How a brand-new Canadian site earned 7,400+ AI citations in 3 months
Proof that AI search visibility can be built, not bought. The same method we run for your business.
Case study by Hami Tahm — May 2026. Updated June 17, 2026 with latest citation data.
HomeCalc.ca launched into one of Canada’s most competitive niches — real estate and mortgage. With no ad budget and nothing to buy its way in, it earned 7,400+ AI citations in its first 3 months, in a market dominated by banks/finance. Here is exactly what we did, and what it means for your business.
The Client — HomeCalc.ca
HomeCalc.ca is a Canadian personal finance calculator platform — mortgage qualifiers, closing-cost estimators, rent-increase tools, and land-transfer-tax calculators for buyers and renters in Ontario and across the rest of Canada. The site launched in early 2026 and was under three months old when the audit took place.
Personal finance is a YMYL category — Your Money or Your Life — Google’s designation for content that could materially affect a reader’s financial wellbeing. YMYL sites are held to a higher standard than almost any other category, and AI engines apply similar caution before citing them. Building authority in YMYL is slow under the best conditions. On a domain under three months old, it shouldn’t have been possible at all.
The Challenge — Invisible in AI Search
YMYL category: why this was harder than average
AI engines weight content authority heavily when answering financial questions. For YMYL queries — “how much mortgage can I afford,” “what closing costs should I expect,” “how much can my landlord raise my rent” — the bar to be cited is steep. Engines prefer established institutional sources: banks, government departments, decade-old advisor brands. A new financial calculator site is, by default, invisible.
Domain age: under 3 months
HomeCalc.ca had no traditional domain authority to lean on. No backlink portfolio. No years of indexed content. No brand recognition signals. By every conventional measure, a site like this is expected to wait twelve to eighteen months before AI platforms start recognizing it — if ever.
Pre-audit baseline: near-zero AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The Results
HomeCalc.ca accumulated 7,400+ AI citations across 25+ pages in 3 months — on a financial site less than three months old at the time of the audit. The closing-cost-calculator page alone received 833citations, and on the “mortgage affordability calculator” query, HomeCalc commands a 76% citation share — meaning roughly three out of every four AI answers on that query cite HomeCalc.
Top performing pages
Top grounding queries & market share
“Citation share” is the percentage of all AI citations for a given query that came from HomeCalc.ca. A 76% share means that when AI engines answered this query, they cited HomeCalc in roughly three of every four answers.
| Query | AI Citations |
|---|---|
| property transfer tax bc | 263 · 29% AI citation share |
| land transfer tax ontario | 160 · 39% AI citation share |
| best rent increase calculator | 123 · 21% AI citation share |
| calculate land transfer tax ontario | 102 · 72% AI citation share |
| mortgage affordability calculator (100K salary) | 86 · 76% AI citation share |
Volume matters. Dominance matters more. HomeCalc is no longer just cited by AI engines for Canadian financial calculations — for several of the most important queries in the category, it is the default source.
What Was Done
Hami Tahm conducted an AI visibility audit on HomeCalc.ca. He identified a specific technical change that would improve AI platform recognition of the site’s pages. The change was implemented — and citations began climbing within 48 hours.
“I identified a specific technical change that produced this lift. The methodology is part of what you receive in the audit.”
Tested AI queries across 6 platforms
Surfaced the single highest-leverage gap
Change deployed; citations climbed within 48 hours
What This Means for Your Business
If this worked on a YMYL financial site under three months old — the hardest category on the web, on one of the youngest domains in market — it works on businesses with real authority, established history, and clearer queries.
An established dental clinic, mortgage broker, or B2B services firm doesn’t carry the trust deficit HomeCalc started with. The same audit applied to your business should move faster, with less friction, against weaker competition for AI citations in your category.
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