We picked the HVAC category because it’s saturated, the searches are intent-rich, and the average local site is built on a stack that hasn’t changed since 2018. If AI search visibility is going to matter anywhere, it’ll matter here first.
The prompt: “What are the best HVAC contractors near St. Louis for a same-day repair?” Run cold from a fresh session, no memory, no plugins. Captured the response, captured the cited sources, did it again from a different network the next day to control for personalization.
What we measured
- Mentioned by name in the answer body
- Cited as a source (visible link)
- Appears in the “sources” expansion (clicked through)
- Not mentioned at all
The headline number
Nine of forty-seven companies showed up at all. Three were named in the body. Six were in the sources expansion. The remaining 38 may as well have not had websites — they didn’t exist to the model.
“Three companies got every meaningful AI mention in a 47-business category. The other 44 were invisible.”
What the named companies had in common
We pulled apart the three named companies’ sites — schema, content, citations, link profile, GBP — looking for the structural pattern that separated them from the 44 who didn’t make it.
- FAQ schema on the home page that answered the exact phrasing customers use, not the keyword variant.
- Real third-party citations: a Riverfront Times feature, a podcast appearance, a chamber-of-commerce profile. AI engines weight third-party text heavily.
- A ‘service area’ page that didn’t list 200 zip codes — it listed neighborhoods, with a sentence per neighborhood. Specific beats stuffed.
What didn’t correlate
Domain age. PageSpeed score. Volume of reviews. Number of pages. None of those four predicted whether a contractor showed up. We’ve seen this in other categories now too — AI ranking and Google ranking are different games even when they look the same from the outside.
Why this matters now
ChatGPT crossed 600 million weekly users this quarter. Perplexity grew 5x year over year. Google’s AI Overview is now the default for half of US queries. The percentage of local-business decisions that start with an AI answer is going up every month, and the structural traits that make a site citable take 30 to 60 days to land. The cost of waiting is compounding.
What we’d do next
Run the same test on your category. Pick a prompt your customers would actually use. See if you’re mentioned. If you’re not, you’ve already learned the most important thing about your AI visibility — and the work to fix it is well-scoped.