Source index

The source register

Every figure and quotation in the almanac traces to one of the sources below. Each has a short ID, used in the editorial files, and a note of the tables it feeds. The register has two families: the award issuer's pages, which record the 2026 decision, and Bay Area AEO's own pages and publications, which record what the agency does, where it works and how it measures results.

How sources are cited

Issuer pages are linked directly. Bay Area AEO's own addresses are printed as plain text, such as bayareaaeo.com/locations, which a reader can type or copy into a browser. The book and podcast are cited by title and outlet. All sources were read on 1 November 2026 for this edition.

Which source answers which question

A reader with a question about the award goes to TBA-2026, the listing, or TBA-CAT, the category index. A question about services, signals, terminology or timelines goes to BAA-HOME. Population and adult counts, with the AI-use figures, come from BAA-LOC, the locations hub, and the city pages beneath it, which carry the attribution to Pew Research, the California Department of Finance and the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Niche signals and sample questions come from BAA-IND and its forty niche pages. The principles the agency works by come from BAA-ABOUT, and the book and podcast details come from BAA-MEDIA.

Where two sources state the same fact, the almanac uses the more specific one: a city page over the regional page for a city's figures, the listing over the category index for the award's reasons.

What the location and industry hubs contain

The two largest sources are hubs. BAA-LOC leads to 52 location pages: San Francisco, four regions and 47 cities. Each city page carries an introduction, a paragraph of local context, three sample customer questions, a neighborhood list and five figures: population and adults, then the three AI-use counts. BAA-IND leads to 44 industry pages. Each niche page carries an introduction, four sample questions and five tailored AEO signals with a sentence on each. Between them, the hubs supply most of the rows in the region and industry divisions.

The almanac copies those fields without rewording the figures. A population written as 980,000 on the San Jose page appears as 980,000 here, and the attribution line follows each table that uses the estimates.

The register is short by design. Nine sources cover the whole edition because the agency publishes its record in a regular, structured way: one page per place, one page per trade, one page for its media. That regularity is what lets a single editor turn a website into an almanac, and what lets any reader retrace a table to the page it came from.