Yellow Pages is beating your website in ChatGPT.

Yellow Pages pulled 692 citations across the plumbing queries we tracked, which made it the seventh most-cited source in the whole dataset. Here is the part that should stop you: 692 of those came from ChatGPT. Perplexity cited it zero times. Google's AI cited it zero times. One engine did all of the work, and the other two acted like the site does not exist.

The short answer: ChatGPT reads YellowPages.com because the site's robots.txt does not block AI crawlers, while Google has largely stopped ranking it, so Google's AI never surfaces it. Claim your free listing at yellowpages.com/claim-your-listing, make the name, address, and phone match your Google Business Profile character for character, and then forget about it as a lead source.

If you read the hub post for this series, you already know the shape of this. Yelp is enormous, Yelp is everywhere, and Yelp got zero citations from ChatGPT because Yelp's robots.txt slams the door on OpenAI. Yellow Pages is the exact photo negative. Nobody has thought about it in fifteen years, it does not block anybody, and OpenAI walks straight in and takes the data.

Why one engine and only one engine

Pull up the robots.txt file at yellowpages.com. It is short. It blocks a handful of internal paths — search results, login pages, feedback forms — and it names exactly three crawlers to keep out: an old bot called 008, Scrapy, and PiplBot. That is it. No GPTBot. No OAI-SearchBot. No ClaudeBot, no PerplexityBot, no CCBot. Whether that is a deliberate strategy at Thryv or fifteen years of nobody touching the file, the practical result is the same: OpenAI's crawlers have unrestricted access to millions of business listings, including yours.

Google is a separate story with a separate cause. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode lean heavily on pages Google's core ranking system already trusts for that query. Over the past several years Google has largely stopped ranking general-purpose directories like YellowPages.com for local service searches — the map pack and individual business sites ate that real estate. No rankings, no AI citations. The door is open, but Google is not walking through it.

Perplexity is a third pattern again. It weights source authority and freshness aggressively, and a listing page that has not been meaningfully updated since the Obama administration does not clear that bar.

So you get 692, 0, 0. Not because of anything you did. Because of three companies making three different decisions about the same website.

What this actually means for your plumbing company

A growing share of the homeowners who used to type "plumber near me" into Google are now typing something longer into ChatGPT. "My water heater is leaking from the bottom in Round Rock, who should I call." When that happens, ChatGPT assembles an answer from sources it can reach. Right now, for a lot of markets, YellowPages.com is one of them — and your own site, which probably has no reviews on it and no structured business data, is not.

There is real comedy in a plumber in 2026 needing to care about Yellow Pages again. Enjoy it for a second, then go claim the listing, because the comedy does not change the number.

But be honest with yourself about what you are buying. You are not buying leads. Traffic to that site is a shadow of what it was, Google barely ranks it, and a claimed listing there is not going to ring your phone. What you are buying is a data point that an AI model reads when it is deciding whether your company is real, where you are located, and what number to give the homeowner. That is worth six free minutes. It is not worth a monthly fee.

NAP consistency, and why it is the entire point

NAP means Name, Address, Phone. NAP consistency means those three things are identical everywhere they appear on the internet — not similar, identical, character for character.

This matters because AI models and search engines both build confidence about a business by cross-referencing. When ChatGPT sees the same business name, at the same address, with the same phone number, on your website, on your Google Business Profile, on Yellow Pages, and on your BBB page, that agreement is evidence you are a real operating company. When it sees four different versions, it has to guess which is current, and guessing sometimes means giving the homeowner your old number.

Here is a real mismatch, the kind we find on almost every audit:

Four rows, four different companies as far as a machine is concerned. "Drive" versus "Dr." "Ste 200" versus "Suite 200" versus "#200." An LLC suffix that appears once. And that last phone number is a tracking line from a call-tracking vendor you fired in 2019, still sitting on the Yellow Pages listing, still getting handed to homeowners.

Pick one canonical version. Make it match your Google Business Profile exactly, because that is the record everything else should orbit. Then push that exact string everywhere, including here. If your Google profile itself is a mess, fix that first — start with getting your Google Business Profile properly verified, then come back.

The six-minute claim

1. Go to yellowpages.com/claim-your-listing and search your business name plus city. If a listing already exists — it probably does, these were bulk-imported from phone book data years ago — claim that one rather than creating a duplicate.
2. Create an account with a business email address you will still have in three years. Not a personal Gmail, not a former office manager's address.
3. Fill in the business details: address, phone, website URL, hours, and category. Paste your canonical NAP string. Do not retype it from memory.
4. Verify by phone. Yellow Pages places an automated call to the business number on the listing and reads you a code. You type the code in. If nobody answers the main line during business hours, this is where you get stuck.
5. Add a description and a few real photos. Trucks, techs, the shop. Not stock images of a wrench.
6. Write down the login in whatever password manager you use. The single most common reason a plumber cannot fix a listing is that a marketing company claimed it in 2017 and nobody knows the password.

Verification usually lands in minutes. Occasionally it takes a day or two. Then you are done, and you should not need to touch it again unless you move or change your number.

Yes, they are going to try to sell you something

Thryv owns YellowPages.com, Superpages, and DexKnows, and claiming your listing puts your phone number in front of their sales team. Expect a call. Possibly several, plus emails. They sell paid placement, enhanced profiles, priority positioning in category results, and a small-business software suite. None of it is publicly priced — you get a quote on a call, which is generally how you can tell the price is negotiable and the value is soft.

Say no. Politely, once, and then stop answering. The free claimed listing does everything you came for. Paying for placement on a directory Google barely ranks is how plumbers ended up distrusting marketing companies in the first place. Marketing for plumbers is broken, and this is one of the small ways it got that way.

Where this actually sits in your priority list

Below your Google Business Profile. Below your reviews. Below whether your site loads fast and says what city you serve, which is the work we do in plumber SEO and on plumbing websites built to get cited. This is a fifteen-minute task on a Thursday afternoon, not a strategy.

But it is one of maybe a dozen listings that AI models actually read, it costs nothing, and right now one of them is feeding ChatGPT more information about your company than your own website is. That is worth knowing, and it is worth fixing this week.

We start client work by telling people the truth about what is and is not working, which usually means a short, unglamorous list of things like this one. If you want someone to run that audit across every source AI is reading about your company — and tell you honestly which ones matter — book a call and we will walk you through what we find.