What 3,060 AI searches told us about how plumbers get recommended
On October 25, 2026 I ran a baseline for a study I am doing on myself. The question: when a homeowner or a contractor asks an AI search engine about plumbing SEO, restoration marketing or “the best SEO agency for plumbers in San Diego,” who gets named, and what pages does the engine lean on to decide?
The setup was deliberately boring. Seventeen fixed prompts. Sixty identical runs of each prompt on three engines: Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. 3,060 calls, 2,861 of which came back with a usable answer. Total cost about $12 in API fees. The full tables are on the study page; this post is the plain-language version.
Why sixty runs and not one screenshot
AI answers move. SparkToro ran 2,961 prompts 60 to 100 times each and found that identical prompts return the same list of brands less than 1% of the time. So a single screenshot of ChatGPT recommending someone proves almost nothing. The number that means something is share of responses: out of sixty asks, how many times did a given name come up.
What came back
My share was 0%. My agency, Digital Dynamics, appeared once in 2,861 answers. I appeared as a marketer zero times. When the engines were asked “who is Carlos Sandoval Jr,” they confidently answered with other people: a Fresno-area news subject, a nurse practitioner, a documentary filmmaker, a German artist. Google AI Mode said there is no widely known authority by that name in SEO. Fair enough. That is the starting line.
Google AI Mode cites Google Business Profiles first. On the agency-discovery prompts, google.com (which is to say, Business Profile listings) was cited 72 to 90 times per prompt. After that came agency roundup lists (firstpagesage.com showed up in 56 of 60 runs on “best GEO agencies 2026”), Reddit threads, YouTube, the Semrush agency directory, and Thumbtack.
Google AI Overviews lean on YouTube and often do not show up at all. On the how-to and “king of” prompts, YouTube was the top citation by a wide margin: 152 to 272 citations per prompt. On the local agency prompts, an AI Overview appeared in only 27 to 33% of runs. If you are a plumber hoping to be in the AI Overview for “best plumber in San Diego,” two-thirds of the time there is no overview to be in.
Perplexity is a fixed list. For every prompt, it returned the identical six domains in all sixty runs. Those domains are listicles and directories: bluelinks.agency, sianamarketing.com, agencies.semrush.com, clicktrackmarketing.com, firstpagesage.com. If you are on the list, you are in every answer. If you are not, you are in none.
“GEO” does not mean what marketers think it means. “GEO consultant Southern California” returned geotechnical engineering firms. “King of plumbing GEO” returned King George Plumbing. The engines read GEO as geology or geography, not generative engine optimization. If you sell AI-search services to contractors, say “AI search” and “get recommended by ChatGPT,” not GEO.
What this means for a plumbing or restoration company
Three things, in order of how much they matter from this data.
- Your Google Business Profile is the surface. It is what Google AI Mode reads when someone asks for a recommendation. Categories, services, photos, posts, Q&A and above all review count are the inputs.
- Be on the lists the engines already cite. For Perplexity especially, the fixed set of directories and roundups is the whole game. Find them for your market by running the prompts yourself and reading the citations.
- If you make video, put it on YouTube. Google AI Overviews cite YouTube heavily on how-to questions. Videos that live only on TikTok or Instagram are invisible to these engines.
What happens next
Over the next 30 days I publish, under my own name and with full attribution: pages like this one, LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos, directory profiles, and one press release about the study itself. Then I re-run the identical panel on day 7, day 14 and day 30 (November 1, 8 and 24) and post the tables next to the baseline. If nothing moves, that gets published too.
The prompts and the method are public so anyone can re-run them for their own market.
Carlos Sandoval Jr. · Founder, Digital Dynamics (San Diego) · plumbing & restoration SEO, ads, and AI search