We asked four AI tools the same question on the same day: who is the best roofer near Leonardtown, Maryland. Between them they named thirteen companies, and not one company appeared on all four lists. What decided each recommendation was not location or size. It was what each tool could read about the business, and every tool read something different.
Note - Method: one question, asked once per platform on 22 September 2026, in a fresh session, from a single location in Southern Maryland. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Everything below is what the tools returned that day. Review counts and credentials are the figures the tools cited, not numbers we verified independently.
What came back
| Roofer | ChatGPT | Gemini | Perplexity | Claude |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One Vision Roofing | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Jerry Lewis Roofing | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Golden Eagle Roofing | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| JDH Remodeling | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Priddy Roofing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| TruHome Exteriors | Yes | No | No | No |
| Roof Pro and Home Improvement | Yes | No | No | No |
| St. Mary's Roofing | No | Yes | No | No |
| Southern Maryland Roofing | No | Yes | No | No |
| Roofing By George | No | No | Yes | No |
| Guardian Roofing Pros | No | No | Yes | No |
| Crossroads Contracting | No | No | Yes | No |
| Southernwood Roofing | No | No | No | Yes |
Thirteen businesses. One appeared on three lists. None appeared on all four.
Why do the lists barely overlap?
Because each tool was reading a different part of the web. A business that has done well in one of those places gets named by one tool and ignored by the other three.
| Tool | What it cited as its reason |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Review counts from 54 to 461, MHIC license numbers, GAF and HAAG certifications |
| Gemini | Star ratings, price ranges, opening hours, business category, themes from review text |
| Perplexity | The companies' own web pages, and a press release |
| Claude | Dedicated Leonardtown service pages, certifications, years in business, third-party review sites |
Gemini's answer arrived with a map, and the ratings, price ranges and opening hours it quoted are all Google Business Profile fields. Two of its five picks advertise 24-hour availability, which is a profile setting most contractors leave blank.
Was the closest business the one recommended?
No. The map panel showed businesses in Mechanicsville, Oakville, Clements and St Leonard. Not one of the pinned businesses was in Leonardtown itself, and St Leonard sits across the Patuxent River in another county, roughly forty minutes away.
This is the first thing most owners get wrong about AI recommendations. They assume being closest wins. It does not. A roofer twenty minutes away with a clear published record beats a roofer in town with nothing to read.
What earned a recommendation?
A service page for the town
All three of Claude's picks have a dedicated Leonardtown page, and Claude cited those exact addresses as its reason. Not review counts. A page about the town.
A press release
One Vision Roofing was the only company named by three tools. Perplexity's citation for it was a press release titled "Best Flat Roofing Companies in Mechanicsville MD 2026", published on a PR wire. That is digital PR doing exactly what it is supposed to do, and the citation makes it visible. This is the practical case for link building and digital PR.
A blog
Perplexity recommended Guardian Roofing Pros with this reason: it positions itself as a local specialist with a blog focused on roofing tips for Leonardtown and nearby communities. No review count was mentioned. A blog about the local area was enough to be named beside companies with hundreds of reviews.
Does this replace Google and the map pack?
No. Most customers still search Google and still tap the map results, and local search still drives the calls today. What has changed is the research that happens first.
Whitespark tested 540 local business queries across six industries in three US cities and found AI Overviews appearing for an average of 68 percent of them. Purely local searches such as "roofer near me" returned one only 15 percent of the time, but informational questions returned one 92 percent of the time and hybrid questions 97 percent of the time.
So "near me" still mostly returns a map. The questions people ask before they are ready to call almost always produce an AI answer now, and that is where the shortlist gets built. Ahrefs found click-through rates fall by an average of 34.5 percent when an AI Overview is present, as cited in that same study. The searches still happen. Fewer of them reach a website. This is the practical difference between SEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.
What should a local business fix first?
| Fix | Mainly affects | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Complete the Google Business Profile: category, services, hours, price range, service area | Gemini | 1 hour |
| Put your license number and certifications on the website | ChatGPT, Claude | 30 minutes |
| Build a real page for each town you serve, describing actual work there | Claude, Perplexity | Ongoing |
| Ask every customer for a review, every month | ChatGPT, Gemini | Ongoing |
| Get listed on third-party sites: Angi, BBB, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, Bing, Apple | Claude | 2 hours |
Note what is missing from that list: a website redesign. Not one tool mentioned how a site looked. They quoted what it said.
Note - A warning on town pages. A real page about a town you genuinely serve, with local detail, earns citations. Twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped are treated as doorway pages and can be penalised. The difference is whether the page says anything true and specific.
How long does it take to appear in AI answers?
There is no fixed timeline, and any company promising one is guessing. These systems refresh at different rates, and answers vary by platform, by phrasing and by where the customer is. Honestly: businesses that fix their information and build genuine mentions tend to see change over months rather than weeks. Nothing here works overnight, and nothing here can be guaranteed.
What does this look like in Maryland?
The opportunity across Southern Maryland is unusually good, because so few businesses have done any of this.
In St. Mary's, Calvert and Charles counties, most trade companies have a Google Business Profile and very little else. No town pages, no third-party listings, no recent reviews, no published anything. When a tool is asked to recommend a plumber near California, Maryland, or an electrician near Prince Frederick, it has almost nothing to choose from.
That is why a Mechanicsville roofer with a press release got named by three tools, and why a company with a local blog got named at all. The bar here is low. In Houston or Phoenix, the businesses in this test would not make any list.
Rizing Metrics is an AI SEO agency in Maryland working with businesses across these three counties and with companies throughout the United States.
How can you check your own business?
Ask all four tools the same question, in the words your customers use: who is the best roofer near your town. Then ask it two or three other ways, because phrasing changes the answer more than most people expect.
- Are you named at all, on any platform?
- If you are named, what reason does the tool give?
- Who is named instead of you, and what do they have published that you do not?
That third question usually answers itself within a few minutes. You can also run a free AI visibility audit, which checks your business across Google and the major AI platforms in about two minutes. There is more on the subject in our guide to AI visibility.
Method and limitations
One question, asked once on each of four platforms on 22 September 2026, from a single location in Southern Maryland, with no follow-up prompts. Thirteen businesses were named in total. This is a snapshot, not a controlled study: results vary by phrasing, by location, by account history and by date. The review counts, licenses and certifications quoted are the ones each tool cited, and were not independently verified. Business names are reproduced as they appeared in the answers.
Sources
- Whitespark, The Prevalence of AI Overviews in Local Search, May 2025. 540 queries across six industries in three US cities.
- Ahrefs, click-through rate impact of AI Overviews, cited within the Whitespark study.
