The Local AI Visibility Index
Philadelphia foundation repair
We asked 5 AI answer engines 10 questions a prospective customer would actually ask, then measured which of the market’s 66 businesses got named. 64 of them never came up once.
- Market
- Philadelphia, PA
- Businesses
- 66
- 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
97%
of foundation repair businesses in Philadelphia 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 22 best-ranked businesses in Philadelphia, 2 got named by an AI engine — 9.1%. Of the 22 ranked lowest, 0 did. The single most-named business in this market ranked 3rd on Maps, coming up in 10% 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 | 2 of 22 | 9.1% |
| The middle third | 0 of 22 | 0% |
| The bottom third | 0 of 22 | 0% |
Finding 02
How many local businesses actually appear in AI answers?
Very few, and the ones that do take most of it. Of 66 businesses measured, 2 were named at least once and 64 were never named. The three most-named businesses took 100% of every mention in the market.
Finding 03
Are the best-reviewed businesses invisible to AI?
Often, yes. Take the 16 strongest businesses in Philadelphia — the top 25% once you combine Google rank, star rating and number of reviews — and 14 were never named by any engine. That is 87.5% of the best businesses in town, missing from every answer.
One of them ranks 12th on Maps with 5.0 stars, and was named zero times across all 50 answers. One of them ranks 27th on Maps with 4.9 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 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 60% of thebusinesses they named — and the furthest apart pair agreed on just 0%.
Each engine surfaced a different slice of the market: Perplexity named 5, Google AI Overview named 4, Gemini named 3, ChatGPT named 2, Claude named 2. 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 |
|---|---|
| Gemini & Perplexity | 60.0% |
| ChatGPT & Perplexity | 40.0% |
| ChatGPT & Claude | 33.3% |
| Perplexity & Google AI Overview | 28.6% |
| ChatGPT & Gemini | 25.0% |
| Claude & Gemini | 25.0% |
| ChatGPT & Google AI Overview | 20.0% |
| Claude & Perplexity | 16.7% |
| Gemini & Google AI Overview | 16.7% |
| Claude & Google AI Overview | 0.0% |
How we measured it
We pulled every foundation repair business Google Maps returns for Philadelphia — 66 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
- 66 businesses, from everything Google Maps returns for "foundation repair" in Philadelphia, PA. 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 Philadelphia 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 | −0.255 | A slight connection |
| Review count | −0.021 | No connection |
| Star rating | +0.075 | 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.