AI Search for Record Stores in Montréal (2026):the tourism board takes the citations
TL;DR: 27 ways of asking three AI engines where to buy records in Montréal, in English and in French, from a US address and a Canadian one: 324 answers, every fired capture of the studied engines accounted for. Montréal’s shops are well equipped online: 70.3% of the 37 registry shops run a site on their own domain, the third-densest market the series has measured, enough to predict an own-site citation share above 40%. ChatGPT delivered 16.5%. The missing citations went to a single address: mtl.org, Tourisme Montréal’s site, cited 278 times across the study, more than every record shop’s own domain combined (180). The shops agree on a champion anyway: Aux 33 Tours, named in 246 of 324 answers. And after three straight cities at zero, ChatGPT is citing Reddit again: 23 times.
Executive Summary
When Rome violated the density law, the diagnosis was competition: a professional press writing about a famous vertical can beat the venues’ own sites to the citations. Montréal is the test of that diagnosis in a different corner of the map, and it passes, with a twist Rome didn’t predict. The competitor here isn’t a food press. It’s the city itself.
Across Mexico City, Seoul, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Helsinki and Prague, one registry statistic (how many businesses in the vertical own a web domain) predicted ChatGPT’s own-site citation share in strict rank order. Montréal measures 70.3% density, third behind Prague (84.6%) and Helsinki (78.4%), two cities that paid out 47.7% and 45.5%. Montréal paid 16.5%:78 of 473 citations. That is the second measured violation, in the same direction as Rome’s, at a density 1.7× higher.
Where Rome’s citations drained into Gambero Rosso and a cottage industry of gelato rankings, Montréal’s drain into mtl.org, Tourisme Montréal, which publishes a vinyl-shopping guide in both of the study’s languages and collects 278 citations for it, 17.5% of everything the three engines cited. A second, smaller drain is new to this vertical: a layer of sites that exist solely to map record shops (Keep Them Spinning, VinylAi, VinylMapper), which takes 31.3% of Gemini’s citations. By the numbers: 324 captures · 1,586 cited URLs · 1,787 extracted mentions, 96.3% resolved, a series best. Copilot (0 of 108) and Perplexity (1 of 108) were fired, failed, and are disclosed below rather than estimated around.
Terminology, as on every page in this series: citations are the URLs an engine attaches under its answer, mentions are the business names inside the answer text. Source analysis uses the former, the leaderboard the latter.
Eight cities measured, two now off the curve
Grey bar: what share of the registry owns a domain. Blue bar: what share of ChatGPT’s citations those domains earn. Six cities rank identically on both. Rome and Montréal sit far under their grey bars, and they are the two cities where somebody else wrote the definitive guide.
The registry says Montréal’s record shops did their homework: of 37 real shops, 32 (86.5%) list some web presence and 26 (70.3%) hold a proper domain: cheapthrills.ca, aux33tours.com, phonopolis.ca, larama.ca. Between Helsinki’s 78.4% and Prague’s 84.6%, shares of 45.5% and 47.7% looked like the going rate at this supply level.
ChatGPT’s 473 citations gave the shops 78, 16.5%. The other five-sixths of its budget went overwhelmingly local: 57.1% of its citations land on Montréal and Québec editorial, and better than half of that is one domain. The supply exists, the engines just rank a bilingual institutional guide above it. Rome taught that owning a domain stops being sufficient once professionals write about your vertical; Montréal shows the professional doesn’t even need to be press.
278 citations for the city, 180 for the shops
mtl.org is Tourisme Montréal, the destination-marketing organisation, funded to promote the city, staffed to keep its guides current in English and French. Its vinyl-store page is the single most-cited real URL source in this study, and it isn’t close: 278 citations from all three engines, against 180 for the 37 shops’ own domains put together. Buenos Aires previewed this pattern when its city government out-drew the tango schools; Montréal runs it at three times the volume.
Columns are largest-remainder rounded to sum to exactly 100. The shop-website bucket counts only the 37 registry shops’ own domains.
154 of ChatGPT’s 473 citations point at mtl.org. Gemini is nearly as committed (81 of 262). Even Google AI Mode, which hides two-thirds of its sources behind its own wrappers, lets 43 mtl.org citations through; every engine in the study reads the board.
Keep Them Spinning, VinylAi and VinylMapper exist for exactly one purpose: cataloguing record shops. Gemini gives this layer 82 of its 262 citations, plus another 9.5% to Discogs and the collector databases. Rome’s gelato-ranking sites have a vinyl equivalent, and one engine leans on it hard.
The world’s reference database for physical music drew 41 citations here: 25 from Gemini, the rest from AI Mode, and exactly 0 from ChatGPT. Two registry shops list their Discogs page as their website; for ChatGPT retrieval purposes they might as well have listed nothing.
Aux 33 Tours, in three answers out of four
The Saint-Denis shop whose name is a pun on 33 RPM gets named in 246 of 324 answers (75.9%), every engine, both languages, both proxies. Cheap Thrills follows at 204 and Death of Vinyl at 144. All twelve names below are real, open shops: no ghosts this time, no chains masquerading as neighbours. For a change, the engines’ consensus picks are the ones a Montréal crate-digger would give you.
Who spins what: the per-engine split
Share of each engine’s 108 answers naming each shop, raw counts beneath. The podium holds across engines; the middle diverges: Gemini is warmest on Le Vacarme and 180g, ChatGPT on Musique Beatnick and Atom Heart, while AI Mode’s map-driven answers flatten the differences.
| # | Shop | AI Mode108 captures | ChatGPT108 captures | Gemini108 captures |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aux 33 Tours | 72.2%(78) | 75.9%(82) | 79.6%(86) |
| 2 | Cheap Thrills | 54.6%(59) | 66.7%(72) | 67.6%(73) |
| 3 | Death of Vinyl | 49.1%(53) | 52.8%(57) | 31.5%(34) |
| 4 | Phonopolis Record Store | 35.2%(38) | 50.9%(55) | 43.5%(47) |
| 5 | Sonorama Disques | 38.9%(42) | 45.4%(49) | 42.6%(46) |
| 6 | La Rama Records | 26.9%(29) | 42.6%(46) | 36.1%(39) |
| 7 | L'Oblique | 30.6%(33) | 45.4%(49) | 25%(27) |
| 8 | Atom Heart | 21.3%(23) | 38%(41) | 13.9%(15) |
| 9 | Freeson Rock | 25%(27) | 31.5%(34) | 16.7%(18) |
| 10 | Musique Beatnick | 10.2%(11) | 41.7%(45) | 16.7%(18) |
| 11 | 180g café-disquaire | 12%(13) | 25.9%(28) | 27.8%(30) |
| 12 | Le Vacarme | 17.6%(19) | 17.6%(19) | 26.9%(29) |
All three columns are complete 108-capture grids over the same prompts, so the percentages compare one-to-one.
Top 12 shops by answer mentions. Click a marker for per-engine counts
Named most vs linked most
246 of 324 answers, all three engines, cite score 130. The breadth pick: when an engine names five Montréal shops, this is the name most likely to be among them.
Cite score 142 against the leader’s 130, carried by cheapthrills.ca, the most-cited shop domain in the study (55 citations, all three engines). Mentions rank: second, at 204.
Previous cities needed this split explained by an artifact: an Instagram-only brand key in Marseille, an eight-branch chain in Rome. Montréal needs no asterisk: both number ones are single-location, independent, and two métro stops apart. They simply win different games. Aux 33 Tours dominates the text the engines write; Cheap Thrills dominates the links they attach, because its site (a plain, fast catalogue page listing what the store buys and sells) is the kind of page retrieval loves to quote.
The first city where French isn’t a secret handshake
Everywhere else in this series, the local language was a proxy for insider knowledge: ask in Japanese, reach the Japanese web. Montréal is the first city where both prompt languages are spoken at home, and the metrics bend accordingly: convergence up, TLD coupling inverted.
The control prompt (“best record stores in Montreal” / “les meilleurs disquaires à Montréal”) returns top-5 lists sharing 67% of their members, tied with Berlin’s tattoo study for the highest value outside Helsinki’s perfect score, and well above the 43% median across all 24 comparable templates. The probe for Québécois music on vinyl converges completely: the same five shops in both languages, the study’s only 100%. Specialist genres still split: classical bottoms out at 11%.
The stranger result is the TLD metric. Since Tokyo, local-language prompts have always pulled more local-TLD citations. In Montréal the coupling runs backwards: .ca domains take 30.4% of ChatGPT’s citations on English prompts but only 19.9% on French ones, a 0.66× ratio, the series’ first below 1. The mechanism is the tourism board again: mtl.org publishes in French too, so French prompts deepen the institutional source (36.3% of French-prompt citations vs 29.1% on English) instead of unlocking a hidden local web. Where the local language is everyone’s language, asking in it reveals nothing the English web didn’t already know.
| Prompt template | EN↔FR top-5 overlap |
|---|---|
| Québécois / francophone music on vinyl | 100% (5/5) |
| control (best record stores) | 67% (4/6) |
| district: downtown / Sainte-Catherine | 67% (4/6) |
| district: Mile End | 67% (4/6) |
| district: Plateau-Mont-Royal | 67% (4/6) |
| new vinyl releases | 67% (4/6) |
| punk & metal | 67% (4/6) |
| tourist persona | 67% (4/6) |
| cassettes | 43% (3/7) |
| cheap used records | 25% (2/8) |
| classical | 11% (1/9) |
| electronic & techno | 43% (3/7) |
| hip-hop | 43% (3/7) |
| iconic shops | 43% (3/7) |
| jazz | 25% (2/8) |
| live-music venues (bleed control) | 43% (3/7) |
| beginner persona | 43% (3/7) |
| locals persona | 25% (2/8) |
| newly opened shops | 25% (2/8) |
| oldest shops | 43% (3/7) |
| rare pressings & collectors | 43% (3/7) |
| Record Store Day | 43% (3/7) |
| sell / trade records | 43% (3/7) |
| CDs | 25% (2/8) |
Overlap = Jaccard of ChatGPT’s map-widget top-5 (CA proxy), present in 103 of 108 ChatGPT captures. Three of the 27 templates returned no comparable pair.
Reddit, pronounced dead three cities ago, cites back
Buenos Aires: 5 Reddit citations study-wide, none from ChatGPT. Rome: 15, none from ChatGPT. Prague: 12, none from ChatGPT, in climbing, a hobby whose discourse practically lives on Reddit. By September this series was writing ChatGPT’s Reddit habit off as a closed chapter.
Montréal: 50 Reddit citations, from all 3 engines, 23 of them ChatGPT’s (4.9% of its citations). That is more Reddit than those three published cities measured combined. Vinyl was picked partly as bait here: r/vinyl and r/montreal both maintain living threads on exactly the questions we asked. The engines took the bait, which means the three zeros before it were not a policy, just verticals whose Reddit wasn’t worth quoting.
What the engines actually read
The fourteen most-cited domains, with how many of the three engines cite each. AI Mode’s 566 opaque Google wrappers (66.5% of its citations) hide their publisher and are excluded; treating them as google.com would manufacture a self-citation statistic out of redirects.
| Domain | Engines | Citations | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| mtl.org | 3/3 | 278 | Tourisme Montréal. One tourism-board domain holds 17.5% of every citation in the study |
| cheapthrills.ca | 3/3 | 55 | The most-cited shop domain: a used-record institution near McGill |
| reddit.com | 3/3 | 50 | Back from the dead: three cities in a row had measured it at or near zero |
| vinylai.app | 3/3 | 50 | A vinyl-shop directory app. It out-cites 35 of the 37 shops it lists |
| montrealrocks.ca | 2/3 | 50 | A local music blog with one very well-read shop roundup |
| keepthemspinning.com | 3/3 | 43 | A Montréal vinyl community site; the city has its own dedicated guide layer |
| discogs.com | 2/3 | 41 | The collector database. Gemini and AI Mode cite it; ChatGPT never does |
| cultmtl.com | 2/3 | 33 | Montréal alt-culture monthly |
| aux33tours.com | 2/3 | 32 | The mention-leader’s own site; most of its citations arrive on French prompts |
| freesonrock.com | 3/3 | 24 | Rock/metal specialist on Avenue du Mont-Royal |
| facebook.com | 2/3 | 23 | Where some shops’ whole web presence lives |
| themain.com | 2/3 | 22 | City magazine named after the Boulevard Saint-Laurent nickname |
| redbull.com | 3/3 | 18 | An energy drink’s content arm wrote a Montréal crate-digging guide; all three engines read it |
| online.phonopolis.ca | 3/3 | 16 | Phonopolis’ web store, a subdomain the classifier credits to the shop |
A detail worth a double take: vinylai.app and keepthemspinning.com (a directory app and a community site) collect 50 and 43 citations. Only one shop domain (cheapthrills.ca, 55) beats either of them.
The Plateau–Mile End spine
Every dot is a registry shop; the numbered markers are the twelve the engines recommend most. Eleven of the twelve sit in a narrow band from downtown up Boulevard Saint-Laurent through the Plateau into Mile End and Villeray, the walkable crate-digging corridor. The registry’s western outposts in Verdun, LaSalle and Lachine exist on the map and barely in the answers. The three district probes (Mile End, Plateau, downtown) all converge at 67% EN↔FR overlap: pin the geography and the languages mostly agree, the same convergence the district probes found in Rome and Buenos Aires.
All 37 mapped registry record shops across Montréal
Instrument notes: what broke, what was hand-checked
Copilot delivered nothing. Both of its collection batches (US and CA proxies, 54 prompts each) were triggered successfully and then sat in “running” state past the 45-minute collection window, and were still running hours later when this page was written. Zero captures arrived, so Copilot carries no number anywhere on this page. If the snapshots ever complete, the raw data lands in the capture store and a follow-up can fold it in.
Perplexity landed 1 of 108, and that lone capture carried zero citations. The 107 others returned error items. It is excluded under the same rule as Copilot; this is the weakest Perplexity return the series has recorded, after 8/96 in Buenos Aires, 14/96 in Rome and a 37/88 partial in Prague.
Two shops list Discogs as their website. Musique Beatnick and Music Capricorne point their Google listings at discogs.com. Left alone, that would have merged two unrelated shops into one “discogs.com” brand and misfiled their citations; the pipeline now treats Discogs and Bandcamp pages the way it treats Instagram links: inventory hosted on somebody else’s platform, which identifies no single shop.
Three resolution passes, disclosed. The raw NER run resolved 87% of mentions. A hand-checked 19-entry alias table reconnected the short names engines actually use (“Phonopolis”, “L’Oblique”, “Disques Beatnick”) to their longer Google listings: 208 mentions. A Places recovery pass added the two real shops the seed had missed, Le Nouveau Soundcentral and Venus Lounge Record, plus one hi-fi dealer kept off the shop registry. Final resolution: 96.3%, the series’ best. The names left over are honest leftovers: a flea market, Walmart, a shop called “Le Noise” in Longueuil, recommended by the engines but across the river, outside the Montréal registry by the same geographic rule every city in this series uses.
One metric is withheld. The district-accuracy check (does a Mile End prompt return Mile End shops?) is not rendered, because the Apify seed stores “Montreal” as the district for nearly every row; the 0% it reports is a property of the seed, not of the engines. Amsterdam and Berlin hit the same wall; the series convention is to say so rather than print a number that looks like a finding.
18 captures recommend nothing (8 ChatGPT, 5 Gemini, 5 AI Mode): answers that discuss record shopping without naming a single shop. They stay in every denominator.
If you run a record shop (in Montréal or anywhere with a tourism board)
One placement on Tourisme Montréal’s vinyl page is worth more AI retrieval than your entire domain: mtl.org drew 278 citations while all 37 shop domains together drew 180. Check whether your city’s destination-marketing site lists you, in every language it publishes.
A community vinyl site and two directory apps out-cite every shop domain but one. These layers accept submissions. Being absent from them is invisible to you and very visible to Gemini, which hands them 31.3% of its budget.
Beatnick ranks tenth on mentions with no own-domain citations possible, because its listed site is its Discogs seller page. ChatGPT cited Discogs exactly 0 times here. A one-page site with your hours, sections and buying policy (what cheapthrills.ca is) earned the only shop domain to beat the directories.
French prompts here don’t surface a separate French web; they concentrate on the sources that bothered to publish in both languages, mtl.org first among them. A site that exists in both languages is quotable on both halves of the prompt space; one that doesn’t forfeits half of it for the cost of a translation.
Conclusion
City by city, the engine personalities keep their shape in the series’ first North American market: ChatGPT reads the local editorial web, Gemini finds the specialist layer, AI Mode wraps two-thirds of its sources in its own redirects. What changed in Montréal is who owns the editorial web. The density law, this series’ most reliable finding, broke for the second time, and both breaks now point at the same cause: a funded, maintained, canonical guide outranks the businesses it writes about, whether the author is a food critic or a destination-marketing office.
The bilingual result may matter past Montréal. Every prior city made “ask in the local language” sound like a growth hack: more local TLDs, hidden local gems. The first city where that language is also the tourists’ language flips the coupling below 1: there was never anything intrinsically local about the effect, just webs that happened to be written in one tongue. Where institutions publish bilingually, the institutions win twice.
Next stops for the open questions: whether a second DMO-heavy city reproduces the mtl.org capture (a hypothesis a future run should test deliberately), and whether ChatGPT’s Reddit comeback survives outside hobbyist verticals.
Methodology
Prompt grid. 27 prompt templates covering formats (used, new, CDs, cassettes), genres (jazz, electronic, punk/metal, hip-hop, classical, Québécois), personas (tourist, local, beginner, DJ), canon probes (iconic, oldest, newest, Record Store Day), three district probes (Mile End, Plateau, downtown) and two entity-bleed controls (turntables, live-music venues) × 2 languages (EN, FR) × 2 proxy countries (US, CA) = 108 payload items per engine. Fired 2026-10-07 against five engines; ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode completed 108/108 each and constitute the study. Copilot (0/108) and Perplexity (1/108) are excluded and disclosed; nothing was imputed in their place.
Registry. 177 Google Maps rows from three Apify searches (“record store”, “disquaire”, “vinyl record shop”), classified by Google’s category strings into 37 real record shops and the adjacent noise a “records” search drags in: recording studios, document-shredding services, hi-fi dealers, three car dealerships. Plus 3 name-targeted Google Places recovery rows for shops the engines recommended that the seed missed. Website layer recomputed at publish time: 32 of 37 shops (86.5%) list some web presence; 26 (70.3%) own their domain, with Facebook pages, Instagram profiles, a WordPress blog and two Discogs seller pages making up the gap.
Extraction and resolution. Shop names in each prose answer were extracted by Gemini-NER under the series’ standard rules (named recommendations only, no inference) and resolved against the registry through exact, fuzzy, containment, alias-table and Places-recovery tiers. 1,787 mentions, 1,720 resolved (96.3%). Unresolved names were individually reviewed; those that are real businesses outside the registry’s scope (Longueuil, flea markets, big-box retail) are documented in section 9 rather than silently dropped.
Citations. 1,586 cited URLs across the three engines, bucketed by a records-specific source taxonomy (shop sites (including shop subdomains), tourism/editorial, dedicated vinyl guides, marketplaces/databases, social, aggregators, press). Google AI Mode’s 566 opaque wrapper URLs are recorded with their publisher domain withheld, never counted as google.com citations. The full headline-stat table ships as summary.csv.
Lineage. The measurement design is the AI hotel landscape methodology pointed at a non-hotel vertical, as in every city study before this one. Comparison figures quoted from siblings (Rome, Prague, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Tokyo) were re-read from those pages’ published data arrays in this repository while this page was written, never recalled from memory or a prompt.