Founder. 26, Frederick MD. Growth operator.
Built AI back office for a $3M HVAC company. Eight months in, saw the visibility gap: 87% of contractors invisible to AI search engines, nobody measuring it. Built the measurement engine. Built the public benchmark. This is it.
Anonymous $3M HVAC contractor
Before
24
Feb 2026 score
After
67
May 2026 score
Delta
+43
points in 90 days
Founder also operates this business as internal beta. Public customer case studies publish Q3 2026 after embargo lifts and customer permissions land.
137 audits. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing contractors scored on the same 30-query standard. Methodology pinned to v2026.06.1. Median score 24/100. Data published under CC-BY-4.0 for trade publications and other researchers to cite directly.
Methodology v2026.06.1. 30 standard homeowner queries per contractor across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Scoring: 1 point per engine citation, 2 points for first position. Weighted across citation presence (40%), accuracy (25%), competitive position (25%), structured data (10%). Every query, formula, and test result public. Mentioned's own score: 30.8/100. Cost per audit: $0.0007 actual tokens.
4 LLMs, 30 prompts, automated parsing. Citation extraction with Levenshtein fuzzy matching (95.2% precision on hand-labeled test). Quarterly public refresh. Enterprise subscribers get monthly updates, API access, and time-series back to 2024. 43-test pytest suite validates every deploy.
In 2024, 12% of US adults used ChatGPT or Perplexity to research a local service. In 2026, that's 41%. Biggest channel shift in small-business marketing since Google AdWords. Almost nobody in the trades is measuring it. I built this to be the citable source of truth, the way Nielsen is for TV ratings.
Everything here is tested. Open methodology. Open dataset. Open code. I published my own score. No private benchmarks. Read the full principles at /methodology.
Nick Beyer
linkedin.com/in/nickbeyer
nick@mentionedinai.com
Solo founder. $0 capital. Building publicly. The full benchmark, methodology, and test suite are live at mentionedinai.com.