How do plumbers show up in ChatGPT answers?

How do plumbers show up in ChatGPT answers?

By being written up on the sites the AI reads before it answers. For plumbers in Dallas we logged 60 Perplexity and Gemini answers to 10 homeowner questions on October 1, 2026: 47 plumbers were named, Baker Brothers Plumbing, Air & Electric was named most, on 14 of 20 question checks, and the sites cited most were angi.com (35 of 60 answers), bakerbrothersplumbing.com (35 of 60 answers) and bestpickreports.com (35 of 60 answers). ChatGPT was not asked the plumber questions in this edition; on the same city's AC and heating questions the same day it read the same kind of pages, with 36.4% of its citations going to directories and review sites.

Which plumbers were named, and how often?

A check is one question on one AI tool, asked three times; a plumber counts on a check when it is named in at least 2 of the three answers. Perplexity and Gemini on 10 questions make 20 checks. The questions were the plain things a homeowner types, for example “emergency plumber in Dallas for a burst pipe, who should I call”, “best company for water heater replacement in Dallas” and “recommend an honest plumber in Dallas that won't overcharge me”. The full list of 10 is on the research page.

Not a ranking of anyone's work. A lead of one or two checks is within the run-to-run noise, and a plumber missing here was simply not named in most runs of these answers. The other 32 plumbers named on at least one check are in the JSON file.

Which sites do the answers read before they name a plumber?

This is the part a plumber can act on. Across 60 answers the tools cited 696 sources. 55.5% went to plumbers' own websites, 32.8% to directories and review sites, and 4.9% to best-of lists. The plumbers named in the table above are, almost without exception, the ones written up on the sites below.

Notice the per-tool columns. A site one tool leans on can be close to invisible to the other, which is why a plumber named on Gemini can be missing on Perplexity, and the reverse.

What about ChatGPT?

Honestly: ChatGPT was not asked the plumber questions in this edition. The reason, as the research page puts it: our OpenAI API credit was at $0 when the answers were collected, so no ChatGPT number is shown or estimated. This page does not guess a ChatGPT number for plumbers.

What we do have is ChatGPT on the same city, the same day, for the neighbouring trade. Asked 10 Dallas AC and heating questions once each on October 1, 2026, ChatGPT (gpt-4o, web search on) named 42 companies and Rescue Air and Plumbing was named in 9 of the 10 answers. The sites it cited most were dfwprofessionals.com (6 of 10 answers), expertise.com (6 of 10 answers) and consumeraffairs.com (5 of 10 answers), and 36.4% of its citations went to directories and review sites against 28.4% for Perplexity and Gemini on the same questions. Several of the companies it named carry plumbing in their name, and 1 of them (Berkeys Plumbing, A/C & Electrical) is in the plumber table above as well. The full table is on the HVAC page.

So the mechanism holds on ChatGPT as well: it searches, reads directories, review sites and company pages, and names the businesses written up there. The specific sites differ by tool, and the plumber-specific ChatGPT list comes when the next round is collected.

So how does a plumber get into the answer?

• Be on the sites in the table, with current reviews. Start with the three or four cited most. Claim the listing, keep the name, phone and address identical to your website, and ask recent customers for reviews there, not only on Google.
• One page per real question, in the homeowner's words. “Emergency plumber in Dallas for a burst pipe” is a page, with your name, your area, your hours and what happens when someone calls, in the first hundred words. “Residential plumbing solutions” is not.
• Let the AI crawlers read your site. Check robots.txt and your firewall for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. A good page the crawler cannot fetch never gets cited.
• Check your own name three times, then again in a month. One answer is a coin flip. Record the baseline before you change anything, so you can see what moved.

How was this measured?

Perplexity and Gemini through their APIs, each of the 10 questions three times on October 1, 2026 (run r-20261001T2315Z-rv26-plumber-dallas-31e2), 60 answers in all. Nobody was signed in and there was no system prompt: the question was the whole input. A plumber counts as named on a question and tool when its name is in the answer text, with links and citation chips removed, in at least 2 of the three runs; spelling variants count as one name. A citation is a URL the API itself returns as a source, counted once per answer. Source types come from a written rulebook, so a few sites land in the wrong group.

Limits: one city, one day, 60 answers, two tools. ChatGPT was not asked these questions; the ChatGPT evidence above is from the HVAC questions in the same city. Every answer is published, so anyone can recount.

Do the AI tools name your plumbing company?

Straight answers