How ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini pick an HVAC company

Two HVAC companies on the same street can get opposite treatment from AI. One gets named by ChatGPT and skipped by Google's AI. The other gets the reverse. That is not luck. The four big assistants read four different source lists, and in 2026 somebody finally counted them.

The study that counted 29,000 AI answers

Most advice about AI search is somebody's opinion. This post is built on a count.

Between 31 August and 20 September 2026, a study published by Cheers (Where Does ChatGPT Get Its Information? Local Data 2026) asked home-services questions across 100 US and Canadian metro areas and recorded every source each assistant cited. The sample: 9,434 ChatGPT answers, 9,435 Google AI Mode answers, 6,509 Perplexity answers, and 4,141 Gemini answers that carried citations.

That is close to 30,000 answers about trades like yours. The result is not subtle. The four assistants barely agree on anything.

What each assistant reads before it names you

Read this table across, not down. Each column is a different world.

Source cited	ChatGPT	Google AI Mode	Perplexity	Gemini
A business website	not reported	92.5%	89.0%	88.3%
Google's own pages	0.1%	95.5%	1.1%	0.2%
Directories and best-of lists	59.9%	9.2%	81.7%	37.8%
Expertise.com	32.1%	0.2%	30.9%	6.0%
Angi or HomeAdvisor	29.4%	9.3%	30.8%	13.4%
BBB	14.5%	1.7%	31.0%	8.4%
Yelp	0.6%	19.7%	13.9%	0.0%
Reddit	4.9%	9.1%	10.8%	1.2%
An online booking page	0.0%	31.2%	0.2%	0.0%

All figures from the Cheers 2026 study of 9,434 ChatGPT, 9,435 Google AI Mode, 6,509 Perplexity and 4,141 Gemini answers to home-services questions, 100 US and Canadian metros, 31 August to 20 September 2026. "Not reported" means the study did not publish that cell, not that the number is zero. BrightLocal's separate Uncovering ChatGPT Search Sources research puts business websites at 58% of ChatGPT's local search sources.

ChatGPT is the directory engine

ChatGPT behaves like a man reading other people's rankings. Pages in the ranked-list format, the "best HVAC companies in your city" shape, appeared in 64.2% of the ChatGPT answers that cited anything at all.

Look at what it almost never touches. Google's pages: 0.1%. Yelp in the text: 0.6%, which is 52 answers out of 9,434. An online booking page: zero.

Instead it reads Expertise.com in roughly a third of answers, Angi or HomeAdvisor in roughly a third, then HomeStars at 16.0%, BBB at 14.5%, Thumbtack at 5.0% and Reddit at 4.9%.

The practical meaning: inside ChatGPT, somebody else's list decides whether you exist. If your company is not on the lists in your metro, ChatGPT has nothing to name. We broke the whole list down in the directories AI actually cites for HVAC.

Google AI Mode is the Google engine

Google's own AI reads Google. It cited a Google page in 95.5% of answers and a business website in 92.5%. It linked an online booking page in 31.2%, which no other assistant did in any meaningful way.

Three things follow from that, and all three are inside your control today:

• Your Google Business Profile is not a listing. It is the fact sheet Google's AI reuses about you. Yext's analysis of 6.8 million AI citations put Google Business Profile alone at 28.5% of local AI citations.
• Your own website needs to state the plain facts in readable HTML: what you fix, which towns you cover, your hours, your phone number, your license.
• A working online booking link is worth building, because this is the one engine that hands it to the customer.

One more Google number that surprises people. Ahrefs found in 2026 that only 37.9% of the citations inside Google AI Overviews came from pages ranking in the top 10 for that query, down from 76%. You no longer have to be first to get quoted. You have to be clear.

Perplexity cites everything at once

Perplexity is the least picky of the four. Business websites 89.0%, long-tail directories 81.7%, BBB 31.0%, Expertise.com 30.9%, Angi or HomeAdvisor 30.8%, Yelp 13.9%, Reddit 10.8%.

Across its answers that carried citations, 93.5% cited a directory, a review platform or a list. Perplexity rewards breadth. The more places you honestly appear, the more often it has a reason to name you.

Gemini sits in the middle

Of the Gemini answers that carried citations, 88.3% cited a business website and 37.8% a long-tail directory, with Angi or HomeAdvisor at 13.4% and BBB at 8.4%. It cited no Yelp pages and no booking pages in the sample.

Gemini is the quiet reminder that your own website still carries most of the weight in three out of four engines.

Why two or three names is the whole game

An AI answer does not hand over ten blue links. It names a couple of companies and stops. Put that next to how people now decide:

• 45% of US consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before, which makes AI the third most popular source of business recommendations (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 US adults).
• 40% of consumers say they trust AI platforms to give business recommendations (BrightLocal 2026).
• 72% of consumers look at three or fewer businesses before deciding, and only 1% look at more than ten (BrightLocal Consumer Search Behavior 2026).
• 75% decide which business to use in under 30 minutes. 28% decide in under five minutes (BrightLocal 2026).
• 39% of ChatGPT users click through to a business website when looking for local services (Sagapixel).

Being off the shortlist is not a ranking problem. It is a lost job that never appears in any report you read, because the customer never contacted you. We put a dollar figure on it in what it costs to be left off the AI shortlist.

What to fix first

In this order, because this is the order the data supports.

1. Unblock the AI crawlers. If your robots.txt or firewall blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended, those engines cannot cite you at all. This is a ten-minute check with the largest downside of anything on this list.
2. Make your Google Business Profile exactly true. Services, service area, hours, phone, license. Google AI Mode reads it in nearly every answer.
3. Get onto the lists ChatGPT reads. Expertise.com, Angi or HomeAdvisor, BBB, and the local best-of roundups in your metro. Claim, correct, then pursue placement.
4. Write service and city pages, not blog posts. When ChatGPT cited a contractor's own site it took the homepage 37.4% of the time, a service page 24.1%, a page naming a service and a city 17.4%, a location page 10.7% and a blog post 1.2%. See which page of your website AI quotes.
5. Fix the reviews, not just the star count. Assistants match the words in a review against the words in the question.
6. Answer the phone. Winning the answer and losing the call is the most expensive way to do this.

How to measure without fooling yourself

AI answers are non-deterministic. The same question can give you a different answer five minutes later. So one screenshot is an anecdote, not a measurement, and a screenshot of a good answer is a sales trick.

The honest method is repeated sampling. Ask the same set of real customer questions, several runs each, on each of the four assistants, every week. Then report the share of answers that name you, with the sample size attached, and watch the trend line instead of any single run.

Nobody controls what an AI says. You control the signals it reads, and you measure the rest honestly.

One last caution about accuracy. Researchers at Washington University checked Google AI Overviews and found about 11% of verifiable claims were unsupported by, or contradicted, the source cited. AI will sometimes state wrong things about your company. Finding those and fixing them at the source is part of the work.

Questions owners ask

Can anyone guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my HVAC company?

No. There is no paid placement inside an AI answer and no ranking data for sale. What can be done is building the signals the assistants read, then measuring the trend honestly over weeks. Any vendor promising a position is selling something that does not exist.

Why does the same question give me a different answer every time?

AI answers are non-deterministic, which means the same question can produce different output on each run. One screenshot proves nothing. The only honest measurement is to ask the same question several times on each assistant and report the share of answers that name you, with the sample size shown.

If ChatGPT barely cites Google, should I stop working on my Google Business Profile?

No. Google AI Mode cited Google's own pages in 95.5% of home-services answers in the 2026 study, and Google Business Profile accounted for 28.5% of local AI citations in Yext's analysis of 6.8 million citations. Your profile is the single most reused fact sheet about your company.

How many HVAC companies does an AI answer usually name?

Usually two or three. That matters because BrightLocal's 2026 Consumer Search Behavior research found 72% of consumers look at three or fewer businesses before deciding, and 28% decide in under five minutes. The shortlist is close to the whole decision.

Does a blog post help my HVAC company get named by AI?

Barely inside ChatGPT, where blog posts were 1.2% of the citations to a contractor's own site. It helps far more in Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini, which cited business websites in 92.5%, 89.0% and 88.3% of their answers. Service and city pages beat blog posts in every engine.