We checked the AI visibility of 18 plumbing companies. Only one scored an A.
Customers now ask ChatGPT and Google's AI "who's the best plumber near me?" So we took 18 real plumbing companies across Columbus and Austin and scored how well an AI assistant can actually understand and recommend each one from its website.
We ran every homepage through a tool that reads the site the way an AI assistant does and scores it from 0 to 100 on the things a model needs to recommend a business: what it does, where it serves, its services, structured data, contact details, pricing signals, hours, answers to common questions, and trust signals. Here is what came back.
Most are findable. Almost none are the one AI picks.
The good news for the trade: plumbing is a competitive local-search niche, and it shows. Sixteen of the seventeen readable sites had structured data, and every one clearly stated what it does and where. These businesses have done the basics. Here's how the grades landed:
But look where they cluster: B and C. In a niche that has invested in being found, the average business still lands at "good enough to appear, not good enough to be chosen." Only one company in eighteen reached an A.
The gap is always the specifics
The pattern was remarkably consistent. AI could tell what these businesses do and where they operate, that's the part everyone gets right. What it repeatedly could not tell was the deciding detail: rough pricing, exact hours, the precise towns served, and plain answers to the questions customers ask before they call ("do you do emergency calls?", "do you service my area?", "what does a drain clearing cost?").
That is exactly the information an assistant needs to recommend one plumber over another. When it isn't on the site in readable text, the model hedges, and hedging means it names the competitor it understood better.
And one site was simply invisible. One of the eighteen couldn't be read at all, most likely heavy JavaScript or bot-protection blocking the crawl. If the tools that feed AI answers can't load your site, you aren't scoring a C, you're not in the conversation.
What the A-scorer did differently
The single business that reached an A didn't do anything exotic. It stated its service area in plain text, listed its services with detail, answered common customer questions directly on the page, and backed it with structured data and visible trust signals. Nothing there is out of reach for any of the others, which is the real point: the gap between a B and an A is a weekend of clearer content, not a rebuild.
The takeaway
If a competitive, SEO-aware niche like plumbing averages a 71, most local businesses in quieter niches are doing worse. Being "findable" was the old bar. As customers shift to asking AI directly, the new bar is being the business the AI is confident enough to name, and that comes down to putting your specifics in plain, readable text.
See where your business scores →More from this series: dentists, HVAC companies, personal injury firms, and med spas. Also: why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business and how to show up when customers ask AI for a business like yours.
Method: 18 plumbing company homepages across Columbus, OH and Austin, TX, scanned in September 2026 with BotDesk's AI Visibility Checker. A spot-check, not a census, individual businesses are not named.