Last week I ran an experiment. I took one question, the exact question a homeowner asks when their air conditioning dies in July. Who is the best AC repair company in Columbus, Ohio? And I put it to 11 different platforms ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, Google's AI, AI Modes, and a few others. 11 platforms, one question, and across all of them, 67 different company names came back. But here is the bit that matters. Out of all 67, only one company was recommended consistently across all those platforms. One, everything else was just noise. Today I want to walk you through what I found because if you run a HVAC company or honestly any local service business, this changes how you should think about being found online. I'm Jacob, I run HVAC SEO, and we help heating and cooling contractors get found and booked on Google and increasingly AI, which is obviously what this episode is about. This show is just me sharing what the data actually says, no fluff, no jargon, and yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's get into it. First, the setup, because I want to be straight with you about what this is and what this is not. So, one question ran across 11 AI platforms centered on Columbus, Ohio, a mid-sized American market, competitive but not crazy. We tracked every company name that came back, every source each platform cited, and then compared all of it against the actual Google results for the same search. Is one question in one city a definitive study? Not really, no. It's just a snapshot. But we will repeat this process in the coming up podcasts and YouTube videos. We are running more prompts across more cities right now as well, so but yeah, even one snapshot tells you things that most contractors and frankly most marketing agencies and frankly most marketing agencies have no idea about. So 67 company names, first thing to understand, a mention is not a recommendation, or being a source of retrieval does not guarantee being recommended, and also ranking in the top 10 on Google does not guarantee ranking or being recommended on Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. And when you actually read the answers for this prompt, that list of 67 includes equipment brands like Carrier and Lennox, it includes a certification body, it includes the same companies counted twice under different names, and we will come back to that one because it might be the most useful finding of the lot. Strip all that out, and you have around 45 real local companies. And of those 45, 42 of the 67 entries, that is nearly 8 out of 10 appeared on exactly one platform. One mentioned on one AI and never again. So that is not visibility, that is mere luck. Only a handful of companies, five or six, once you merged the name variants, showed up on more than two platforms. And only one, a company called Columbus Worthington Air, appeared on the majority of them. So seven platforms out of eleven, and they pretty much usually near the top for those answers. And just think about what that means. So in a metro area of two million people with hundreds of HVAC companies, the AI answer space has effectively one consistent winner. Not because they are unbeatable, but because nobody else is even competing on the signals AI reads. And that is the opportunity. So right now in almost every city, this space is essentially wide open. So the second finding, and this one surprised me. So we compared everything the AI platform cited against page one of Google for the same search, and 70% of the sources that AIs use do not rank on page one of Google. So 21 out of the 30. So if you have been told to get your Google rankings right and the AI stuff takes care of itself, the data says otherwise. And obviously, this can change depending on the prompt you're doing. Your Google rank is not your AI rank, and really there's no AI rank. It's are you a source of retrieval or are you recommended? But they do overlap. They overlap, but they are different systems reading different sources. And here is why. So each AI platform needs on a different search index under the hood. In our data, Grok agreed with Google's results 100% of the time. Copilot agreed with Bing 75% of the time, which makes sense. It is Microsoft, and Claude agreed with Brave Search 100% of the time. So when someone says, How do I rank on AI? the honest answer is which one? Being strong on Google covers you for some platforms, but full coverage means being present in three different search indexes plus the review platforms. Almost nobody is doing that deliberately, which again is the opportunity. So the third finding, we looked at which sources the AI is cited most across all 11 platforms, and here is the hierarchy, and the top of it is not what I expected. So the single most cited source across engines was a contractor's own website. Seven of the 11 platforms cited one local company's site directly. Another contractor site was cited by five. So before any directory, any review site, the thing AR reads most is the company's own page. So real service pages, real city pages with plain answers on them. If your website is thin, you're invisible at the source level. After that, a best HVAC in Columbus listed on a site called expertise.com, cited by six platforms, then Yelp cited by four, then a Reddit thread and Angie each cited by three. The Reddit one deserves a moment because there is a thread on the Columbus subreddit called Reputable HVAC Companies, and it ranks number one on Google for our question. And it is one of Google AI overviews' top citations, a forum thread where people named companies they trust is literally quietly shaping who gets recommended in that city. And you cannot buy your way into that thread, and sometimes it's difficult to even you know manipulate those threads because the moderators these days on those threads are just literally hardcore, but you can be the kind of company people name in threads like it, obviously, if your reputation precedes you. So the practical read is this if you run these checks for your own city and the same sources keep appearing for multiple different prompts, then so Yelp. So the practical read is this if you run these checks for your own city and the same sources keep appearing, Yelp, a listical site, Reddit, a directory, that occurrence is your to-do list. That is where AI is looking. So you need to be visible there. Last finding, and it is my favorite because the fix costs nothing. So one of the companies in our data appeared twice in the results, once under its full name and once under a shortened version. The AI platforms treated it as two separate, smaller companies. Its already limited visibility was literally split in half. So, and it wasn't alone. At least 10 companies in our data appeared under two different versions of their name, counted by the AI as two different businesses each time. Here is why that happens. So AI Engines builds a picture of your business as an entity from every place your name appears on the website. You know, that could be your website, your Google Business profile, Yelp directories, social media, everywhere. If your name is written differently across those places and you see it very often, the picture fragments. So half your reputation goes to one version of you and half goes to the other. So the cheapest AI visibility fix in existence is literally to pick one exact business name and make it identical everywhere. Same name, same spelling on your site, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Angie, BBB, all of it. So 10 minutes of checking, and yes, it might be awkward remembering those longer details, but you know, 10 minutes of checking, and for some companies, it is worth more than a month of marketing spend. So let me pull this together into five things you can actually act on this week. So one, ask the AIs about your own company. Go in a fresh chat, use incognito mode if you can, and just ask, you know, who is the best AC repair in your city, and then ask is your so one ask the AIs about your own company. In a fresh chat, ask who is the best AC repair in your city, and then ask, is your company name any good? You know, see what comes back. That is your baseline. Two, check your name is identical everywhere your business appears. So fix any variants that you do find. Three, look at your own website the way AI does. Do you have a real page for each service and each city you serve that plainly answers what you do, you know, where and for how much. Own sites were the most cited sources in our data, and that is in your control. Four, do not write all the platforms you stopped caring about. So Yelp was cited by more AI engines than Angie in our data for this prompt, obviously. You know, claims, complete, and steadily reviewed is the bar. Five, keep your reviews recent. Volume matters, but recency kept showing up in what gets surfaced. A review this month beats 20 from three years ago. That is the episode. No magic, just data. If you want to see this run against your own company, your own city, your own services, you know, your competitors, we do exactly that as part of the free audit at hvacseo.io. No pitch attached, you get the findings either way. So, next episode, I'm gonna break down the cheapest finding from this study in more depth. So, how your business name quietly decides your visibility and how to audit yours in 10 minutes. Thanks for listening and go check what the machines are saying about.