Does AI Recommend Your Trade? What 25,220 AI Answers Reveal

We asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity a simple but exact question, five buyer-intent versions of it per market, across 21 local-service trades and 40 U.S. cities, and then parsed every single answer. Between June 18 and July 10, 2026, that came to 25,220 individual AI answers, built into 1,261 AI-visibility leaderboards, naming 8,299 distinct local businesses. Here's what the dataset actually says about whether AI recommends businesses like yours, and how competitive your specific trade really is.

The scale of the dataset

This isn't a survey or a handful of test prompts. It's a live, ongoing measurement:

• 21 local-service trades, from plumbers and HVAC companies to dentists, chiropractors, locksmiths, and moving companies.
• 40 U.S. cities, covering a wide spread of metro sizes and regions.
• 5 buyer-intent questions per market, the kind of thing an actual customer would type when they need someone now.
• 4 AI engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, each queried independently.
• 25,220 total AI answers parsed, resulting in 1,261 leaderboards and 8,299 distinct businesses named.

The full, continuously updated version of this report lives at /state-of-ai-search.

The big finding: no single business owns the answer

Across every market and every engine, the average business ranked first captures just 24% of a market's AI mentions. On average, AI names about 10 businesses per question set. In plain terms: even the "winner" in a given city and trade is only getting named roughly a quarter of the time, and the field naming businesses is wider than most owners assume. There is no default answer AI always gives. The recommendation set is contestable, in nearly every market we measured.

AI recommends local, not national

Here's the finding that surprises most business owners: 91% of the 8,299 businesses AI named appeared in only one city's answers. AI assistants are not defaulting to a handful of national brands everywhere. They're pulling in genuinely local names, over and over, market by market. That's good news if you're an independent operator worried about being drowned out by a chain.

The exception is a small set of national names that show up with real frequency across markets. The most-recommended national brands in our dataset, by total mention count, are Orkin (738 mentions), Terminix (684), The Cleaning Authority (554), Two Men and a Truck (497), Roto-Rooter Plumbing & Water Cleanup (358), H&R Block (344), A1 Garage Door Service (272), and Two Maids & A Mop (232). If you compete directly against one of these in pest control, cleaning, moving, plumbing, tax prep, or garage doors, expect a stronger built-in presence to overcome. Outside those specific categories, the field is overwhelmingly local and open.

Which trades are locked up, and which are wide open

The 24% average leader share hides real variation by trade. Some categories are far more decisive, AI converges hard on one or two favorites, while others are wide open with no dominant name.

Most decisive trades (AI concentrates heavily on a leader):

• Chiropractors, 32% average leader share
• Dentists, 28%
• Locksmiths, 28%
• Real estate agents, 26%
• Moving companies, 26%

Most wide-open trades (fragmented, no dominant name):

• Auto repair, 21% average leader share
• Landscapers, 22%
• HVAC, 22%
• House cleaning, 22%
• Salons and barbershops, 22%

Leader share is the percentage of all mentions in a market that go to the single most-mentioned business. Lower means more fragmented, which means more winnable for a business willing to do the work outlined in our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT.

So, does AI recommend plumbers, HVAC companies, and dentists?

Every trade we tracked gets recommended by AI somewhere, the real question for your business isn't "does AI recommend my trade," it's "how concentrated is the answer in my city, and am I one of the names."

For dentists, the data says the field tends to be more decisive (28% average leader share nationally), so if a competitor already owns the AI answer in your city, displacing them takes deliberate work, but 72% of mentions on average still go to someone other than the leader. That's still a real opening, it's just a harder one to earn. For HVAC companies, the field is one of the most wide open in our dataset (22% average leader share), meaning most markets do not have an entrenched AI favorite yet, which makes it one of the easiest trades in our whole dataset to break into right now. Plumbing sits among the many trades not yet broken out individually by name in this summary; the fastest way to know exactly where your city and trade stand is to check the live leaderboard rather than lean on a national average that may not reflect your specific market.

Why the leader share number matters more than a simple yes or no

"Does AI recommend my trade" is really two different questions wearing one sentence. The first is whether AI mentions businesses in your category at all, and across 25,220 answers spanning 21 trades, the answer is consistently yes; every trade we track produces real, specific business names, not generic non-answers. The second, more useful question is how much room exists in your market. A 32% leader share, the ceiling in our dataset, held by chiropractors, still means more than two thirds of all mentions go to businesses other than the single leader. A 21% leader share, the floor, held by auto repair, means no business is close to a lock. Read as a competitive index rather than a scoreboard, the leader-share number tells you how much organized effort it will take to become one of the names AI gives back, not whether it's possible.

The 91% local-only figure matters here too. Because the overwhelming majority of named businesses appear in just one city, your competitive set for AI visibility purposes is your actual local market, not a national industry. A dominant chain in another state has essentially no bearing on whether you get named in your own city; the businesses you're actually up against are the ones already showing up on your city's leaderboard.

How to check your own trade and city

National averages are a starting point, not your answer. Browse the live, continuously updated leaderboards for your exact trade and city at /top, for example /top/hvac/phoenix-az or /top/plumbers/sacramento-ca, and see who AI is naming right now. You can also see how we help your specific trade get recommended at /services.

If your business isn't listed anywhere in your city's leaderboard, that's the clearest possible signal: AI has enough to say about your competitors and not enough to say about you.

Run a free AI visibility scan and see, in about 30 seconds with no signup, exactly where your business stands against this dataset today.