The Local AI Visibility Index
Lake Charles Fencing Contractors
We asked 5 AI answer engines 10 questions a prospective customer would actually ask, then measured which of the market’s 26 businesses got named. 19 of them never came up once.
- Market
- Lake Charles, LA
- Businesses
- 26
- Questions
- 10
- Engines
- 5
- Measured
- July 2026
Every business in the market · one dot each · ordered by Google Maps rank · lit = named by at least one engine
73.1%
of Fencing Contractors businesses in Lake Charles were named in none of the 50 AI answers we collected.
Finding 01
Does ranking well on Google mean AI recommends you?
It helps, and it is nowhere near enough. Of the 8 best-ranked businesses in Lake Charles, 5 got named by an AI engine — 62.5%. Of the 10 ranked lowest, 0 did. The single most-named business in this market ranked 4th on Maps, coming up in 34% of answers.
Google rank and AI answers are decided by two different systems looking at different things. Your map position comes from how close you are, what category you are in, and how people engage with your listing. Whether an AI names you depends on whether it can find, read and trust a description of your business in the sources it pulls from. Ranking first buys you better odds. It does not buy you the answer.
| Where they rank on Google Maps | Named by AI | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The 1st third — best ranked on Maps | 5 of 8 | 62.5% |
| The middle third | 2 of 8 | 25% |
| The bottom third | 0 of 10 | 0% |
Finding 02
How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?
Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 26 businesses measured, 7 were named at least once and 19 were never named. The three most-named businesses took 56.3% of every mention in the market.
The most-named business came up in 34% of answers; the fourth came up in 23%; everything below that was 15% or less. A short shelf at the top, and a long floor underneath it.
Bar length is the share of all 50 answers, so a full bar would mean every answer named them.
Finding 03
Are the best-reviewed businesses invisible to AI?
Some are. Take the 6 strongest businesses in Lake Charles — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 2 were never named by any engine. That is 33.3% of the best businesses in town, missing from every answer.
One of them ranks 2nd on Maps with 4.9 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. One of them ranks 14th on Maps with 5.0 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. Their customers rate them highly and Google ranks them well. The AI engines do not know they exist.
Finding 04
Do Google reviews affect whether AI recommends you?
Not measurably. In Lake Charles the businesses AI named average 4.41 stars and the ones it never named average 4.52 — near enough to identical that ratings are clearly not what is deciding it.
7 businesses here were named by at least one engine, rating between 3.0 and 5.0 stars. 17 were named by none, rating between 1.0 and 5.0. The two groups overlap almost completely.
Reviews do real work in the map pack and in how customers choose. This measures something narrower: whether they are what makes an AI say your name. In Lake Charles the answer is what the numbers above say it is, and it is not the same answer in every market we measured.
Finding 05
Do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend the same businesses?
No. Asked the same questions about the same market, the closest any two engines came to agreeing was 100% of thebusinesses they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 0%.
Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Perplexity named 7, Google AI Overview named 7, Gemini named 6, ChatGPT named 2, Claude named 1. Showing up in one does not mean showing up in the others, so checking yourself against a single assistant tells you very little.
| Engine pair | Agreed on |
|---|---|
| Perplexity & Google AI Overview | 100.0% |
| Gemini & Perplexity | 62.5% |
| Gemini & Google AI Overview | 62.5% |
| ChatGPT & Claude | 50.0% |
| ChatGPT & Perplexity | 28.6% |
| ChatGPT & Google AI Overview | 28.6% |
| ChatGPT & Gemini | 14.3% |
| Claude & Perplexity | 14.3% |
| Claude & Google AI Overview | 14.3% |
| Claude & Gemini | 0.0% |
How we measured it
We pulled every Fencing Contractors business Google Maps returns for Lake Charles — 26 of them, after combining duplicate listings of the same business — then asked 5 AI answer engines the same 10 customer questions and recorded which ones each engine named.
- Who is in it
- 26 businesses, from everything Google Maps returns for "fencing contractors" in Lake Charles, LA. A business with more than one listing is counted once.
- What we asked
- 10 questions a customer would actually ask, kept identical across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview. 50 answers in total, July 2026.
- How we scored it
- The share of answers that named or cited a business, weighted by how many people use the engine that named it.
- How we ranked reputation
- Google Maps position, star rating adjusted for how many reviews back it up, and review count on a sliding scale that levels off around a thousand.
- Scope
- One market, one category. Every number on this page describes Lake Charles and comes from that market alone — results differ between markets and we do not carry them across. We never name individual businesses. AI engines change over time; this describes July 2026.
For anyone who wants the statistics
The findings above are counts, which is how most people want to read them. Here are the same relationships as correlations, for readers who prefer them.
| What we measured | How closely it tracked | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps rank | −0.49 | A clear connection |
| Review count | +0.168 | No real connection |
| Star rating | +0.026 | No connection |
Reading the middle column: 0.0 means the two things had nothing to do with each other. 1.0 would mean they moved together perfectly. A minus sign means they moved in opposite directions. Anything under about 0.2 either way is noise.