most do not appear in general review tools. We track how the AI engines weight these vertical platforms in their category answers with AIQ™, because within a vertical the synthesized recommendation is increasingly built on exactly these niche sources.