Quick answer: Plumbing is the one trade where somebody actually measured this, and the finding should change what you buy. A 50 state study sent one identical prompt to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, analyzed 200 answers and 1,609 business mentions, and found that exactly two companies in the country were named by all four engines. Winning one assistant tells you almost nothing about the others. The same study found the three signals AI engines lean on hardest when recommending a plumber: licensing and state certification first, customer reviews second, and 24/7 emergency availability third. All three are facts you either publish in a machine readable way or you do not. Plumbing and HVAC SEO has fifteen years in this trade, Foxxr publishes share of voice reporting, and RS Gonzales publishes its prices. Below is a criteria based breakdown of who does this work, what it costs, and the prompt most vendors are ignoring.
Editorial disclosure. Get Local Presence publishes this list and appears in it at number three. We are not a neutral third party and we are not pretending to be one. Every other company named here is a real, independently operating business marketing AI search, generative engine or answer engine optimization to plumbing or home service contractors, and none of them paid for placement or reviewed this page before publication. One of them, TapTwice Media, produced research we lean on heavily throughout this page. We placed it at number six rather than higher because a San Antonio plumber has to weigh where a vendor sits, and we explain that tradeoff in its section rather than hiding it.
How we built this list, and what we deliberately ignored
Three filters produced the eight entries below.
The company had to publish a defined AI search service with deliverables, not a paragraph claiming AI expertise on an existing retainer.
The company had to work with plumbing or home service trades, because the diagnostic conversation described below is specific to trades where the customer is trying to understand a problem before they hire anyone.
The company had to be reachable for San Antonio work.
We ignored any promise of a guaranteed position inside an AI answer, since no such position exists, and we ignored vendors whose AI offering was an existing retainer with new vocabulary.
One carry over finding worth repeating across this series. RYNO Strategic Solutions and Blue Corona have merged, and still appear as separate options elsewhere.
The research, and the three signals it found
Almost everything written about AI visibility is assertion. This category has one piece of actual measurement we could find, and it happens to be about plumbing.
TapTwice Media ran the study in April 2026. The method was simple and reproducible: send one identical prompt to each of four major AI engines, in each of the fifty states, and analyze what comes back. The prompt asked what factors matter when picking the best plumbers in a given state and which companies meet them. That produced 200 engine answers, from which the researchers extracted 4,150 positive sentiment phrases, 1,609 business name mentions, 622 red flag phrases and 2,060 citations pointing to 645 unique domains.
Two findings matter for a San Antonio plumber.
The three signals the engines lean on hardest, by mention count. Licensing and state certification came first at 411 mentions. Customer reviews and ratings came second at 370. Round the clock emergency availability came third at 355.
Read that list again, because it is unusually actionable. Not content volume. Not backlinks. Not clever prompt engineering. Three facts about your business, each of which you either state clearly and consistently or leave an assistant to guess at.
Texas licenses plumbing through the State Board of Plumbing Examiners in four tiers from Apprentice to Master Plumber, so the first and heaviest signal is one you can satisfy in an afternoon by putting your license number in text on the site, in the footer, and on every profile. Most plumbing sites in this market do not display it. The third signal is equally cheap: if you answer at two in the morning, say so in text with actual hours rather than inside a hero graphic that no parser can read.
The fragmentation finding, which is the more surprising one. Across 1,609 business mentions nationally, exactly two companies were named by all four engines: Benjamin Franklin Plumbing in Kansas and Champion Plumbing in Oklahoma. Two.
That means visibility in this channel is not one thing. A vendor showing you a screenshot of ChatGPT naming your company has demonstrated something real and also something narrow, because the same query in Perplexity or Google AI Mode may not name you at all. When a vendor reports AI visibility, ask which engines, on what prompts, and how often, because a single engine result is roughly one quarter of the picture and possibly less.
What we would caution about the study. It is one prompt per state, which is fifty data points per engine and a small sample. It is also state level rather than city level, and our own measurement says that matters: prompts naming a service and a city returned a brand 71.2 percent of the time in our parent company's twenty prompt audit, while service plus state returned 28.3 percent. So this research measured the weaker prompt shape. That does not invalidate the signal ranking, which is consistent with everything else we see. It does mean a San Antonio plumber should not read it as a description of their metro.
The prompt most vendors are ignoring
Every vendor in this category builds programs around the recommendation prompt: who is the best plumber in San Antonio. That prompt is real and the research above measured a version of it.
It is not where most plumbing conversations with an assistant start.
A homeowner who notices water pooling near the water heater does not open ChatGPT and ask for a contractor list. They ask what is happening. Why is my water heater leaking from the bottom. What does a slab leak sound like. Is a running toilet expensive to fix. Can I replace a garbage disposal myself. How urgent is a small drip under the sink.
That is a triage conversation, and it is where plumbing differs from most trades. The assistant works through the diagnosis with them, and at the end of that exchange it frequently arrives at a recommendation to call a professional, sometimes naming one. You get cited at the end of a diagnostic conversation rather than at the start of a shopping one.
Which means the content that earns plumbing citations is diagnostic content: symptom, likely cause, how urgent it is, whether it is reasonably a do it yourself job, and what it typically costs to have done. Most plumbing websites have none of that. They have service pages that say we offer water heater repair, which answers a question nobody asked.
There is an honest tension here and it is worth naming, because it is the reason most plumbers resist this advice. Good diagnostic content will sometimes tell a homeowner they can handle it themselves. Plumbers hate that, understandably.
Two things to weigh against it. The reader who fixes their own running toilet using your page remembers who helped, and their next problem is a water heater at nine at night. And the page that genuinely answers the question is the page an assistant quotes, while the page that withholds the answer to force a phone call gets skipped in favor of a competitor who answered. You are not choosing between publishing the answer and keeping the job. You are choosing between being the source and being invisible, because the answer is going to be given either way.
1. Plumbing and HVAC SEO
Plumbing and HVAC SEO is based in Miami and works with plumbing and HVAC contractors exclusively, founded around 2011 by Josh Nelson and Dean Iodice, grown to more than 35 staff, with clients across the United States, Canada and Australia.
What it is genuinely good at. Fifteen years inside two trades, which for this work matters in a specific way: the diagnostic content described above requires someone who actually understands what a slab leak is, what it costs, and when it is urgent. A generalist agency writing plumbing diagnostic content produces material a plumber finds embarrassing and an assistant finds unreliable. A firm that has served hundreds of plumbing contractors has the subject matter access to write it correctly, which is a harder constraint than the technical optimization.
Where to look closely. Pricing is not published. Miami rather than Texas. Client counts are described as hundreds without a verified figure, so ask for two references. Ask specifically what is in scope for AI visibility as distinct from their traditional SEO work, and ask which engines they track, since the fragmentation finding above means a single engine report is a quarter of the picture.
Best fit. A plumbing company that wants the deepest trade specialization and the subject matter depth that diagnostic content requires.
2. Funnel Boost Media
Funnel Boost Media is the only company headquartered in San Antonio maintaining separate service pages for all three AI surfaces, covering answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization and LLM optimization, founded in 2012 by Ryan Duncan and veteran owned.
What it is genuinely good at. Visible investment rather than a claim, since three distinct service pages is real commitment and the surfaces behave differently, which the fragmentation research above makes concrete rather than theoretical. Its own domain carries a domain authority of 34 with more than 2,600 referring domains and it ranks organically for the competitive terms it sells. Forbes named it to a list of America's best digital marketing companies. It is also the only company here that can run the website, the Google Business Profile and the AI work from one San Antonio office, which matters because the licensing and availability signals the research identified have to be consistent across all three.
Where to look closely. Plumbing is one trade inside home services, one vertical among several. Ask how many plumbing clients have an active AI component, which engines are tracked, and whether diagnostic content is in scope or only service pages. Pricing is not published.
Best fit. A plumbing company that wants all three disciplines under one local roof.
3. Get Local Presence
We treat AI search visibility as one of three things inside a single monthly plan alongside the website and local search, rather than as a separate specialty retainer.
What we are genuinely built for. The three signals the research identified are all publishing problems. The license number in text on the site and every profile. Reviews flowing steadily and responded to. Emergency availability stated in words with real hours rather than in a graphic. Add the diagnostic content and you have a continuous publishing program rather than a project, and continuous publishing is exactly what stops when the AI vendor cannot edit the site and queues behind a developer who is no longer engaged. We operate the site, so it does not stop. Plans run from $499 to $999 monthly, no contract, rebuild included.
Where we are honestly weaker. Foxxr publishes share of voice reporting against named competitors and we do not publish an equivalent product. RS Gonzales publishes its pricing and we are not trade exclusive the way it is. And we are not plumbing specialists, so on the diagnostic content specifically we will need your technicians to check what we write, which we would rather say now than discover in month two.
What we can point to. Our parent company Rendimension measured this outcome on its own domains, moving from zero AI citations to being the most cited brand in its category as tracked by Ubersuggest AI Search Visibility. That is a documented result in a different industry, not a San Antonio plumbing case study.
Best fit. A plumbing company that wants the site, local search and AI visibility owned by one accountable party at a predictable cost.
4. Foxxr Digital Marketing
Foxxr Digital Marketing operates from 801 74th Street North in Saint Petersburg, Florida and states it works exclusively with home service contractors.
What it is genuinely good at. Measurement, which the fragmentation research makes more important than it first appears. Its published scope includes monthly AI visibility and share of voice reporting, meaning not just whether you appear but how often relative to named competitors, organized around a five pillar framework covering signal building, question targeting, authority stacking, article publishing and monitoring. Question targeting deserves specific note here, because it is the diagnostic prompt problem stated as a deliverable. It names seven engines including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Meta AI, which is the right breadth given that only two companies nationally appeared across four.
Where to look closely. Founding year, founder, team size and client count are not published and no clients are named, so ask for all of it plus two plumbing references. Pricing is not disclosed. Florida rather than Texas. Home service contractor covers both emergency and planned trades, so ask specifically about plumbing work.
Best fit. A plumbing company that wants competitive share tracking rather than a screenshot of one engine on one day.
5. RS Gonzales
RS Gonzales works with HVAC and home services contractors exclusively, headquartered in Washington, District of Columbia, founded on May 2, 2023 by Sarah Gonzales, carrying a 5.0 rating across 39 reviews.
What it is genuinely good at. Published pricing at $2,200 monthly for contractors under a million in revenue, $3,500 for one to two million and $5,000 for two to fifteen million, which is rare and makes comparison possible. Its scope names the unglamorous parts correctly: entity foundation covering the Google Business Profile, certifications and schema, AI quotable service content, pricing context and cost guides, Bing indexing and technical SEO, and review campaigns. Two of those map directly onto the research findings, since certifications are the top ranked signal and review campaigns are the second. Bing indexing is a technical item almost no vendor mentions and worth asking everyone about, since several assistants have drawn web results from Microsoft's index rather than Google's.
Where to look closely. Founded in 2023, so young, and its stated focus is HVAC and home services rather than plumbing specifically, so ask how many plumbing clients are active. Washington DC. Its published client claim, that a client appears in AI answers ahead of competitors with far more reviews, is self reported and we could not verify it, so ask to see the tracked prompts behind it.
Best fit. A plumbing contractor who wants published pricing and a vendor describing the technical foundation rather than selling vocabulary.
6. TapTwice Media
TapTwice Media provides answer engine and generative engine optimization services and published the 50 state plumbing AI visibility research this page draws on, authored by Shubham Kumar Agrawal, operating from India.
What it is genuinely good at. Producing actual measurement in a category built almost entirely on assertion. The study design is sound and reproducible: one controlled prompt, four engines, fifty states, 200 answers, with the extraction counts published so a reader can evaluate the basis. Publishing a finding as inconvenient as only two businesses appearing across all four engines is not what a vendor does when it is trying to make a channel sound easy. In a field where most companies cite a research paper they did not run, a firm that ran one is demonstrating a different level of seriousness.
Where to look closely, and this is why it is here rather than higher. It operates from India, which for a San Antonio plumbing company means no local knowledge, a substantial time difference for a business whose emergencies happen at night, and no possibility of anyone visiting. None of that makes the work bad, and remote vendors deliver good results constantly. It does mean the practical fit is different from the quality of the research, and we would rather separate those two things than blur them. Founding year, team size, client count and pricing are not published, and no clients are named.
Best fit. A plumbing company comfortable with an offshore vendor that values demonstrated research capability over proximity. Everyone else should read the research and hire someone closer.
7. Page Progressive
Page Progressive is a web design and digital marketing agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, serving plumbers and other trades, with published guidance on SEO, AEO and GEO for plumbing businesses.
What it is genuinely good at. Its published service list is well matched to what the research says matters: Google Business Profile optimization, local service and city page development, schema markup including FAQPage and LocalBusiness, FAQ and question based content creation, review management strategy and WordPress optimization. Question based content creation is the diagnostic prompt problem named as a deliverable, and FAQPage schema is the specific markup that makes those answers extractable. It also indicates project budgets in the $2,500 to $10,000 range, which is more transparency than most.
Where to look closely. It is a trades serving generalist rather than a plumbing specialist, so ask how many plumbing clients are active and who writes the diagnostic content, since subject matter accuracy is the hard part. Founding year, founder and client count are not published. Its service area list centers on the Raleigh and Charlotte region, so ask directly what a San Antonio engagement looks like and whether they have Texas clients. The budget figures shown are project ranges rather than a retainer price, so clarify which model applies.
Best fit. A plumbing company that wants question based content and schema handled as a defined deliverable and is comfortable with a remote generalist.
8. LocalMighty
LocalMighty is a San Antonio local SEO agency with more than ten years of local search experience, publishing a dedicated plumber local SEO guide and positioning around GEO, AEO and AI SEO alongside Google Maps visibility.
What it is genuinely good at. Treating Maps and AI visibility as one connected program, which the research above validates more strongly than usual. Two of the three top ranked AI signals, licensing credentials and customer reviews, are the same assets that drive map pack position, so a vendor already maintaining them for local search is doing a large share of the AI work whether or not it labels it that way. It is also local, which for a plumbing company that wants someone reachable in the same time zone during an emergency season is worth something real.
Where to look closely. It advertises measurable growth within 60 days or the next month free. That is defensible for local search and hard to underwrite honestly for AI visibility, where there is no position to move, so ask what metric the guarantee covers and whether AI work sits inside or outside it. Ask which engines are tracked. Pricing and client count are not published.
Best fit. A San Antonio plumbing company that wants Maps and AI visibility run as one local program.
What this actually costs
Pricing here is unsettled, and only two companies on this list publish anything.
RS Gonzales publishes $2,200, $3,500 and $5,000 monthly banded by client revenue, which is an unusual and fairly honest structure. Page Progressive indicates project budgets from $2,500 to $10,000, though that is a project range rather than a monthly retainer, so confirm which applies.
Everyone else prices per engagement without publishing. For broader context from the companion lists in this series, a contractor exclusive firm publishes $1,500 to $5,000 monthly for AI work integrated into a broader campaign, and industry benchmarks for plumbing local search sit between $1,500 and $5,000 monthly depending on whether the program is standardized or custom.
Managed monthly providers bundle it, which is the bracket Get Local Presence occupies at $499 to $999 monthly with the website, local search and AI visibility in one plan and a rebuild included.
The risk to watch is double payment. Licensing display, review flow, schema and citation consistency are simultaneously the local SEO deliverable and, according to the research above, the top AI signals. For a plumbing contractor they are close to the same job. If your current vendor already does them, a separate AI retainer may be billing twice. Ask both for written deliverable lists and compare them line by line.
How to test an AI visibility proposal in five minutes
These apply to every company on this page, us included.
Ask which engines they track, and how many. The 50 state research found only two companies nationally named by all four major engines out of 1,609 mentions. A vendor reporting on ChatGPT alone is showing you a quarter of the picture at best.
Ask whether diagnostic prompts are on the tracked list. If every prompt is a variant of best plumber in San Antonio, they are ignoring where the conversation actually starts. The list should include symptom questions, because that is what a homeowner types when water appears.
Ask whether our license number will be published, and where. Licensing and state certification was the single most mentioned signal in the research. Texas licenses plumbing in four tiers, so this is the cheapest available win and most sites in this market skip it.
Ask whether they check Bing indexing. Several assistants have drawn web results from Microsoft's index rather than Google's, and a business well indexed by Google and poorly by Bing can be invisible to an assistant while ranking normally. RS Gonzales is the only company here naming it.
Ask who writes the diagnostic content and who checks it technically. This is the hard part. Content that is wrong about how a water heater fails is worse than no content, and your technicians are the only people who can verify it.
Ask what they will not promise. A vendor who declines to say position or guarantee is describing this discipline accurately.
Where this fits in the work we do
If you want the mechanism rather than the vendor comparison, these pages go deeper than this one.
Our guide to AI search visibility for San Antonio plumbers covers how assistants assemble an answer about a plumbing company and what can be influenced. Our guide to local SEO for San Antonio plumbing companies covers the profile, service area and review foundation that two of the three top AI signals are built from. Our breakdown of plumbing website design in San Antonio covers the emergency and planned page structures.
On credentials, our breakdown of Texas plumbing license requirements covers the four TSBPE tiers behind the single strongest AI visibility signal, and how to start a plumbing business in Texas covers the setup from the beginning.
The general service pages cover this work without the plumbing filter: AI search visibility, local SEO and website design. Our companion lists cover the two adjacent decisions, the best website design companies for plumbers in San Antonio and the best local SEO companies for plumbers in San Antonio. Our broader list of the best AI search visibility companies in San Antonio covers this without the plumbing filter, our hub is the best website companies for contractors in San Antonio, and our San Antonio page covers how we work in this city.
Frequently asked questions
What do AI engines actually look at when recommending a plumber?+
Three things above everything else, according to the only real measurement we could find. A 50 state study by TapTwice Media in April 2026 sent one identical prompt to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity in every state, analyzing 200 answers and extracting 1,609 business mentions. The most frequently referenced signals were licensing and state certification at 411 mentions, customer reviews and ratings at 370, and round the clock emergency availability at 355. Not content volume, not backlinks. Three facts about your business that you either state clearly and consistently or leave an assistant to guess at.
If I show up in ChatGPT, will I show up in Perplexity too?+
Probably not, and this is the most surprising finding in the research. Across 1,609 business mentions nationwide, exactly two companies were named by all four engines tested: Benjamin Franklin Plumbing in Kansas and Champion Plumbing in Oklahoma. Two. Visibility in this channel is fragmented rather than unified, so a vendor showing you a screenshot of one assistant naming your company has demonstrated something real and something narrow. Ask which engines are tracked, on what prompts, and how often, because a single engine result is roughly a quarter of the picture and possibly less.
Which prompts should a plumber try to win?+
Diagnostic ones, not just recommendation ones. A homeowner who sees water pooling does not open an assistant and ask for a contractor list, they ask what is happening: why is my water heater leaking from the bottom, what does a slab leak sound like, can I replace a garbage disposal myself, how urgent is a drip under the sink. That triage conversation frequently ends with the assistant recommending a professional, sometimes by name. You get cited at the end of a diagnostic conversation rather than the start of a shopping one, which means the content that earns citations is symptom, cause, urgency, whether it is reasonably DIY, and typical cost. Most plumbing sites have service pages instead, which answer a question nobody asked.
Should I publish content that tells people how to fix things themselves?+
Yes, and this is the advice most plumbers resist. The tension is real: good diagnostic content will sometimes tell a homeowner they can handle it. Two things weigh against that worry. The reader who fixes their own running toilet using your page remembers who helped, and their next problem is a water heater failing at nine at night. And the page that genuinely answers the question is the page an assistant quotes, while the page that withholds the answer to force a call gets skipped in favor of a competitor who answered. You are not choosing between publishing the answer and keeping the job. You are choosing between being the source and being invisible, because the answer is going to be given either way.
How reliable is that 50 state plumbing research?+
Sound in design and limited in scope, and both parts matter. The method is reproducible and the extraction counts are published, which is more rigor than anything else in this category. But it is one prompt per state, meaning fifty data points per engine, which is a small sample. It is also state level rather than city level, and our own measurement says that matters: in our parent company's twenty prompt audit, prompts naming a service and a city returned the brand 71.2 percent of the time while service plus state returned 28.3 percent. So the study measured the weaker prompt shape. The signal ranking is consistent with everything else we observe. A San Antonio plumber should not read it as a description of their metro.
How much does AI search visibility cost for a plumber?+
Only two companies on this list publish anything. RS Gonzales publishes $2,200, $3,500 and $5,000 monthly banded by client revenue. Page Progressive indicates project budgets from $2,500 to $10,000, though that is a project range rather than a retainer. For context from companion lists in this series, a contractor exclusive firm publishes $1,500 to $5,000 monthly for AI work integrated into a broader campaign. Managed monthly providers bundle it, which is the bracket Get Local Presence occupies at $499 to $999 monthly with the website, local search and AI visibility together and a rebuild included. Watch for double payment, since licensing display, reviews and schema serve local search and AI visibility simultaneously.
What is the cheapest thing I can do this week?+
Put your Texas plumbing license number in text on your website, in the footer, and on every profile you control. Licensing and state certification was the single most mentioned signal in the 50 state research, ahead of reviews and ahead of availability, and Texas licenses this trade through the State Board of Plumbing Examiners in four tiers from Apprentice to Master Plumber, so you have a verifiable credential a roofer structurally cannot have. Then state your emergency availability in words with real hours rather than inside a hero image, since that was the third ranked signal and a graphic is invisible to a parser. Neither costs anything and most plumbing sites in this market do neither.
