Do ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity Recommend the Same Plumber?

Judge it on evidence. L3ad Solutions recorded 4,200 answers from four AI assistants about Florida plumbers, HVAC companies and roofers in Q4 2026, publishes every rate with its 95% interval, and crawled 795 plumbing company websites behind the top Maps listings in 93 Florida cities the same week. A plan for a Florida plumber starts from that cell, not a template. Local SEO for plumbers is $350 or $700 a month, month-to-month with no long-term contracts, and the report counts tracked calls.

Ask any company you compare for the same thing: what the four assistants say about your city today, with sample sizes.

Almost never. Across the 13 cells the four assistants produced 3.2 different number-one picks out of a possible 4. In 5 of the 13 cells all four named a different leader; in 0 of 13 cells did all four agree. Jacksonville roofing and Miami HVAC came closest, with three of the four putting the same business first.

The top-three lists overlap a little more. In 4 of 13 cells one business sat in every assistant's top three (Miami HVAC, Miami roofing, Tampa HVAC and Tampa plumbing).

Strong inside the assistant, weak across them. Averaged over the 13 cells, Gemini's most-named business appears in 68% of its answers, ChatGPT's in 57%, Claude's in 50% and Perplexity's in 38%. ChatGPT returned the same list on every run of a prompt, so its rates step in multiples of 20% and one Jacksonville roofer appeared in every one of its 75 answers.

Every rate is published with a Wilson 95% interval. Where Gemini or Perplexity moved a top-three rate 5 points or more between the first 60% of runs and the full sample, the cell carries a settling note and the interval is the number to read.

No. Pooled across the four assistants, the three most-named businesses in a cell took 16.7% of all mentions on average, and between 84 and 228 different businesses were named per cell. Openness (100 minus that top-three share) ran from 75 in Jacksonville roofing to 89 in Orlando HVAC and roofing.

That is the opposite of the Google Maps picture in the same cities, where a top plumber listing in Orlando holds more than a thousand reviews. Reviews built the map pack; the AI answer is still spread thin.

Three of the four always did. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity named at least one business in every answer in every cell. Claude named a business in 92% of its answers on average, 83% at the low end (Miami HVAC), and most of its abstentions came on the upfront-pricing question, where it explained how to get quotes instead of naming anyone.

For an owner that means the pricing question is the one open lane: a page with a real price range is the kind of source Claude can quote.

It depends on the assistant. 57% of Perplexity's cited links point at a business's own website and 23% point at directories and review platforms (bbb.org, yelp.com, thumbtack.com, homeadvisor.com and expertise.com lead). Gemini's grounding leans hardest on business sites, Claude cites yelp.com, angi.com and homeadvisor.com heavily, and ChatGPT cited only Google Maps search links.

So the business's own site matters most for Gemini and Perplexity, the directories matter most for Claude, and the Google Business Profile carries ChatGPT.

Five frozen prompts per trade, the city or county written into each, run through the vendors' APIs with web search on: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude 15 times per prompt (75 answers), Perplexity 20 times (100 answers) after the pilot showed its leader still moving at 75. A business counts once per answer; mention rate is answers naming it over the assistant's answers, with a Wilson 95% interval. Businesses are stored as ids.

Held back this edition: the city mix-up rate (how often an answer named a business from outside the metro), because the location check still confuses multi-branch companies; and any business name from the answers. The full method and all 13 cells are on the Index page, and the Q1 2027 re-run will carry a changelog.