Angi Was Cited in 185 of 600 Plumbing Answers. Not One Plumber Appeared on All Four Engines.

Angi was cited in 185 of 600 plumbing answers. Zero plumbers appeared on all four engines.

In April 2026 Local Vitals put 600 plumbing queries to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity across ten Florida metros and five plumbing specialties. The assistants returned a plumber's name in 88.2% of answers, and not one plumber appeared on all four platforms. Angi was cited in 185 of the 600 queries, roughly 30%, Yelp in 135 and the Better Business Bureau in 70 (Local Vitals). Local Vitals sells AI-visibility diagnostics, so a study finding contractors have a visibility problem sells the fix. The counts are still the counts.

Read those figures against each other and the problem changes shape. The assistant will hand a homeowner a plumber's name; it just hands out a different plumber depending on which app the homeowner opened. The one name that survived all four engines was not a contractor. It was a directory.

So the loss is not the one most contractors think they have. You are probably not invisible; you are unrepeatable — named on one engine, missing on the next three, with no way to know which your customer used. It never feels like a problem, because the one time you check you may well find yourself. And in a 2025 survey of 1,000+ US consumers, 57% said they had asked ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a local business (GatherUp; GatherUp sells reputation software).

1,571 contractors were recommended. 23 of them appeared on all four platforms.

Not a plumbing quirk. Local Vitals ran the same design across trades — 600 queries, ten US metros, five trades, four platforms — and AI returned specific local business names in 87% of answers, producing 1,571 unique businesses. Twenty-three of them, 1.5%, appeared on all four (Local Vitals, April 2026; same vendor, same diagnostic for sale). Fifteen hundred got named; twenty-three got named reliably.

5W, a PR and GEO agency, reports that 78% of independents in the local-services metro-category combinations it tested had effectively zero AI citation share, naming Yelp, Angi and Zocdoc among the aggregators absorbing it (5W). The sample is not fully visible on the page, which we say plainly: an agency's index, not a replicated study, selling what it recommends. Take the direction, not the decimal.

The engines disagree with each other more than they disagree with you because they read different source pools: Semrush's AI Visibility Index (126 million prompts, 1,200+ brands, January to April 2026) found ChatGPT cites 15.4 sources per answer, leaning on Reddit and Wikipedia, while Gemini uses 3.3 (Semrush via PPC Land; Semrush sells AI-visibility tracking). A fix aimed at one is not a fix for the others.

Thumbtack is an OpenAI Operator partner, which is a different thing from being recommended

When OpenAI introduced Operator on January 23 2025 — an agent built to carry out tasks in a browser rather than answer questions about them — Thumbtack was among the partners it named (OpenAI). Read it for exactly what it says: a product partnership, an agent that can move through a booking flow on a marketplace. It is not a statement that ChatGPT's home-services recommendations are produced by Thumbtack, and nobody has published evidence for that. The announcement is also OpenAI's own.

It belongs here because of consistency. A marketplace is a stable, machine-addressable object across products and engines — a name an assistant can reach for, and now a set of rails an agent can operate. A contractor is a name in one answer, on one platform, on one day. As assistants move from describing options to acting on them, the durable entity is the one the software already knows how to address.

24/7, same-day, service area, licensed, bonded, insured: if it is not in readable text, the engine cannot use it

Here is the practical core. An emergency question has to be answered out of emergency facts, and the assistant has to find those facts written down. Does a human pick up at 2am? Is the caller's zip code inside the service area? Is there a license number? On most contractor websites each is unreadable, in a fixable way: "24/7 EMERGENCY SERVICE" set in a banner graphic, the service area a shaded map image with no town names in text, the license number on a truck, the hours inside a booking widget.

A human sees all of it. A model that reads text sees a page that never says the company answers at night, never lists the towns it covers and never states a license number. So the engine reaches for a source that does state those things in fielded, structured text — and the sources built to do that are the directories. That is how Angi ends up in 185 answers of 600. Angi did not outbid you for that answer. It answered a question your own site declined to answer, and the model has no register, no license database and no CRM to consult instead — only text.

The peer-reviewed work points the same way. The GEO study (Aggarwal et al., ACM SIGKDD 2024, 10,000 queries) found that adding cited sources raised a page's visibility in generated answers by up to 115% for low-ranked content, statistics by 41% and quotations by 28%, while keyword stuffing produced no gain (arXiv). Checkable facts are what a model repeats. "Licensed electricians on call 24 hours, average arrival under 90 minutes in [town]" is a sentence an engine can lift; "fast, friendly, family-owned service" is not. More in how to improve your AI visibility and AI visibility versus local SEO.

• Hours as a fact, not a promise: whether a human answers overnight and at weekends, and what "emergency" means at your company — a callback within the hour, or a truck by morning.
• Service area as a list of towns, neighborhoods and zip codes, in text. A map graphic is not a list. The assistant answering "who covers [suburb]" is looking for the word.
• Same-day and next-day availability, in words, on the page for the trade in question — not only inside a chat widget.
• License, bond and insurance as the records they are: number, issuing authority, trade covered. Read the next section first — what you must hold and disclose is a state and trade question.
• Reviews with sentences in them, which are text an engine can read where a star average is not. A 2024 Clear Seas Research study for The ACHR NEWS found 91% of respondents rate online reviews as an important factor when choosing an HVAC contractor (ACHR NEWS).

Washington requires contractors to be registered, bonded and insured. California tells homeowners to check the number. Neither is a national rule.

"Licensed, bonded and insured" is the most repeated phrase in the trades, and it is not a universal US legal requirement. What a contractor must hold, and must disclose, varies by state and by trade — an electrician, a roofer and a handyman are not always under the same regime inside one state. Two examples, illustrating that variance rather than describing your obligations.

In Washington, the Department of Labor & Industries requires construction contractors to be registered with the state, and to be bonded and insured (Washington L&I). That applies in Washington. In California, the Contractors State License Board instructs consumers to verify a contractor's state license number before hiring (CSLB). That applies in California. Neither tells you what your state or trade demands of you. Rules vary by state and by trade; confirm what applies to your company with your state licensing authority. Nothing here is legal advice.

The visibility point sits underneath the regulatory one. "Fully licensed" is an adjective anyone could type; a number, an issuing authority and a trade is a record verifiable against a public database — the shape of claim a model restates. And "how do I check that a contractor is licensed in [state]" is a live question the assistant answers by pointing at the state lookup — a source you do not control but do appear in. If that record names one entity and your website another, the check no longer checks.

The sources AI cites when a homeowner asks for a contractor, ranked — and the two studies that disagree

Two vendor studies measure this and disagree, which is itself the useful finding. Across 28 million small-business AI answers in Q4 2025, Foundation Marketing and AirOps counted Yelp far ahead of every home-services directory. Across 600 plumbing queries, Local Vitals counted Angi ahead of Yelp. Opposite orderings — so anyone selling a ranked directory strategy is picking a study. Treat the list below as an order of work, not a ranking factor — and note that it starts where the facts start. Hours, service area, trade and license number can only be asserted by you; a directory can only repeat them. That is why your own pages lead the order of work and the directories follow it.

The nearest primary evidence is ours, and it is from other verticals. In the three markets we have measured — dental, med spa and plastic surgery in Dallas, July 2026, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — 73% to 79% of every source cited behind those recommendations was a business's own website rather than a directory (the Dallas benchmark). The trades were not in that sample, so treat it as direction, not as your number. Dallas, July 2026 — one market, one day, and a primary measurement: the raw answers are stored, the method is published, and the run repeats against any city, including yours.

• 1. Your own emergency and service-area pages — the only source here where "a human answers at 2am", "we cover [suburb]" and a license number with its issuing authority can be stated rather than repeated. In BrightLocal's July 2025 test the business's own site was the majority of sources for every engine and vertical (BrightLocal). Our own Dallas run points the same way in adjacent verticals: 73% to 79% of cited sources were businesses' own sites across dental, med spa and plastic surgery (the Dallas benchmark; our primary measurement — one market, one day, no home-services cut). Yext puts Gemini at 52.15% own-site citations (Yext), and Yext sells listings management, so a finding that listings decide everything sells listings management. Do this: one readable page per trade and per town, with hours, service area and license in text. Everything below corroborates those pages — or contradicts them once it goes stale.
• 2. Angi and HomeAdvisor. The most-cited name on plumbing queries: Angi in 185 of 600, about 30% (Local Vitals; an AI-visibility vendor). At local-business scale Angi drew 145,600 citations and HomeAdvisor 33,600 across 28 million AI answers in Q4 2025 (Foundation Marketing + AirOps; a content agency and an AI-search vendor, so their tooling is the subject). Do this: claim it; make trades, service area, hours and license field true. Sitting in the source pool is not being picked out of it.
• 3. Yelp — first at local-business scale, second on plumbing. Yelp took 512,680 citations against BBB 149,700, Angi 145,600, Thumbtack 56,000, HomeAdvisor 33,600 and Nextdoor 10,300, and supplied 72.5% of directory citations in Google AI Mode (Foundation Marketing + AirOps). On Florida plumbing it came second, 135 against Angi's 185 (Local Vitals). Do this: claim the page, fix category and hours, reply to reviews in sentences an engine can quote.
• 4. Google and Maps. BrightLocal's July 2025 test of 20 queries across ten verticals found Google Business Profile strongly preferred by Google's own models (BrightLocal; sells local SEO tools; no home-services cut). Do this: right trade category, real service area, hours that say whether a human genuinely answers at 2am.
• 5. The BBB. Cited in 70 of 600 plumbing queries (Local Vitals) and 149,700 times across 28 million local answers — ahead of Angi at that scale (Foundation Marketing + AirOps). Do this: read your BBB record. It is text about your company that you did not write.
• 6. Your state license lookup. Never measured as an AI citation source for contractors, and we will not pretend otherwise — but it is the record an assistant routes to when a homeowner asks how to verify a license (Washington's and California's are linked above). Do this: confirm the record is current and that the legal name on it matches your website and listings.

Eight questions a homeowner types with water on the floor. Ask the engines what they answer.

Any contractor can run this free, this week. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, start a fresh chat per question, paste the eight below with your city or state in the brackets, and record three things: every contractor named, every directory named, and — the one that matters most — whether any contractor repeats across more than one engine.

That last column is the point. Thirty-two answers tell you what one check cannot: not whether you exist in AI, but whether you exist in it consistently. If your company shows up once and never again, you have the 1.5% problem — not the same problem as being unknown. If a directory shows up in most of the thirty-two, you have met a competitor you did not know you had.

The homeowner's clock is short, which is why misses are expensive. In a 2022 survey of 559 US homeowners, Service Direct found 85% contact three or fewer contractors before hiring and 60% decide within 72 hours (Service Direct; Service Direct sells leads to contractors, so weigh a finding that the consideration set is tiny). Three names, three days — an answer that hands out three names is the whole shortlist. One pass is one moment: ask twice and the contractors change. Run it anyway.

• "Emergency plumber tonight — water is leaking under my sink in [city]."
• "How much does it cost to replace a water heater in [city]?"
• "HVAC company open now in [city] — my AC is dead and it is 95 degrees."
• "Licensed electrician in [city] for a breaker that keeps tripping."
• "Roof leak after a storm in [city] — do I call a roofer or my insurance first?"
• "Sewer line repair in [city] with financing."
• "Is Angi reliable, or should I just call a local company directly?"
• "How do I check that a contractor is licensed in [state]?"

What contractors say when we show them this, including the objections that land

These come up in nearly every conversation with an owner, and several of them are right.

• "I only care about booked jobs, not visibility." Correct, and nothing here promises a booked job. No study measures whether an AI-sourced call converts better or worse than any other channel, and nobody — us included — can tell you what a job from it is worth. What is measurable is narrower: whether an assistant names your company at all, and which name it gives instead. On the plumbing data, somebody is named in 88.2% of answers.
• "I already pay for Angi leads and I hate them." That is a decision about a marketplace, and a separate one. We make no claim about what any marketplace charges or whether it is worth it — we found no independent source, so this article carries no such figure. What we can say: Angi is cited in about 30% of AI plumbing answers (Local Vitals, a vendor) whether or not you buy from it. Its place in the answer is a citation fact, not a purchase — cancelling does not remove it, and buying more has never been shown to put you there. What does change the answer is the part you control: the marketplace gets quoted because it holds your hours, your towns and your trades in text and your site does not. Dependence on it is the price of that silence, not a fee anyone charged you.
• "My phone rings fine." It may. The exposure is not in the calls you get; it is in the three-name shortlist you never see. 85% of homeowners contact three or fewer contractors (Service Direct, 559 homeowners, 2022; a lead seller). A full schedule describes the homeowners who found you, and says nothing about those who asked an assistant and got four companies, none of them yours.
• "Every number here comes from a company selling AI visibility." Largely correct. Local Vitals sells AI-visibility diagnostics; 5W is a PR and GEO agency; Foundation is a content agency and AirOps sells AI-search software; Semrush, Yext and BrightLocal sell tooling into this problem; Service Direct sells leads. No trade association, academic group or government body has measured how often AI names a contractor rather than a directory. RecoSignal measures — and stores the raw engine answers and publishes the method, so the number can be checked instead of believed. Which is the argument for the check above: it costs nothing, and it is about your city, not Florida's.
• "Can I just fix my Angi profile and be done?" Unknown, and we will not pretend otherwise. 185 citations out of 600 tells you Angi sits in the source pool the engines draw on. It does not tell you a completed Angi profile gets your company named. Claim it, fix it, log it as a hypothesis rather than a fix.

Zero plumbers on all four engines: the only cross-engine number that describes your company is one you take yourself

A contractor has Google Search Console for search traffic and nothing for the answers assistants give about the company. You cannot see whether ChatGPT tells a homeowner you cover their zip code, or which company Gemini names when the AC is dead and it is 95 degrees. And the thing the data is clearest about — zero plumbers on all four engines, 23 of 1,571 across the trades — is a fact about consistency that one check on one assistant cannot show you.

So start from a measurement rather than a purchase. RecoSignal's free AI Visibility Snapshot puts homeowner-style questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and reports how often your company is named, which contractors and directories are named instead, and which sources those answers lean on. For one engine's mechanics, see how to get recommended by ChatGPT. Nobody can promise an assistant will name your company, and there is no #1 inside ChatGPT to buy: it shifts probability, not certainty. A pitch that guarantees a recommendation deserves the treatment you would give a quote with no line items.