Plumbing
What AI says about plumbers.
Water comes through the ceiling on a Sunday morning. Before the homeowner phones anyone, they ask ChatGPT who to call. This checks whether your shop is one of the names that comes back.
The questions that come before the call
Nobody types “plumber” into ChatGPT and stops there. They describe the mess. “Water is coming through my kitchen ceiling, who do I call in Mississauga.” Most of what they ask falls into four piles.
- Emergencies
- A pipe lets go. A toilet overflows at eleven at night. The homeowner wants a name and a number this minute. The AI answer gives them both, and you don't know whether it gave them yours.
- Water heaters
- Their water heater quit over the weekend and they're weighing a repair, a new tank, a tankless unit, or living with it another winter. So they ask ChatGPT what each one runs.
- Drains
- A slow sink, or a floor drain that smells. They usually want to know whether it's a snake job or a camera job before they call anyone.
- Renovations
- Someone adding a second bathroom or moving the kitchen sink will read for weeks before a single phone rings, and the shop names they pick up along the way are the ones on the list when they finally start dialling. Yours is on that list or it isn't.
Each of those gets a short answer with a few shop names in it. If yours isn't one of them, nothing tells you. The job just goes somewhere else.
What the check tells a plumbing shop
You paste your web address. We put the questions above to ChatGPT, the AI answer at the top of Google, Gemini and Perplexity, worded the way a homeowner would. Then we show you what came back.
You'll see whether your name came up at all, and which questions brought it up. When it didn't, we name the shop that got the call instead, and in the checks we've run that's usually one a few neighbourhoods over. We also flag when AI links to your own site rather than somebody else's page about you. Every answer carries the date we asked, because they shift week to week.
One score, in plain English, with the questions and answers behind it. Where we're estimating instead of measuring, we say so.
What tends to put a shop in those answers
AI tools build their answers out of what's already public about you. The same material a homeowner can see. None of it is clever.
- Your licence number and your insurer on your own site, where someone can read them.
- The work named the way customers say it. Burst pipe repair. Water heater replacement. Drain camera inspection. Sump pump install. Not residential plumbing services.
- The places you actually drive to, listed out. Name Etobicoke. Name Scarborough. The GTA is not what a homeowner types when the basement is filling up.
- Reviews with real words in them, recent, on more than one site.
- A phone number and hours that match everywhere they show up. Mismatched hours make a shop look closed.
Tedious, all of it. That's the point. It's ordinary record-keeping, and it's the kind of thing that sits half finished for years. You don't need to become a marketer to fix it.
Find out where you stand
The check lives at the top of the home page. Paste your web address and read what the AI tools say about your shop. It's free, no credit card.