Who AI recommends for plumbers in Phoenix, and which sources it cites
We asked Perplexity and Gemini 10 questions a homeowner in Phoenix would ask, three times each (60 answers, October 2, 2026). Roto-Rooter was named most: in 9 of 20 question checks. 70 plumbers were named on at least one check. The most-cited site was angi.com, in 45 of 60 answers. ChatGPT was not measured in this edition.
By Matt Turley60 answers660 citations10 questionsPerplexity and GeminiChatGPT not measured
A check is one question on one AI tool, asked three times. A plumber counts on a check when it was named in at least 2 of the three answers. Perplexity and Gemini together make 20 checks.
plumbers in Phoenix named by majority, October 2026 (top 15 of 70)
#
Business
Checks named (of 20)
Perplexity (of 10)
Gemini (of 10)
Answers naming it (of 60)
1
Roto-Rooter
9
5
4
29
2
Parker & Sons
8
7
1
26
3
George Brazil Plumbing & Electrical
7
1
6
20
4
Goettl
6
3
3
17
5
Robins Plumbing
5
1
4
15
6
Wyman Plumbing & Mechanical LLC
5
1
4
14
7
Benjamin Franklin The Punctual Plumber
5
0
5
11
8
Apache Plumbing Services
4
1
3
11
9
Do It Right Plumbing, Inc.
4
0
4
14
10
Mr. Rooter Plumbing
4
4
0
14
11
Local Plumbing LLC
4
0
4
12
12
Cobra Rooter & Plumbing Service
4
0
4
11
13
Simply Better Plumbing and Drain, Inc.
4
0
4
11
14
Custom Plumbing of Arizona, LLC
4
0
4
10
15
ASAP Plumbing
3
1
2
10
Small sample, read it as a snapshot: 10 questions, two AI tools, three runs each, on October 2, 2026. A lead of one or two checks is within the run-to-run noise. This says nothing about the quality of anyone's work, and a plumber missing here was simply not named in most runs of these answers.
Table 2 · By AI tool
Perplexity and Gemini only partly agree
13 of the 70 plumbers named were named by both tools. The rest were named by one tool only.
Each AI tool on the same 10 questions
AI tool
Answers
Named by majority
Named most
Citations per answer
Perplexity sonar
30
28
Parker & Sons (7 of 10 questions, 70.0%)
14.3
Gemini gemini-2.5-flash
30
55
George Brazil Plumbing & Electrical (6 of 10 questions, 60.0%)
Your customers already ask these AI tools who to call. The answers above are what they get back. The plumbers named are the ones whose names show up on the sites the AI reads: the directories, review sites and best-of lists in Table 3, plus their own websites.
So start with the sites in Table 3. Make sure you are listed on the directories and review sites there, with your name written the same way everywhere. Find out who wrote the best-of lists and whether you belong on them. Then make your own site say plainly what you do, where you work and why people pick you, in the words a homeowner uses.
Do not judge from one answer. The names move from run to run, which is why every check here is three runs and a name only counts when it shows up in most of them.
See your own business
Are you one of the plumbers AI names?
This page covers the whole city. The AI Answer Check runs the same test on your own business: the questions your customers ask, three runs each on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, whether you are named, who is named instead, and the three fixes worth the most. I read every report before it goes out.
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AI tools
Perplexity: Perplexity API, sonar model, live web search; cited URLs from the citations field. 30 answers.
Gemini: Google Vertex AI, gemini-2.5-flash with Google Search grounding; cited URLs from grounding chunks. 30 answers.
ChatGPT: Not measured in this edition: our OpenAI API credit was at $0 when the answers were collected, so no ChatGPT number is shown or estimated.
These are the APIs, not the consumer apps. Nobody was signed in and there was no system prompt: the question was the whole input. Each question went to each tool three times on October 2, 2026.
Who counts as named
A list of the businesses the answers recommend was built first by reading every answer. Then each answer was checked for each name in its text, with links and citation chips removed, so a cited link alone never counts. Spelling variants count as one name: curly or straight apostrophes, hyphen variants, and “&” or “and”. A name counts on a question and tool when it appears in at least 2 of the three runs. Directories, review sites and platforms are never ranked.
Sources
A citation is a URL the API itself returns as a source (Perplexity's citations list, Gemini's grounding sources resolved from Google's redirect links). Each site counts once per answer. Source types come from a written rulebook, not a person reading every page, so some pages land in the wrong group, mostly between company sites, blogs and lists.