AI Visibility Index · San Francisco, CA

The moment your leads go to ChatGPT instead of you

It's 9pm on a Wednesday. A homeowner in the Mission District has a burst pipe. Their first move isn't yellow pages or a Google search. It's opening ChatGPT on their phone and asking "Who should I call for emergency plumbing in San Francisco?" ChatGPT returns a list of names. Roto-Rooter is on it. Maybe Ragan's. Maybe your competitor on the other side of town. Your name is not there. That homeowner calls someone else. You never know the lead existed.

This isn't theoretical. We ran the same audit on 137 service contractors across the US. We checked whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini could find them. Median score: 32 out of 100. Top performers hit 79. The gap between invisible and visible? About $5k to $20k per month in calls routing to the wrong phone number.

Why San Francisco plumbing contractors get invisible

San Francisco's housing stock is 60% pre-1960 Victorian and Edwardian homes. Older pipes corrode faster. Plumbing emergencies happen more often. Demand is high. Competition is fierce. You'd think every plumber would show up in AI search. They don't.

Three reasons stand out:

First: inconsistent citations. Trade directories list you under different names. Your business might be "SF Plumbing Experts" on Google, "S.F. Plumbing" on Yelp, and "San Francisco Plumbing" on the chamber site. AI models train on all these sources. When they see four different names, they treat them as four different businesses. You get fractional credit instead of unified credit. Your signal gets diluted.

Second: missing local schema. San Francisco's top plumbing contractors use service area schema—the structured data that tells Google Maps and AI models "we serve these zip codes." Most don't. Your website says "serving the Bay Area" in prose. An AI model trying to figure out if you serve the Presidio or Soma has to guess. You're competing against someone with explicit schema markup saying "we cover 94107, 94108, 94109." Guess who wins.

Third: minimal review density in the right places. You have 47 Google reviews. Great. You have 12 on Yelp. That helps. But you're missing reviews on industry directories—the data sources AI models actually trust. HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, the Better Business Bureau. When an AI system pulls industry-specific data sources, you're not there. Your competitor who has 8 BBB reviews and a HomeAdvisor profile shows up in 4 models. You show up in 1.

What the data shows

Our 137-audit benchmark breaks down like this:

Median AI visibility score across all trades: 32/100. That includes plumbing. Top 10% hit 79 to 95. The contractors scoring in the 70s and 80s share a pattern: they're cited by industry directories, they have local schema on their website, they have reviews across 4+ platforms, and they appear in trade association databases.

The gap between 32 and 79 is a 47-point spread. We modeled call volume against visibility scores across metro areas. Conservative estimate: that gap equals $5k to $20k per month in inbound calls. In San Francisco's market, where a service call is $150-$300 and the average job runs $2k-$5k, losing that call volume to invisibility is brutal.

The contractors we audited fell into three buckets: invisible (below 35), partially visible (35-60), and visible (60+). In San Francisco specifically, most solo and two-person plumbing shops landed 28-38. Regional chains (big enough to have a marketing team) landed 48-65. The franchise players hit 70-82.

What to do about it

Three tactical moves compound:

One: unify your citations across directories. Pull your business information from Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, HomeAdvisor, and the San Francisco Better Business Bureau. Every single one should have the same phone number, address, and service area. Use Bright Local or a similar audit tool to find inconsistencies. Spend two hours fixing them. This one move usually bumps your score 5-8 points.

Two: add service area schema to your website. Your homepage should declare exactly which San Francisco neighborhoods and zip codes you serve. The schema markup should list them explicitly: 94102, 94103, 94104, etc. This takes 15 minutes if your developer knows what they're doing. AI models will index this. Your score jumps another 8-12 points.

Three: get three new reviews on industry directories in the next 60 days. Ask your last three jobs to leave a review on HomeAdvisor or Angie's List, not just Google. Industry-specific platforms carry more weight with AI models than consumer platforms. Three new reviews on the right sites usually adds 5-7 points. When all three moves stack, you're looking at a 20-27 point swing. That's the difference between 32 and 52 to 59. That's the difference between invisible and visible.

Find your visibility score in 90 seconds

We built a free AI Visibility Audit that scores your plumbing business on the same benchmark we used for the 137-audit study. Four fields, 90 seconds, you get back your score and a roadmap of what's missing. No signup required. No email follow-up spam.

Head to mentionedinai.com. Type your business name, city, phone number, and website. Click Audit. You'll see your score and what moves move the needle.

We're also running a Founder Cohort until July 4. $297 a month or $1,497 for lifetime access. It's a tracking dashboard that monitors whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini know about you. It shows you exactly which citations are inconsistent. It flags missing schema. Real signal, no fluff.

See your plumbing AI visibility score in San Francisco

Enter your business below. We run live queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. You get your score in under 90 seconds.

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