Your customers used to type plumber near me into Google and pick a company off the map. A growing share now asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI mode and gets back one short answer with two or three companies in it. If you are not one of them, you are invisible for that search no matter where you rank.
In a recent workshop, Josh Nelson walked plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors through a live test of their own AI visibility. Here is the exact exercise so you can run it on your company this week, in about ten minutes, with no tools and no budget.
What Is In This Article
Why You Have to Test This Yourself
Nobody can tell you from the outside whether ChatGPT recommends your company. The answer changes
by city, by service and by the exact words the customer uses. The only way to know is to run the
searches your customers are running and write down what comes back.
In the workshop Josh did this live for a client, Buds Plumbing in Evansville, Indiana. Same
company, three engines, three slightly different answers: first place in Google AI mode, first
place in one ChatGPT prompt, third place in another. That variance is the point. You are not
looking for a single ranking number, you are looking for a pattern.
The Five Prompts
Run each one in ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Gemini and Perplexity. Swap in your own company, service
and city. Keep a tally sheet open while you do it.
| # | Prompt | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Who is the best plumber in [city]? | Whether you make the shortlist at all |
| 2 | Top rated [service] companies near [city] | How review volume and directories are weighted |
| 3 | Is [your company] a reputable company? | What the engines say about you unprompted |
| 4 | How much does [service] cost in [city]? | Whether your pricing content gets cited |
| 5 | Who should I call for a [service] emergency in [city] tonight? | How availability and urgency shift the answer |
Score each prompt as a simple yes or no: were you in the answer. Five prompts times four engines
is twenty checks, and it takes about ten minutes. Most contractors who run it for the first time
land somewhere between two and six. If you want the same exercise in a structured worksheet, the
workbook is free inside the Growth Training Library.
Run It in a Clean Room
One warning that catches almost everyone. If you use ChatGPT every day inside your own business,
it knows your company and it will flatter you. Your result is not the result a homeowner in your
city gets.
Add this to every prompt: "Please exclude any history or memory you have about my company. Give me the answer a first time searcher in this city would see."
Better still, run the prompts in a logged out browser or a private window. You want the cold
answer, not the friendly one.
The Prompt That Gives You the Formula
The single most useful prompt in the whole exercise is the follow up question. After the engine
gives you its list, ask: why did you recommend your number one pick over the others?
These tools will tell you. They explain their reasoning, and the reasoning is the work order for
your next ninety days. Across hundreds of these searches in competitive markets, the same factors
keep coming back:
- Review volume and review recency, very similar to what drives rankings in the Google map pack
- Years in business, which you cannot fake and should therefore publish clearly
- Service range, meaning whether you obviously offer the exact service in the query
- Availability, especially same day and emergency service
- Real local presence in that specific city, not a service area claim
- Pricing transparency, licensing, warranties and certifications on your own website
Notice how many of those live on your website rather than on Google. That is the part you control,
and it is why the seven AI visibility pages matter so much.
Log the Competitors, Not Just Your Score
While you are running the prompts, write down which companies keep appearing. Three or four names
will repeat across engines. Those are your real competitors for AI recommendations, and they are
often not the same companies you think of as your competitors in the truck lettering sense.
Then go look at what they have that you do not. Usually it is one of three things: far more
reviews, a website that answers questions yours does not, or third party mentions on directories
and independent lists. All three are fixable. None of them are fixable in a week, which is why you
start now. If you want a realistic timeline for that work, we wrote about
how long SEO and Google Ads take to produce leads.
Going Deeper Than Five Prompts
Five prompts by hand is an awareness exercise. A real assessment runs about thirty five prompts
across your top services and your top ten cities, plus a keyword ranking analysis in Google and the
map pack. That is the version we build for contractors who want the full picture, and it is free:
schedule a strategy session and we will run it for your market.
If you would rather do it yourself, start with the keywords that actually matter in
home services and build your own list from your top services and cities.
Get the Book and the Full Growth Training Library, Free
Josh Nelson's book, How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Digital Marketing Right, plus the complete Growth Training Library: 10 workshops covering local search, paid ads, website conversion and tracking, built specifically for plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. Read it, watch it, and put it to work in your own company.
Already know you want help running it? Schedule a free strategy session.
