On August 4, 2026, Kodec ran the exact question a Katy homeowner types into an AI assistant when their AC dies — through both ChatGPT and Google AI Mode — and recorded exactly what came back, word for word, including which companies got named and which sources the AI leaned on to build its answer.
What each AI actually said
ChatGPT answered the query by name, pulling from five sources. It led with Katy HVAC Repair, citing the company's own site for its licensing number, review count, and response-time claim, then worked through six more companies — 4C A/C & Heating, AMS A/C & Heating, Service Pros, Mirtron, Crump A/C and Heating, AKKO, and Arktikos — leaning almost entirely on a single aggregator, expertise.com, plus one directory listing (bestprosintown.com) and one review platform (homeadvisor.com). The bulk of ChatGPT's confidence in these names came from that one Expertise.com roundup page — not from ChatGPT independently verifying anything about the work.
Google AI Mode built a completely different list from a completely different set of sources — 29 of them, mostly Reddit threads (r/Katy, r/houston, r/Dallas, r/Austin), a Facebook group post, and Google's own local business panel data. It surfaced four companies with star ratings and review counts pulled directly from Google listings: 4C AC & Heating Repair, Crump A/C and Heating, AC Comfort, and BVS Home Experts. Only one name — Crump A/C and Heating — appears on both engines' lists. Everything else is different. Same city, same question, same day, two different answers.
How the AI actually builds that answer
Neither engine went out and inspected a single unit, called a single technician, or graded anyone's workmanship. Both read what other sites already say about HVAC companies in Katy — a directory roundup, a review aggregator, a handful of Reddit threads, a Google Business Profile — and repeated the parts that looked most consistent across those sources. ChatGPT leaned on one commercial directory page. Google AI Mode leaned on community threads and its own Maps data. The answer is a synthesis of what's already indexed about a business, not an evaluation of the business itself.
That also means the list is not fixed. Sources get re-crawled, threads age out, new reviews shift a rating, a directory adds or drops a listing — and the next time someone asks, the names in the answer can change. This isn't a one-time snapshot you either made or missed forever. It's a live surface that gets rebuilt every time it's queried, off of whatever is currently indexed about your market.
You can verify all of this yourself in about thirty seconds. Open ChatGPT or Google AI Mode and ask almost the exact question we asked: a homeowner in Katy needing an AC repair, asking who people recommend. Read what comes back. See whose name shows up and whose doesn't. That's the same mechanism a homeowner in your service area is using right now, tonight, at 9pm when their unit dies.
of consumers now use AI to find local services, up from ~6% a year prior
BrightLocal 2026 Consumer Review Survey
of independent HVAC and plumbing contractors have effectively zero AI citation share in their own metro
5W HVAC & Plumbing AI Visibility Index 2026
of local businesses ChatGPT names by default, versus ~11% for Gemini and ~7.4% for Perplexity
SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index
What this means for a Katy HVAC owner
The homeowner research window used to end on a search results page, where you at least had a shot at a map pin or a paid ad. It now ends inside a conversational answer that names a handful of companies and stops there. If your name isn't one of the ones the AI reads back, the decision has already happened by the time you'd have found out there was a question to answer.
Nothing about this capture says anything about the quality of the companies named above — Crump, 4C, AC Comfort, BVS Home Experts, Katy HVAC Repair, and the rest are simply the names that surfaced from the sources these two engines happened to read on this date. The gap that matters here isn't what's said about them. It's what isn't said about anyone not on the list.
This capture is a snapshot of one query on one day. Run it again next month and the list may look different — which is exactly the point. The sources that feed these answers are gettable. The question is whether you're being read into them.