The 10 websites AI reads before it recommends a plumber.

A homeowner's water heater starts leaking on a Tuesday night. Three years ago they googled "plumber near me" and called whoever showed up in the map pack.

This year, a growing number of them open ChatGPT and type: who's the best plumber in Rochester, Minnesota?

And ChatGPT answers. Confidently. With names.

The short answer: when AI recommends a plumber, it is almost never reading plumbing company websites. It reads a small set of third-party directories and "best of" articles — ten sites accounted for 9,293 citations across 14,000 test searches — and seven of those ten are free to claim this afternoon.

What the study actually measured

Joshua Crouch at Relentless Digital ran roughly 14,000 unique queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI. The prompts were the ones homeowners actually type:

• Who's the best plumber in [city, state]?
• Who are the best water heater repair companies in [city, state]?

Then he logged every source each engine cited to build its answer. Not what the AI said — what it read.

Read that list again and notice what isn't on it. Your website. Our website. Any plumbing company's website.

Why your website isn't in the results

This surprises people, so it's worth explaining properly.

When a homeowner asks who's the best plumber in Rochester, they're asking for a ranked comparison. The AI needs a document that already contains one.

Your homepage says "Rochester's trusted plumber since 1998." That's a great answer to who are you. It's a useless answer to who are the ten best. Meanwhile there's a page on Angi titled "15 Best Plumbers in Rochester, MN" with ratings, license numbers and phone numbers already formatted. One page, complete answer, third-party voice.

There's a second reason, and it's less flattering: language models are trained to discount self-promotion. You calling yourself the best is a claim. A directory ranking you fourth is evidence.

So the goal isn't to outrank Angi. You won't. The goal is to be inside the pages AI is already reading. That's a different job than the plumber SEO work that gets you into the map pack, and it runs alongside it rather than replacing it.

The seven you can claim this month

All free. None of them require buying leads.

Angi (1,867 citations) — the most-quoted source in the study, and you may already have a profile built from public licensing records. Claim it at signup.angi.com/pro. Then get reviews on it: a zero-review Angi profile isn't searchable on Angi's own site. List services individually — tankless install, sewer line replacement, slab leak detection — not "plumbing."

BBB (1,413 citations) — no homeowner under 40 has checked the BBB in a decade. AI checks it constantly. The free listing at bbb.org/get-listed is separate from paid accreditation, which runs roughly $500–$1,000/year depending on your local chapter and is optional. The highest-value free move: your complaint resolution rate is public and AI quotes it. Go resolve old complaints.

Yelp (1,037 citations) — see the zero in the ChatGPT column? That's not a rounding error. Yelp's robots.txt blocks OpenAI's crawlers from every business page while letting Google through. ChatGPT literally cannot see your Yelp page. That changes soon: OpenAI and Yelp signed a licensing deal in July 2026. Claim it at biz.yelp.com/claim, fill out every service category, and never ask customers for Yelp reviews — their filter suppresses solicited ones.

Thumbtack (784 citations) — free profile at thumbtack.com/pro. The leverage is the long list of job-type checkboxes at signup. Most guys check three and move on; that list is the matching engine. Check everything you actually do, then fill in pricing.

HomeAdvisor (736 citations) — same company as Angi. Together they own 2,603 citations, 28% of the top ten. Joining HomeAdvisor routes you into the Angi Pros signup, so don't pay for two memberships. But homeadvisor.com is indexed separately and cited separately, so verify your services and license actually carried over to that side.

YellowPages (692 citations) — yes, that Yellow Pages. All 692 came from ChatGPT, none from anywhere else, because YellowPages doesn't block AI crawlers at all while Google has mostly stopped ranking it. Free at yellowpages.com/claim-your-listing. Match your name, address and phone to your Google Business Profile exactly — inconsistent details make it harder for any model to resolve all these listings to one business, which is the same discipline that keeps you out of Google Business Profile suspension trouble.

HomeGuide (559 citations) — smallest number, zero catch. No membership fee, no contract, at homeguide.com/pro. Their cost guides get quoted constantly, so fill in your pricing fields.

The two you can't sign up for

This is where most advice about this list falls apart.

Today's Homeowner (1,108 citations) is a magazine, not a directory. There is no claim button. Staff writers build the "best plumbers in [city]" articles from public signals — your Google review volume, your BBB record, whether your license is active and verifiable, whether your service area is clearly stated. You get in by being the plumber their researcher can't miss. If they've already listed you with wrong information, FindAPro@TodaysHomeowner.com handles corrections.

Expertise.com (674 citations) publishes its methodology, which makes it the most workable one here. For Austin plumbers: 496 screened, 303 curated, 15 selected. Scoring inputs include licensing, review consistency across multiple sites, service breadth — and mystery shopping calls. Somebody calls your shop pretending to be a homeowner, and how that call gets handled is part of your score. Request consideration at expertise.com/review-me.

The one that isn't what AI thinks it is

Porch got 423 citations, 419 of them from ChatGPT. Ninety-nine percent from a single engine.

So we went looking for where a plumber signs up. Go to porch.com today and you land on a home insurance site — quotes, warranty bundles, moving services, member perks. Porch Group has reoriented the brand around insurance, and the contractor marketplace is no longer what the front door is selling.

The pro network hasn't been switched off. There's still a Porch Pro Network page and a working pro login. But the signup path we tried returns a 404, and the thing ChatGPT is describing when it sends a homeowner to Porch is not really the thing they'll find when they get there.

It recommends it 419 times anyway.

That's the real lesson in this dataset. AI's picture of the home services industry runs behind reality, and it states the outdated version with total confidence. Which means whatever it's currently saying about your company deserves the same suspicion. Old phone number, old address, a one-star review from a guy you fired in 2021, or nothing at all.

What Google's AI is doing instead

One more pattern worth your attention. Of 9,293 citations, ChatGPT accounted for 5,230 and Perplexity 3,510 — but Google AI only 553. Six percent.

Google barely uses directories for local questions because it doesn't need them. It owns Maps and has first-hand data on every plumbing company in America. It grounds answers in its own local data while ChatGPT and Perplexity go read somebody's listicle.

So these are two separate jobs. Directories win you ChatGPT and Perplexity — 94% of the citations here. A fully built-out Google Business Profile wins you Google's AI, which is why verifying and completing your Google Business Profile is still the highest-leverage hour you'll spend. Neither one covers the other.

Where to start

In order: open all three engines and ask who the best plumber in your city is, and write down what they say. Claim the seven free listings. Match your name, address and phone across all of them. List every service individually. Resolve your open BBB complaints. Request review from Expertise. Then go finish your Google Business Profile.

None of that requires spending a dollar on leads, and most plumbers we talk to haven't done any of it.

Over the next few weeks we're publishing a walkthrough for every single one of these ten — what to click, what to fill in, what to skip, and what it actually costs. Each one will show up at the bottom of this article as it goes live.

That's the whole opportunity, and it has a shelf life. Everything above will be table stakes in eighteen months. Right now it's an afternoon of unglamorous listing work that changes how AI describes your business — and if you'd rather have someone run your city's queries and tell you exactly which of these ten mention you, that's the first thing we do on a call. We diagnose first, then prescribe.