A homeowner can ask an assistant about the gurgle in the toilet or the warm spot on the slab and get the whole explanation without talking to a plumber. What survives is the referral: which company around here should handle it. This checker gives that question to Google's Gemini, with live web search, and shows whether your shop is one of the names that come back.
Run the free tool ↓Enter the company name exactly as your state license and your Google Business Profile carry it, the town a homeowner would say out loud, and the job in their words: sewer line repair, water heater replacement, slab leak, repipe. Add your website for a tighter match, the run takes under a minute, and there is no email wall.
Prefer a full page? Open the AI Visibility Checker tool here.
It asks the question that comes after the diagnosis, three ways: who are the best companies in town, which one should I call, and who is top rated on reviews. Each answer's wording is printed under the question, so you read what a homeowner reads standing over a wet floor.
The verdict comes back as AI is not recommending you, you are only partly visible, or AI is recommending you, with a tally of how many of the three answers named your business, who was named instead, and the source domains under each question. Look at the domains before the verdict. If an answer about sewer work in your town leaned on review platforms, a lead marketplace, and two franchise pages, your site was never in the pile.
Then run it again through Check another business with one word changed. Plumber is one license covering a dozen unrelated purchases: drain cleaning, sewer replacement, water heater swap, repipe, gas line. Each brings back a different list, and the lists rarely overlap. The mechanics live on the AI Visibility Checker page.
There is no industry average for this, and any number quoted at you was invented by whoever quoted it. The only benchmark worth anything is the set of names printed for your town when you type the job you want more of.
Strong looks like this: named in every answer, your own domain among the sources, and a description that matches the shop you actually operate, right down to pipe materials and license counties. Weak is blunter. Invisible verdict, no answer naming you, six companies listed instead, half of them strangers to your market. A national drain brand with a page for every city keeps a model supplied with sentences to repeat. A thirty year shop whose license number exists only inside a truck photo hands it nothing.
Two catches particular to this trade. Read how the answer describes you, not only whether you appear: a shop the model knows as a 24 hour drain outfit stops coming up when the question turns to repipes and water heaters, where the ticket size lives. And when a job you do weekly is missing from every answer, check whether you ever wrote the word down. Plenty of shops jet lines and pull gas permits without a sentence saying so.
Both shops below are invented, and both runs show only output the tool actually prints.
Say an eight truck company that runs service calls all day and books two or three repipes a month. Entered as plumber plus its city: verdict AI is not recommending you, zero of three answers naming it, six companies listed instead, review platforms and directory rosters under every question. The site tells you why. The homepage is mostly an emergency banner, drains and water heaters and repiping share one services page, the license number sits inside a truck photo, and the service area is a shaded map. Nothing there is wrong. It is only unreadable.
Now imagine a two truck outfit doing mostly trenchless sewer work. Typed as trenchless sewer repair, it lands in all three answers with its own domain among the sources. Typed as plumber, it falls to one of three. Typed as water heater replacement, roughly a third of what it invoices, it drops out, because nobody ever wrote a page saying it installs water heaters.
Neither run is a score or a diagnosis. It leaves you holding the gap and the names standing in it, and the way out is unglamorous: a page for every job you want asked about, written the way a homeowner asks, the license number and counties typed out, LocalBusiness and FAQ schema pasted into the head, an llms.txt file at the root, and no AI crawler blocked in robots.txt. Together that work is AI search optimization; the structural pieces are what the AIO readiness scanner checks.
Plumbing has a wider spread of buying behavior than almost any trade, and one website serves all of it.
What homeowners type is usually a symptom rather than a job name. Gurgling toilet, sewage smell in the bathroom, rusty hot water, a warm patch on the slab. Somebody translates that into a job before anyone is hired, and whoever published the translation usually gets the call. What makes a plumbing company describable is the rest of that: the license number and its counties, a straight account of the overnight phone, and each job written on its own page. Housing stock sets the local menu of searches, which is why polybutylene, galvanized, and cast iron laterals carry volume in some cities and none in others. The full argument for this trade is laid out on the plumbing page. The neighboring disciplines are local SEO and a tended Google Business Profile.
Running the checker costs nothing. It is one of more than 50 free tools we publish, none of them behind an email wall. Acting on what it prints does cost, in your own slow weeks or in hired hours.
The prices here are published: a custom website build runs $3,500 to $12,000+ one time. Ongoing SEO or local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500 per month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 per month in competitive metros or for multi-location companies. Everything is month to month, no long-term contract, and the site, the content, and the accounts stay in your name.
For many plumbing shops the money already leaves the building as a per call lead bill, the marketplace kind that resells one burst supply line to four competitors on a freeze night. Lead generation you own sends the same budget into pages that stay yours. There is no published management fee for Google Ads here, because we quote flat after a free consult rather than take a percentage of spend. See what SEO costs, or the report card for plumbers.
Both, and compare the name lists rather than the verdicts. Plumber is the broadest question and the hardest to appear in, because national drain brands and marketplace rosters sit on it. Water heater replacement, sewer line repair, repipe, and backflow testing are narrower, and your odds of being named there rise. The narrow runs show which lanes you never described in writing.
The ad slots, yes. Google sells ads in and around AI answers the same way it sold them around the blue links, and on a freeze morning your competitors are bidding on them. The organic recommendation is different: no budget decides which companies the answer itself names. A model names what it can read and verify about you, and nobody can guarantee it, including us.
Run the emergency wording only for towns you are genuinely willing to roll a truck to at two in the morning, since being named for a call you cannot reach is worse than not being named. Run the planned work wider, because a repipe buyer waits a week for the right company. The gap tracks which towns have a real page and which live in a dropdown.
Run it whenever you like, just do not overreact to any single run. The answer is assembled fresh from live search each time, and it drifts as the model and the web underneath it move. The calendar behind it matters more: frozen line pages belong in the fall, drain and disposal pages before the holidays, sump pump pages before the wet spring. Emergency weeks are for answering the phone, not publishing.
That happens, and it is worth reading closely. Some are national brands with a page built for every city, some are franchise locations attached to another metro, and the sources under the answer are often review platforms and directory rosters rather than company sites. It tells you what the model had to work with, not that those companies are better plumbers.
AI Visibility Checker: full tool page and methodology · Marketing for plumbing companies · Website Report Card for Plumbers · All free tools
Send the name lists from your runs, plus the job words you typed, and you get back a plain read: which gap is a missing page and which is a listings problem. I am Orlando based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008, and the free concept mockup of your homepage is yours either way.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.