13 First-Page Electricians Were Named in 67 of 259 AI Answers

This is the fourth study in the series and the third in the same thirteen cities. In October we tested thirteen HVAC companies and thirteen plumbers that hold Google's first page in their metro. For electricians we kept the cities and the method: thirteen electrical contractors, each the first electrician's own site on Google's first page for "electrician [city]", in Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis, Columbus, Charlotte, Tampa, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Nashville, Denver and Philadelphia.

The electricians landed between the two earlier trades. They were named in 67 of 259 answers, 26 percent, against 31 percent for the HVAC companies and 18 percent for the plumbers. And the franchise pattern from the plumbing study repeated with two names instead of one: Mr. Electric and Mister Sparky were named in 64 of the 259 answers between them, in nine of the thirteen metros, almost as often as all thirteen local electricians combined.

13

electrical contractors, one per metro, each on Google's first page for its city

67 of 259

answers named the tested electrician, 26 percent

64

answers named Mr. Electric or Mister Sparky, across 9 of the 13 metros

224

citations to one AI-era contractor directory, the most of any source in any of our studies

3 of 13

company sites turn away at least one AI crawler, confirmed from two networks

As before, this is not a judgement on anyone's electrical work. It is a measurement of what four assistants do with a local electrician question, and of what they build the answer from.

How we picked the 13 electricians and what we asked

We pulled Google's organic results for "electrician [city]" from Ahrefs SERP data on October 6, 2026, in the same thirteen metros. In each we took the first electrical contractor's own site. We skipped directories, Reddit, Facebook groups, job boards, national franchise pages, multi-trade companies that lead with plumbing or HVAC, and any company already in the earlier studies.

Two cities needed a second keyword, and both are worth knowing about. In Dallas the first page for "electrician dallas" had no local electrician's own site at all: franchise pages, directories, Reddit, Facebook and an HVAC company, so we used "electrician dallas tx". In Charlotte the first qualifying site for "electrician charlotte" returns a 404 error for its homepage, so it could not be tested and we used "charlotte electrician". Two companies we tested first were then excluded because the testing tool, which writes its questions from what the site says, wrote HVAC and "home services" questions for them. The selection file in the data pack records every skip.

The five buyer questions per company follow the work each electrician advertises: panel upgrades, EV charger installation, knob-and-tube removal in Boston and Philadelphia, whole-house rewiring in Charlotte, commercial wiring in Dallas. Across the 65 prompts the shapes were:

1. 01Who are the top [electricians / electrical contractors] in [metro] in 2026? The plain list question.
2. 02Which electricians in [metro] do you recommend for [a job]? A panel upgrade, a rewire, an emergency repair.
3. 03Which electrical contractors in [metro] offer the best value? or Where can I find an affordable electrician in [metro]?
4. 04Which electricians in [metro] have the best reviews? or are the most recommended?
5. 05Who does the best [job] in [metro]? or Where can I get [job] in [metro]? EV charger installation came up in seven of the thirteen cities.

Each prompt went to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity through the same visibility-testing connector as the earlier studies: fresh sessions, no account history, no location set, the smaller tier of each assistant. Twenty answers per company were requested; 259 came back, because one Gemini answer was empty. Everything below is out of 259, and the answer file has one row per answer.

Two numbers per company, as before. Linked, of 5: in how many of the five prompts did at least one assistant link the company's own website. Named, of 20: in how many of the twenty answers did the company's name appear at all. And, as in the plumbing study, whether each company's website lets the AI assistants' crawlers read it.

The results, all 13 electricians

Sorted by prompts linked, then answers named. Mention counts in the names-instead column are across that company's twenty answers.

The table is available as a spreadsheet: download the study data as CSV, 13 rows, one per company. Every one of the 259 answers is published too; the data appendix at the end explains the file.

What the 259 answers say

1. Two franchises were named almost as often as all 13 local electricians

Mr. Electric was named in 44 of the 259 answers and Mister Sparky in 20; one or the other appeared in 64 answers, in nine of the thirteen metros. The thirteen local electricians that hold Google's first page were named 67 times between them. In Tampa and Phoenix the most-named company in the local electrician's twenty answers was the Mr. Electric franchise for that city, six and seven times, while the first-page electrician itself was named once.

It is the plumbing pattern with two names. Mister Sparky held an organic first-page result for "electrician [city]" in five of the thirteen metros, and Mr. Electric sat in Google's map pack in Tampa, Dallas and Phoenix. A franchise with a page in city after city is the name an assistant reaches for when it knows little about the local market. A local electrician competes for the same questions with a page for each job in each town it works.

2. Electricians land between HVAC and plumbing in the same cities

Same thirteen metros, same method, three trades. The electricians were named more often than the HVAC company in six metros, less often in six, and the same in one. Against the plumbers it was six more, five fewer and two the same. The totals: HVAC 80 of 260, electricians 67 of 259, plumbers 48 of 260.

Boston is the clearest case of trade not carrying over: the HVAC company was named 11 times, the electrician 12, the plumber never. Nashville runs the other way, one for HVAC and ten for the electrician. Atlanta is the only city where two of the three first-page companies were never named at all. A first-page ranking is a fact about one trade in one city, and nothing more.

3. The most-named electrician in Charlotte has a website that returns an error

In the Charlotte answers the name given most often was Gianni Electrical Service, 12 times, ahead of the tested company. Gianni's site also sat on Google's first page for "electrician charlotte". Its homepage returns a 404 error, and the testing tool could not read it. The assistants were naming the company from directories and review sites, not from anything the company published. A name can outlive its website in these answers for a long time, which cuts both ways: the credit it earns goes to a phone number nobody may be answering.

4. One AI-era directory was cited 224 times

The same AI-era directory topped the HVAC study (196 citations) and the plumbing study (165). For electricians it was cited 224 times, the most of any source in any of the four studies. Lead marketplaces were cited 184 times, more than in HVAC (113) or plumbing (166). The tested electricians' own sites were cited 44 times across all 259 answers. For the five companies named once or never, the pattern was the same each time: that directory first, then a lead marketplace, then a review site, and in Atlanta a competitor's site cited nine times.

One more name that is not an electrician: Tesla was named in 21 answers, because seven of the thirteen companies' prompt sets included an EV charger question and the assistants answer those with the car maker's installer list. It is the electrical version of Carrier and Trane in the HVAC study. An electrician who installs chargers and is not on that list is competing with the manufacturer for its own job.

5. Gemini and Claude name local electricians; Perplexity almost never did

Gemini and Claude each named the tested electrician in 23 answers, ChatGPT in 17 and Perplexity in 4 of 65. Perplexity, which cites sources the most heavily, leaned hardest on directories and marketplaces and named the first-page company least. Gemini has led or tied in all three October studies; the ordering below it moves from trade to trade.

6. Three sites turn away an AI crawler

As in the plumbing study, we asked each company's homepage for its page the way the assistants' crawlers do, from an ordinary office connection and again from a data center, and counted a block only when both agreed. Electric Pros in Dallas answers both OpenAI's and Claude's crawlers with "403 Forbidden". On Time Electrical in Charlotte answers Claude's crawler with "429 Too Many Requests" on the first request, which is a block with a politer name, and STS Electric in Chicago does the same to OpenAI's. All three let Google's crawler and an ordinary browser in. Eight sites answered every crawler normally. Two, Mirsky Electric and Jim & Sons Electric, showed a challenge page to our data-center checks, so we report them as inconclusive rather than blocked.

Three of thirteen is more than the two of thirteen in plumbing, and the shape is the same: a security plugin, a firewall rule or the host switched it on, and the owner does not know. Electric Pros, which turns away two crawlers, was named in one answer out of twenty. That is one company and proves nothing on its own, but it is the one check on this list that can rule a company out of an answer entirely, and it takes ten seconds with the free AI crawler checker.

What this means for an electrical contractor

1. 01Make sure the assistants can read the site. Check robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, and ask whoever runs your hosting or security plugin whether those crawlers get through. Three of thirteen first-page sites were turning at least one away.
2. 02One page per job and per town. The prompts were built around specific work: panel upgrades, EV chargers, rewires, generator installs. Two franchises win those questions with a page for each city. A local electrician can win them with a page for each service in each town it actually works. Electrician SEO is that list.
3. 03Get on the EV charger installer lists. A fifth of the answers that named a car maker were answering a charger question. If you install them, the manufacturer programs and the utility rebate lists are sources the assistants read.
4. 04Put the proof on the page. Review count and rating, the license number as text, years in business, the towns by name. That is what an assistant can quote back to a homeowner, and what a site built for an electrician is designed to hold.
5. 05Be in the places the answers are built from. The directories and review sites in the chart above, with a complete profile and the same name, address and phone everywhere. The 404 in Charlotte shows those profiles keep speaking for you after the website has stopped.

To see where your company lands, run the AI visibility test on your own business, free, and we will send the twenty raw answers. The earlier studies: plumbing companies, HVAC companies and roofing companies. All four, with the numbers side by side, are on the research page.

Data appendix

Two files sit behind this article. The summary has 13 rows, one per company, including the crawler-access result. The answer-level file has 259 rows, one per answer, for all thirteen companies. Every number in the article can be recomputed from them.

How it was collected

• When: October 6, 2026, for the AI answers, the Google results and the crawler check.
• How: a third-party visibility-testing tool, called through its API. It writes the prompts from each company's website, sends each one to the four assistants with no account history and no location, and records what comes back.
• Models, as recorded: ChatGPT gpt-4o-mini, Perplexity sonar, Gemini gemini-3.1-flash-lite, Claude claude-haiku-4-5. These are the smaller API models, not necessarily what the consumer apps answer with.
• Crawler check: each homepage requested once per crawler, identifying as that crawler, from an office connection and again from a data-center connection. A block counts only when both agree. A 429 on a single first request is counted as a refusal, since a real crawler gets the same answer.
• One run per company. Nothing was repeated, so the file is one day's answers, not an average. One of the 260 requested answers (Gemini, Bradley Electric, prompt 5) came back empty and is not in the file.

What the columns mean

• own_site_linked: the tool's flag that the answer put the company's own website in front of the reader. A prompt counts toward linked, of 5, if any of its four answers has it.
• company_named: the company appears in the tool's list of brands named in that answer, link or not. This is named, of 20.
• cited_domains and cited_urls: the sources the tool recorded for the answer, the pages the assistant drew on. A source is not a click.
• answer_excerpt: the first 400 or so characters of the answer. The tool stores only that much.

Checks and edits

• Recomputed from the answer file, all thirteen companies match the published scores on both counts, and the total is 67 of 259 answers naming the tested company.
• The three lead marketplaces appear as [lead marketplace] in the sources, the links and the answer text, as in the earlier studies. Marketing-firm pages appear as [marketing firm, withheld]; we don't name other agencies. Nothing else is edited.
• The franchise count of 64 is answers where either "Mr. Electric" or "Mister Sparky" appears in any form ("Mr. Electric of Tampa Bay", "Mister Sparky of Denver"); five answers named both and are counted once.
• Two companies tested and then excluded (one in Atlanta, one in Dallas) are not in either file; their raw results are kept in the data pack with the reason.

Both files are free to use under CC BY 4.0, with credit to Riptide Growth.