A Local Ottawa Dance Studio Just Discovered They're Invisible to AI Search.

Here's what that means for your business — and why most Ottawa companies are in exactly the same position right now.

Leeming Danceworks is an established dance studio in Ottawa's east end. They teach ballet, jazz, hip hop, acrobatics, and a dozen other styles. They've built a real community over the years. Families know them. Their teachers care. Their students come back.

Last week, we ran their website through our AI Visibility Audit.

The results stopped us cold.

What We Found

Google measures business credibility using something called E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's how Google's AI decides who to cite when someone asks a question.

Leeming Danceworks scored 2.9 out of 10.

Below 4 means a business is effectively invisible to AI search. No matter how good the service is. No matter how loyal the customers are. When someone in Ottawa asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI "where should I send my kid for dance classes," Leeming doesn't come up.

We tested three of those exact queries. Leeming was cited zero times out of three.

Meanwhile, their two main competitors — both Ottawa-area dance studios — are showing up. Customers are finding them instead.

Why This Matters (And Why It's Not Their Fault)

Sharon and her team did everything a dance studio is supposed to do. They built a website. They listed their programs. They wrote content about their classes. They invested in their business.

But the rules changed in 2024 and nobody told them.

Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024 (Google, 2024). Within a year, AI-generated answers were appearing in over 13% of U.S. searches, according to a Semrush study analyzing more than 10 million keywords (Semrush, 2025). By late 2025, that number reached roughly 50% of queries (DemandSage, 2025).

The traffic that used to come from page-one rankings is now intercepted by AI answers above the search results. If a business isn't in that AI answer, they're invisible to anyone who doesn't scroll.

Leeming isn't alone in this. Most local businesses in Ottawa are in exactly the same position. They just don't know it yet.

The Specific Problems We Found

Our crawler audited 34 pages on the Leeming website. Here's what came back:

1. 34 pages with no schema markup Schema is the structured data that tells AI exactly what your business is, where you're located, and what you offer. Without it, AI tools skip the page entirely — even when it's the best answer to someone's question.
2. 1 page with a missing or broken H1 heading The H1 is the first signal search engines use to understand what a page is about. Without it, that page is fighting an uphill battle to rank for anything.
3. 11 pages missing instructor bios When a parent searches "best ballet teachers in Ottawa," Google's AI looks for credentialed humans behind the business. No bios means no signal of expertise.
4. 104 images without alt text This hurts accessibility and means every image is invisible to Google's image search.
5. 58 content gaps versus competitors Topics their competitors cover that Leeming doesn't: fees, schedules, adult classes, summer camp details, French-language content. Every gap is a customer searching for that information and finding a competitor instead.

What Fixing This Looks Like

The good news: most of this is fixable in a few weeks.

Schema markup on all 34 pages takes about 2 to 4 hours of developer time. Fixing the H1 tag takes 15 minutes. Adding instructor bios takes 1 to 2 hours of writing. Closing the content gaps takes longer — several months of consistent publishing — but the technical foundation can be in place within a week.

Once schema is implemented, AI tools typically start citing pages within 4 to 8 weeks.

That's the window. A few weeks of focused work and a business that's invisible today becomes a business that AI recommends.

Why We're Telling You This

We're publishing this audit with Sharon's blessing because it illustrates something every local business owner in Ottawa needs to understand:

Your website has to communicate what you do in a way AI can understand. Otherwise, the customers searching for exactly what you offer will find someone else.

This isn't a Leeming Danceworks problem. We've run this same audit on dozens of local businesses — consultants, contractors, clinics, agencies, retailers. The pattern is consistent. Most score below 4 out of 10. Most aren't getting cited by AI. Most don't know it.

The businesses that figure this out first will own their markets for the next decade.

What This Means for You

If you run a local Ottawa business, you're probably in the same position Leeming was in last week. You have no idea where you stand with AI search because nobody has measured it for you.

That's what our AI Visibility Audit does. We crawl your site, score it on E-E-A-T, check whether AI tools cite you for queries customers actually search, and identify the specific fixes that move the needle.

You get the same report Sharon got — pages of analysis, specific recommendations, and a prioritized action plan your developer can implement immediately.