We audited 152 local businesses. Only one vertical loses to national chains.

Correction (2026-07-11)

We published this page on 2026-07-10 with two findings that were wrong, and we are leaving the record straight rather than quietly editing it. The original version reported that home services was the worst vertical (21.7/100) and that “Roto-Rooter alone accounted for 10.3% of every competitor mention” in it. Both figures were contaminated by our own data: five synthetic smoke-test audits — an invented business called “Smoke Test Plumbing”, which we run against the production pipeline to check it still works — had been swept into the home-services bucket. A business that does not exist scores near zero and is out-named by every real plumber alive, including the biggest franchise in the country. That dragged the vertical's average down and inflated the franchise share roughly 2.5×.

Corrected, on 152 real audits with the synthetic rows removed: home services is not the worst vertical — on our data it is marginally the best (29.3 average, named in 48%). The franchise finding survives in direction but not in size: national brands take 5.5% of home-services rival mentions, not 12.9%, and Roto-Rooter takes 3.2%, not 10.3%. Everything below is the corrected cut. The table, the findings and the methodology have all been rewritten.

The benchmark

Each business was asked about the way its buyers actually ask — “what are the best {vertical} in {city}?”, “who do you recommend?”, “is {business} a good choice?” — and we recorded whether the engines named it, and who they named instead.

Two context numbers before the findings. Only 21 of the 152 cleared a score of 50 — the range runs 0 to 83. And 103 of 152 (68%) were named no more often than their single most-mentioned rival: for roughly seven businesses in ten, someone else is at least tied for the recommendation.

Finding 1: The vertical you're in barely matters

This is the corrected headline, and it is duller and more useful than the one we published first. Every vertical lands between 25.4 and 29.3 out of 100. Every one is named in 43–48% of the answers its buyers see. Every one is out-named by a rival in 38–46% of audits. A 3.9-point spread across 152 businesses is not a story about industries — it is a story about how uniformly bad everyone is at this. If you were hoping your category was the easy one, it isn't, and if you feared it was the cursed one, it isn't that either.

The one number that does move: med spas are the most fragmented category we measure. 63 audits produced 185 distinct rivals and the single most-named one holds just 2.3% of mentions. Nobody owns that answer yet.

Finding 2: Home services is the only vertical where AI names chains at all

This is the finding that survived the correction, and it is cleaner than the inflated version. Across all 152 audits the engines named 547 distinct rival businesses. In med spas, dental practices and personal-injury law, every single one of them was a local independent: zero national brands across 435 rival mentions in those three verticals. Not a small number — zero.

In home services, national franchises take 5.5% of rival mentions (12 of 218), and 6 of the 21 home-services audits surfaced at least one. Roto-Rooter alone takes 3.2% — the third-most-named rival in the vertical, and the only national brand to crack any vertical's top ten. The names we count as national franchises: Roto-Rooter, Mr. Rooter, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning, ARS/Rescue Rooter, Aire Serv, Goettl, Mister Sparky, Service Experts and Mr. Electric.

So the honest version of “AI recommends chains instead of me” is: usually it doesn't — 94.5% of the time in home services it recommends another local shop, and in the other three verticals it recommends a chain essentially never. But home services is the one trade where a franchise is in the room at all, and it is worth understanding why. We took that apart in why AI recommends national chains instead of your shop.

What this means if you're the local business

• Your real rival is the shop across town, not the franchise. 547 distinct local independents were recommended across 152 audits. The chain is a rounding error next to that; the business two suburbs over that the engines can actually describe is not.
• If you're a med spa, dentist or injury firm: the field is fragmented and no one owns the answer. 185 different med spas were recommended across 63 audits. That is the shape of a category where showing up is still winnable, and it will not stay that way indefinitely.
• Everyone: a mediocre score is the normal condition, not a failure state. The median business here is invisible in about half of the answers its buyers see. The number that should worry you is not your score — it's the rival list underneath it, which is a literal list of who the engines send your customer to instead.

Methodology

152 completed AskedAbout free mini-audits run in production between 2026-06-12 and 2026-07-10, after excluding five synthetic smoke-test rows (see the correction above). Each audit puts three buyer-intent questions to two AI search engines — OpenAI's search model and Perplexity's Sonar — for 6 answers per business and 1,466 answers in total. A rival is any business named in an answer other than the audited one; we store the top five per audit, so “distinct rivals” undercounts the true tail. The AI Visibility Score (0–100) weights how often and how prominently the engines name you. Aggregate figures only; the audited businesses are anonymized and were never contacted.

Limits, stated plainly. This is not a random sample of US small business: these are the four verticals we audit, and med spas are 63 of the 152. The home-services (n=21) and dentist (n=27) cells are the small ones — treat the between-vertical ranking as directional, not decisive, which is precisely the lesson of the correction above. The free check runs two engines; the paid audit adds Gemini and Claude across 25 questions with three samples each. And the national-brand classification is a hand-enumerated list, named above, not a lookup — a regional chain we failed to recognize would be counted as a local independent.

Related reading: our earlier n=10 local-business benchmark, how often AI visibility changes (all 20 businesses changed inside two weeks), which AI engine actually recommends your business, and why AI recommends your competitors instead of you. Vertical pages: home services, med spas, dentists, law firms.