On September 13, 2026, Kodec ran the exact question a Peoria homeowner types into an AI assistant — "I need a good HVAC company in Peoria AZ for an AC repair. Who do people actually recommend, and what should I look for to pick a good one?" — through ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, and published both answers as they came back. This page is the capture: which companies each engine named, which domains it leaned on, which companies' own websites ended up in the source list, and what the answer looks like from the side of the list you're not on.
The two engines named seven companies between them — and the overlap is zero
ChatGPT put five companies at the top of its answer: Semper Fi Heating & Cooling, M & R Refrigeration LLC, Air-Zona Air Conditioning, Heating & Ventilation, LLC, Grizzly Mechanical, and Total Care Heating & Cooling. Google AI Mode named two: Arctic Fox Air Conditioning & Heating Company and Worlock Air Conditioning & Heating. Not one name appears on both lists.
- On ChatGPT's list only: Semper Fi Heating & Cooling, M & R Refrigeration LLC, Air-Zona Air Conditioning, Heating & Ventilation, LLC, Grizzly Mechanical, Total Care Heating & Cooling
- On Google AI Mode's list only: Arctic Fox Air Conditioning & Heating Company, Worlock Air Conditioning & Heating
The near-miss is worth reading closely. ChatGPT's answer does contain "Worlock Mechanical" — but only in a trailing "Other notable mentions" line attributed to HomeAdvisor, inside a bullet that also lists Oasis Air, LLC, The Plumber Guy, Anthony James Air Conditioning & Heating, and State 48 Home Services. In Google AI Mode, Worlock Air Conditioning & Heating is a headline recommendation with its rating, address and website printed in the body of the answer. Same market, same question, same day: one engine treats a company as a footnote inside a directory scrape, the other treats it as one of two answers.
The other asymmetry is volume. ChatGPT's single answer names more than a dozen businesses across its bullets, its quick-answer section, its summary table and its HomeAdvisor line. Google AI Mode names two, then spends the rest of the response on a four-item checklist. A wider net is not a better outcome for the owner reading this — it's just more slots that someone else took.
What fed each answer: six sources for ChatGPT, nine for Google AI Mode
ChatGPT's answer rests on six domains. Two are national directories — expertise.com, whose Peoria AC repair page carried four of the five headline picks, and homeadvisor.com, whose Peoria-AZ listing page supplied the trailing "other notable mentions" bullet. One is a lead-gen directory subpage, hvacservice.io/az/peoria/hvac-service. One is a resident forum thread, reddit.com/r/PeoriaArizona. One is a domain that isn't a Peoria or Arizona publisher at all — impakter.com, carrying the article "Best AC Repair Companies in Peoria, AZ: 7 Local Experts Rated & Reviewed," cited more often than any other source in the answer. And one is 1stairco.com, cited in the same bullet that names 1st AirCo.
Google AI Mode's nine sources collapse to three platforms and one company site: Nextdoor, Yelp, Angi, and arcticfoxairconditioning.com. The list comes back partly shuffled — three entries carry the bare titles "Yelp," "Nextdoor" and "Angi" while their URLs point at nextdoor.com, request.angi.com and arcticfoxairconditioning.com. The single Nextdoor page for the Peoria company is cited three separate times under three different titles: "Arctic Fox Air Conditioning And Heating - Nextdoor," "Arctic Fox Air Conditioning & Heating | Peoria HVAC Company," and "What to Look for in a Good AC Repair Tech." And one of the two Angi entries isn't a content page at all — "Central A/C - Service Or Repair" on request.angi.com/service-request-pro-direct/task/40074 is a service-request funnel URL, not an article.
One detail repeats across both engines: a named company's own domain sits in the source set. 1stairco.com is cited in the ChatGPT bullet that names 1st AirCo; arcticfoxairconditioning.com is a source behind the Google AI Mode answer that names Arctic Fox Air Conditioning & Heating Company first.
There is no Peoria newsroom in the layer either engine reads
Across all fifteen source slots behind both answers, there is no local journalism. No Peoria city paper, no Arizona broadcast outlet, no local business journal. What stands in for local voice is the r/PeoriaArizona thread ("Compared Peoria HVAC contractors as the summer…"), a Nextdoor business page for one company, a Yelp search-results URL, and national directory pages that happen to carry a Peoria segment. That's the structural finding for this market: the local layer of the web AI reads is resident forums, plus aggregators, plus the companies' own sites — and nothing else. There is no local publication layer to earn a citation from, because in this query set there isn't one.
What happened to one contractor's site after the business-identity fix
A Bay Area HVAC contractor's site we tracked moved from roughly 206 to roughly 2,038 daily impressions — a +421% rebound — after a navigation fix, area pages, and consistent business-identity reinforcement across the sources engines cross-check. AI-referred engagement on that site ran about 50% versus 24.1% for non-AI traffic, a 2.08× gap, on 4 AI sessions against 399 non-AI sessions in a 30-day window. That is a small-volume result and we report it as one. The work was not link-buying or a content blitz; it was making one business look like the same business everywhere the AI looks. Peoria's source set above is what would have to change in this market.
How the AI actually built the Peoria answer
Both engines read what other sites already say about Peoria HVAC and repeated it. ChatGPT's structure tracks its sources almost line for line — the four expertise.com-fed bullets, the impakter.com-fed Editor's Choice line, the HomeAdvisor-fed footnotes. Google AI Mode pulled from Yelp, Nextdoor, Angi and the named company's own domain, then generated its own generic checklist on top (licensing, upfront diagnostic fees, no high-pressure sales, transparent warranties). The lists are a mirror of the sources, which is why being present in those sources — consistently, under one identity — is the entry point.
What this means for a Peoria HVAC owner
The research window for a Peoria AC repair now closes inside the AI answer: the homeowner gets names, ratings and a checklist, and the call happens before your site is ever opened. BrightLocal's 2026 consumer review puts about 45% of consumers using AI to find local services, up from roughly 6% a year earlier. If your company isn't in the two lists above, nothing was said against you — nothing was said at all.
of local businesses are named by ChatGPT in an answer (Gemini names ~11%, Perplexity ~7.4%)
SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index
of independent HVAC and plumbing contractors have effectively zero AI citation share in their own metro
5W HVAC & Plumbing AI Visibility Index 2026
Kodec runs this capture market by market and query set by query set. The same prompt that returned two Peoria companies for Google AI Mode and five for ChatGPT is the one we'd run against your city — and then we work the identity layer and the source layer the answer is built from, which is what decides whose name gets repeated.