# We Ran 600 AI Queries for Local Service Businesses. Only 23 Made It Onto All Four Platforms. *2026-04-01* · *Original Research* > We ran 600 real queries across four AI platforms, ten U.S. cities, and five home service trades. 80% of businesses were recommended by only one platform. If a homeowner in Nashville asks ChatGPT for a plumber, there are exactly two businesses in the entire metro that every major AI platform will recommend. Two. In a city with hundreds of licensed plumbers. We know this because we tested it. We ran 600 real queries across four AI platforms, ten U.S. cities, and five home service trades. We asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini the same questions a homeowner would: who is the best plumber, who should I call for AC repair, where do I find a reliable roofer. Then we documented every answer. This is the first published study of what AI actually says when you ask about local service businesses. Not what it could say. Not what SEO experts predict it will say. What it says right now, today, when a real person types a real question. ## How we ran the study We selected ten metros ranging from large (Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, Portland) to mid-size (Tucson, Omaha, Columbus). Five trades: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, and landscaping. Three query types per trade, designed to mirror natural homeowner language. Fifteen queries per city, times four AI platforms, times ten cities. Six hundred data points. We categorized every response by whether the AI named specific local businesses, gave generic advice without names, recommended only national franchises, or redirected to a directory like Yelp. In some cities, Google AI Overviews didn’t trigger at all, meaning the query produced no AI-generated answer. ## How often does AI recommend specific local businesses? Across all 600 queries, 87% returned specific local business names. That number was even higher on some platforms: Perplexity and ChatGPT both named local businesses on nearly every query. The fear that AI only gives generic advice is wrong. When someone asks for a plumber, AI usually answers with names. ## Does every AI platform recommend the same businesses? This is the headline finding. Of 1,571 unique businesses named across the study, 80% were recommended by only one AI platform. Just 1.5%, 23 businesses total, appeared on all four. Ask ChatGPT for a roofer and ask Perplexity the same question: you will almost certainly get different names. Each AI tool is pulling from different data sources, weighting different signals, and arriving at different answers. If you only show up on Google, you are invisible on three out of four AI platforms. ## How consistent are Google AI Overviews across cities? In Portland, Nashville, and six other cities, Google AI Overviews triggered on every query and named local businesses every time. In Raleigh-Durham and Tucson, they returned zero results on all 15 queries. Not low results. Zero. A homeowner in Portland gets AI-powered recommendations from Google. A homeowner in Raleigh gets nothing. Same queries, same format, completely different experience. No other platform showed this level of inconsistency. ## Which AI platforms agree on who to recommend? When we measured which platform pairs recommended overlapping businesses most often, Google AI Overviews and Gemini agreed 61% of the time. Both pull from Google’s index. Perplexity and ChatGPT, which rely on different data pipelines, agreed only 37% of the time. The average overlap across all platform pairs was below 10%. Smaller metros produce more consensus. Omaha had eight businesses appear on all four platforms. Dallas-Fort Worth and Raleigh-Durham had zero. In smaller markets with fewer competitors, the strong local brands rise to the top everywhere. In larger markets, the AI tools diverge because there are more businesses competing for attention. ## Do national franchises dominate AI recommendations? Franchise brands appeared in 15% to 42% of responses depending on the city. Roto-Rooter was the most frequently cited franchise in the study. But in every single metro, independent local businesses made up the overwhelming majority of AI recommendations. Nashville had the highest franchise penetration at 42%. Portland had the lowest at 15%. Local operators are not being crowded out by national brands in AI search. Not yet. ## Which sources do AI platforms cite most? BBB was the most-referenced third-party source in seven of ten cities, with up to 24 mentions per metro. Yelp dominated on the West Coast. Angi appeared consistently everywhere. ChatGPT in particular leaned heavily on BBB data for its recommendations. The citation sources vary by trade. For plumbers, BBB was cited more than any other source by a 3-to-1 margin. For roofers, BBB also led, likely because roofing carries more consumer trust concerns. For landscapers, Yelp was the top source. Businesses without profiles on these platforms are effectively invisible to the AI tools that cite them. ## What should service business owners do about AI visibility? The data from this study shows something most people haven’t grasped yet: there is no single AI search to optimize for. There are four, and they barely agree on who to recommend. The 23 businesses that made it onto all four platforms share a pattern: strong review profiles on multiple sites, BBB accreditation, consistent business information across directories, and specific service pages on their websites. These are not new ideas. But in AI search, they are the difference between being recommended and being unknown. The question isn’t whether AI recommends local service businesses. It already does, 1,571 of them across this study alone. The question is whether it’s recommending yours. I built a diagnostic that checks your business across all four platforms. Takes 60 seconds. **Find out what AI says about your business.** → [Run Your Free AI Visibility Check](https://getlocalvitals.com/check) This study covered 600 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini in 10 U.S. metro areas and 5 trade categories. Full dataset available at hello@getlocalvitals.com. --- Source: https://getlocalvitals.com/blog/ai-local-service-business-study-2026 Published by Local Vitals · https://getlocalvitals.com