EP 1: I Asked 11 AIs to Name the Best AC Repair Company. One Answer Kept Coming Back.

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 results, AI Mode, 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 an 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. 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. One question, run 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 podcasts and YouTube videos, and we are running more prompts across more cities right now as well. Even one snapshot tells you things that most contractors, and frankly most marketing agencies, have no idea about.

So, 67 company names. First thing to understand: a mention is not a recommendation, being a source of retrieval does not guarantee being recommended, and ranking in the top 10 on Google does not guarantee being recommended on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and the rest. 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, and it includes the same companies counted twice under different names. 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, 42 of the 67 entries, that is nearly 8 out of 10, appeared on exactly one platform. Mentioned on one AI and never again. 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: seven platforms out of eleven, and usually near the top of those answers.

Just think about what that means. 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. Right now, in almost every city, this space is essentially wide open.

The second finding, and this one surprised me. We compared everything the AI platforms cited against page one of Google for the same search, and 70% of the sources the AIs use do not rank on page one of Google. 21 out of the 30. 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 running. Your Google rank is not your AI rank, and really there is no "AI rank". It's: are you a source of retrieval, and are you recommended? They do overlap, but they are different systems reading different sources.

Here is why. Each AI platform leans 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.

The third finding. We looked at which sources the AIs cited most across all 11 platforms, and here is the hierarchy, and the top of it is not what I expected. 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. Before any directory, before any review site, the thing AI reads most is the company's own pages: real service pages, real city pages with plain answers on them. If your website is thin, you are invisible at the source level.

After that, a "best HVAC in Columbus" list on a site called expertise.com, cited by six platforms. Then Yelp, cited by four. Then a Reddit thread and Angi, 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. It is one of Google AI Overviews' top citations. A forum thread where people named companies they trust is quietly shaping who gets recommended in that city. You cannot buy your way into that thread, and it is difficult to manipulate those threads because the moderators are strict. But you can be the kind of company people name in threads like it, if your reputation precedes you.

The practical read is this: run these checks for your own city, and if the same sources keep appearing for multiple prompts, Yelp, a listicle site, Reddit, a directory, that recurrence 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. 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. 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. AI engines build a picture of your business as an entity from every place your name appears: your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, directories, social media, everywhere. If your name is written differently across those places, the picture fragments. Half your reputation goes to one version of you and half goes to the other. 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, Angi, BBB, all of it. Ten minutes of checking, and for some companies it is worth more than a month of marketing spend.

Let me pull this together into five things you can actually act on this week.

One: ask the AIs about your own company. In a fresh chat, use incognito mode if you can, ask who is the best AC repair in your city, and then ask if your company is any good. See what comes back. That is your baseline.

Two: check your name is identical everywhere your business appears, and fix any variants you 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, 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 off the platforms you stopped caring about. Yelp was cited by more AI engines than Angi in our data for this prompt. Claimed, 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, your competitors, we do exactly that as part of the free audit at hvacseo.io. No pitch attached, you get the findings either way.

Next episode, I am going to break down the cheapest finding from this study in more depth: 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 you.