The websites AI assistants cite when recommending Phoenix contractors

The short answer

When an AI assistant recommends a contractor and shows its sources, those links are pages it read while writing the answer. In our weekly measurements of Phoenix window and door questions, the website the engines cited most was energyshieldwindowsanddoors.com¹, linked in 26%² of the answers. That measurement so far covers one trade and two engines, Claude and Gemini, and across it the engines cited 154³ different websites in all.

That list of websites matters more than it looks. It is the reading list the engines use before they name a business. If your company is described accurately on the pages they read, you are part of the material the answer is built from. If you are missing from those pages, or described wrongly, the engine is working from someone else's version of you or from nothing at all.

How we measured it

In each weekly run we put the questions homeowners ask about hiring a contractor in Phoenix to the AI engines we measure, and store each answer with every link it cites. The finished run so far used Claude and Gemini; ChatGPT and Perplexity will be added. For each trade, the citation study covers that trade's most recent finished weekly runs, up to the last four, so that once several runs are in, a single odd week cannot dominate the result. Today the window and door study rests on one finished run. Each figure on this page carries its sample size and dates in its footnote.

We count by answer, not by link. If one answer links three pages from the same directory, that directory counts once for that answer. A website's share is the share of answers that cited it at least once. Subdomains roll up to the site that owns them, so a directory's city pages and its business profiles count as one website.

The window and door study currently covers 86⁴ answers. Of those, 72%⁵ cited at least one website. Any answer without a link named or discussed businesses without showing its sources, so from the outside there is no record of what they drew on. That is one reason we measure citations and mentions separately: a business can be named without being linked, and a site can be linked without the business it describes being named.

Window and door companies were the first trade we measured, and so far the only one. We have not measured roofing or heating and air conditioning yet, so this page has no citation figures for them. The full tables, per trade and per engine, are on the citation sources study.

Each engine reads from a different shelf

We measure each engine on its own, because nothing obliges them to cite as often as each other or to cite the same sites. In the engines measured so far:

• Claude cited at least one website in 74%⁶ of its answers. Its most-cited site was ecowatch.com⁷.
• Gemini cited at least one website in 71%⁸ of its answers. Its most-cited site was energyshieldwindowsanddoors.com⁹.

Two engines answering the same questions had different most-cited sites. ChatGPT and Perplexity will be added to the runs, and their figures will join this list when they are measured.

Any difference follows from how each engine retrieves. ChatGPT's search features surface websites through OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot¹⁰. Perplexity surfaces and links sites through PerplexityBot¹¹. Anthropic indexes pages for Claude's search with Claude-SearchBot¹². For Google's AI features in Search, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet, and Google says there are no additional requirements¹³ beyond that. Different crawlers and different indexes produce different reading lists, which is why a profile that carries you on one engine can be invisible on another. We look at what that does to the businesses they name in why the engines recommend different contractors.

Citing a link is also not the default for every question. Across all kinds of prompts, not only local ones, Similarweb's panel found web citations in 6.8%¹⁴ of US ChatGPT prompts in May 2026. Set that beside the cited shares above: how often an engine shows its sources for your trade is itself a measurement worth watching.

Why directories and review sites show up so often

Our figures are specific to Phoenix contractors, but outside studies point the same way. BrightLocal ran local searches across ChatGPT Search, Gemini, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity and found Yelp used as a source in 33%¹⁵ of them, with every platform using directories. Yext analyzed citations on location-specific queries and found 86%¹⁶ of them came from sources brands control or manage, mainly their own websites and their listings. Both are vendors in the listings business, their samples are not home services, and Yext counts a listing as brand-managed. Read them as direction, not as your numbers.

The mechanics explain the pattern. Google documents that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out¹⁷: one question becomes several related searches across subtopics and data sources. A homeowner asking who should replace the windows in a Mesa house built in the eighties sets off searches about the service, the city, reviews, and pricing. The pages that match those searches are the pages that get read. Directory category pages, review profiles, local news, and a contractor's own service pages all compete for that slot.

What this means for an owner

The sites in the citation data for your trade are your real directory list. Plenty of directories will sell you a listing. The ones that matter for AI answers are the ones the engines actually read for your trade and your city, and that list is measurable.

On each of those sites, your profile should say exactly what your website says: legal name, phone, address or service area, license, hours, and the lines of business you want to be hired for. If you run a second listing on purpose for a different line of business, keep the two clearly distinct so an engine does not merge them or treat one as an error.

Your own website can be one of the cited sources. The pages that get cited answer one question plainly, with specifics a directory cannot copy: the neighborhoods you work in, the products you install, the numbers from your own jobs.

None of this shows up in a single chat with ChatGPT. The citation list can move from week to week and differ by engine, which is why we measure it every week. To see where your own business stands, start with how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business, or read how the engines find local businesses for the full mechanics.