Northern Beaches Trade Visibility Index — Edition Two
We asked four AI assistants for a tradie on the Northern Beaches again. This time they named 131 businesses, and agreed on two.
Edition Two. 48 tests, twelve locked questions, four trades, one morning. The method is first, the correction to Edition One is on this page, and so are all 131 names.
Edition Two — October 2026
Last month we asked four AI assistants who the best tradies on the Northern Beaches are, and published every name they gave us.
This month we asked again. Same nine questions, word for word. Plus one new trade: landscaping, because it is spring on the peninsula, and half the blocks here are sloping.
Each month adds one trade, and every trade already in the Index gets run again. By next winter this is a year of data on who gets named and who stopped being named. Nobody else in Australia has that.
How this was done — and what changed
Run on Saturday 10 October 2026, between 8:33am and 8:39am AEDT.
Twelve locked questions, three for each trade, sent word for word with no greeting, no framing and no follow-up:
| Trade | Q1 — The job + the area | Q2 — The homeowner’s own question | Q3 — The “best” question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | emergency plumber Northern Beaches | my hot water stopped working who do I call | best plumber Northern Beaches |
| Electrician | emergency electrician Northern Beaches | who installs split system air con Northern Beaches | best electrician Northern Beaches |
| Carpenter | deck builder Northern Beaches | do I need council approval for a deck | best carpenter Northern Beaches |
| Landscaper (new) | landscaper Northern Beaches | who can rebuild a retaining wall on a sloping block | best landscaper Northern Beaches |
The first nine are identical to Edition One. They will never change. The three landscaping questions are now locked too.
The method changed this month. Here is exactly how.
Edition One was run by hand, in a signed-in browser, one fresh chat at a time, with screenshots.
Edition Two was run automatically, by sending each question straight to each assistant through its official connection for software (its API), one fresh request at a time. It is the same set-up that runs our free AI Visibility Snapshot, so a tradie who runs the Snapshot is asked exactly these questions, by exactly these engines.
| Edition One | Edition Two | |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | chatgpt.com, browsing on | OpenAI API (gpt-4o-mini), web search on |
| Claude | claude.ai, web search on | Anthropic API (Claude Haiku), web search on |
| Perplexity | perplexity.ai, default model | Perplexity API (Sonar) |
| Google AI Overviews, in a browser | Google’s top five search results — see below | |
| Signed in / history | Yes, deliberately | No. No account, no history, no device location (Google set to Australia) |
Google is the honest gap. Google returned no AI Overview to an automated request on any of the twelve questions. Rather than leave Google out, the Google column this month records the businesses named in Google’s top five search results. That is a search result, not an AI answer, and it is labelled that way everywhere on this page.
Two consequences, both stated plainly:
- Edition Two is not a like-for-like repeat of Edition One. Some of the movement between the two editions is the market and some is the method. Edition Two is the starting line for the automated method, and every edition from here runs the same way, so from Edition Three onwards a change is a change.
- The personalisation problem from Edition One is gone. Last month Invision Plumbing was named twice, both times by a signed-in Claude, and we flagged it. With no account and no history, Invision Plumbing was not named by any engine this month. That is the control Edition One promised, and it confirms the flag was right.
Every name was checked. The businesses in each answer were pulled out automatically and then checked line by line against the full answer text in a separate pass. Not one name was invented. One was corrected: a Google result titled “Local Plumber Northern Beaches” is Tai Irwin Plumbing’s website, so it is recorded as Tai Irwin Plumbing. Two Google results gave a page title but no business name we could confirm — “Air Conditioning Northern Beaches” and “The Plumber Sydney”. Both are left out rather than guessed.
The numbers
| Edition One — Sep 2026 | Edition Two — Oct 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Trades | 3 | 4 |
| Tests run | 36 | 48 — 4 trades × 3 questions × 4 engines |
| Distinct businesses named | 79 | 131 |
| Named by all four engines on the same question | 3 (corrected — see below) | 2 |
| Named exactly once | 51 of 79 (65%) | 94 of 131 (72%) |
| Conversational answers (Q2) that named nobody | 7 of 12 (corrected — see below) | 11 of 16 — and all 8 for plumbing and carpentry |
The Index — Edition Two
One row per trade. A new row every month. The three questions across the top. (x of 4) = how many of the four engines named that business for that question. Businesses named by one engine only are listed in full further down.
| Trade | Q1 — The job + the area | Q2 — The homeowner’s own question | Q3 — The “best” question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | emergency plumber Northern Beaches 18 named LKB Plumbing (3) · BMH Plumbing Solutions (2) · Tai Irwin Plumbing (2) | my hot water stopped working who do I call 0 named — on all four engines | best plumber Northern Beaches 15 named Hello Plumbing (4 of 4) · Curl Curl Plumbing (2) |
| Electrician | emergency electrician Northern Beaches 13 named DM Electrical (4 of 4) · Connery Electrical (3) · Plateau Electrical (3) · Matty James Electrical (2) | who installs split system air con Northern Beaches 16 named Peninsula Air Conditioning (3) · Frozone Air Conditioning (2) · Northern Beaches Air Conditioning (2) | best electrician Northern Beaches 20 named AB Electrical & Communications (2) · Matty James Electrical (2) |
| Carpenter | deck builder Northern Beaches 15 named Coastal Decking (3) · Dependabuild (2) · Elo Silo (2) · MJ Leckie Carpentry (2) · UrbanArch Building (2) | do I need council approval for a deck 0 named — on all four engines | best carpenter Northern Beaches 19 named MJ Leckie Carpentry (3) · CGB Carpentry (2) · HRJ Carpentry & Building (2) · Mastercraft Carpentry (2) · Skilled Carpenters Services (2) |
| Landscaper (new) | landscaper Northern Beaches 16 named Eclipse Landscapes (2) | who can rebuild a retaining wall on a sloping block 1 named — Google search result only; no AI assistant named anyone | best landscaper Northern Beaches 20 named Eclipse Landscapes (2) · Mother Nature’s Landscapes (2) |
Five things the data says
1. Ask a question, and nobody gets named. Again.
Edition One’s clearest finding held, almost to the cell.
| Question | ChatGPT | Claude | Perplexity | Google (top 5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| my hot water stopped working who do I call | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| do I need council approval for a deck | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| who can rebuild a retaining wall on a sloping block | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| who installs split system air con Northern Beaches | 5 | 7 | 6 | 2 |
Every AI assistant answered the hot-water, council and retaining-wall questions. Some answers were useful, some generic, and one of Claude’s quoted American building rules. Not one of them named a business. The single name in the retaining-wall row came from Google’s ordinary search results, not from an AI answer.
The new landscaping question is the useful test. “Who can rebuild a retaining wall” starts with who, the same word that got air-con businesses named. It still produced no names, because the assistants read it as what kind of tradesperson do I need and answered with job titles: landscaper, structural engineer, excavation contractor.
Names appear when the question carries a place and asks for a business. A question about a rule, a fault or a type of tradesperson gets an explanation. Two different jobs, and one page will not do both.
2. The air-con job still belongs to air-con brands
Sixteen businesses were named for who installs split system air con Northern Beaches. Two read as electricians: ATEC Electrics and Alpine Air & Electrical. The rest have air-conditioning words in the name: air, aircon, AC, clima.
Installing a split system is licensed electrical work. It is still being handed to the businesses whose name says air conditioning. Same finding as Edition One, different names: Platinum AC, named by all four engines last month, was named by one this month.
3. Two businesses out of 131 were named by all four
- Hello Plumbing — best plumber Northern Beaches
- DM Electrical — emergency electrician Northern Beaches
Everyone else was named by three engines at most. Asked for the best carpenter, electrician or landscaper, the four engines did not agree on a single business.
| Asked for the best… | Businesses named | In all four | In two or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | 15 | 1 | 2 |
| Electrician | 20 | 0 | 2 |
| Carpenter | 19 | 0 | 5 |
| Landscaper | 20 | 0 | 2 |
4. Who moved
The eight businesses that led Edition One, and where they are now. Read this with the method change in mind: some of this is the market, some is the switch from a signed-in browser to the automated method.
| Business | Edition One (of 12) | Edition Two (of 12) |
|---|---|---|
| Plateau Electrical | 7 | 4 |
| MJ Leckie Carpentry | 6 | 5 |
| Hello Plumbing | 5 | 5 |
| DM Electrical | 5 | 4 |
| Northside Electrical Services | 5 | 2 |
| Curl Curl Plumbing | 4 | 2 |
| Platinum AC | 4 | 1 |
| Precision Decking | 4 | 1 |
Hello Plumbing is the only one that held level, 5 of 12 both times. Plateau Electrical and MJ Leckie Carpentry have the most mentions across both editions and both methods, 11 of 24 tests each. New at the top this month: Connery Electrical and Matty James Electrical, 4 of 12 each, and BMH Plumbing Solutions, 3 of 12, which was not named at all in Edition One.
5. Landscaping: 27 businesses, and nobody owns it
27 landscaping businesses named, and no landscaper named more than four times. The most named was Eclipse Landscapes, 4 of 12, then Mother Nature’s Landscapes, 3 of 12.
One engine would not play at all. Asked “landscaper Northern Beaches”, Claude replied by asking which Northern Beaches was meant and what kind of information was wanted, and named nobody. A homeowner using Claude got questions back instead of a name.
For a landscaper, that is the opening. No business owns this trade in the AI answers yet. Whichever one says plainly what it does, where, and for how much, has the best chance of being the name that comes back next month.
Correction to Edition One
Edition One said that one business was named by all four engines on the same question. It was three.
Going back through Edition One’s own records, all four engines named:
- Plateau Electrical — emergency electrician Northern Beaches
- Platinum AC — who installs split system air con Northern Beaches
- MJ Leckie Carpentry — best carpenter Northern Beaches
So three statements in Edition One were wrong:
- the headline, “agreed on one”
- the line saying Platinum AC “is the only business in this entire Index” to be named by all four engines on any question
- the line saying MJ Leckie Carpentry was “one business in the whole Index” named by all four
Each was one of three. The figure in the Edition One numbers table should read 3, not 1.
A second figure in that table, also corrected: “Questions that returned no business at all: 11 of 12 cells” should read 7 of 12. Of the twelve answers to the three conversational questions, seven named nobody: seven of the eight plumbing and carpentry answers, and none of the four air-con answers. The finding stands; the count was wrong.
One spelling, also corrected: the business listed in Edition One as “lo Silo” is Elo Silo.
Edition One stays on this page as it was published. Corrections go here, in the next edition, with the mistake named. That is the rule this Index runs on.
Everyone who was named — Edition Two
Number = how many of that trade’s 12 tests named the business.
Plumber — 29 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 5 | Hello Plumbing |
| 3 | BMH Plumbing Solutions · LKB Plumbing |
| 2 | Curl Curl Plumbing · Hillier Plumbing · Network Plumbing · Tai Irwin Plumbing |
| 1 | At Your Service Plumbing · Beaches Emergency Plumber · Collis Bros Plumbing · Davy Plumbing · Freshwater Plumbing & Drains · Inform Plumbing · Inline Plumbing · Koalafied Plumbing & Gas · Peach Plumbing · Pearla Plumbing · Platinum Plumbers · Plumber To The Rescue · Plumbing Dynamix · Plumd In Plumbing · Pure Plumbing Professionals · Russom Plumbing · SXP Plumbing · Steady Plumbers · Stuart Plumbing · Triple Zero Plumbing · Watermen Plumbing · Wild Water Plumbing |
Electrician — 43 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 4 | Connery Electrical · DM Electrical · Matty James Electrical · Plateau Electrical |
| 3 | Peninsula Air Conditioning |
| 2 | AB Electrical & Communications · Frozone Air Conditioning · Letts Electrical Services · Northern Beaches Air Conditioning · Northside Electrical Services · Palms Electrical |
| 1 | ABC Air Conditioning · ATEC Electrics · Abbotts Electrical Connection · Alpine Air & Electrical · Beach Hill Electrical · Bennett Aircon · CB Climate Control · ClimaCool · Climate Care Air Con · Correct Phase Electrical · Endeavour Air Conditioning · Ervan Electrical · Everest Electrical · Glenco · GreenElec · Hudson Electrical · Loony Leads Electrical · Luxe Air Conditioning · Marmont Electrical · Mastroair · McIntosh Electrical · Overhead Electrical · Pacific Power Electrical · Perfect Connection Electrical Group · Pica Electrical · Platinum AC · Proven Air Conditioning · Sure2Electrical · Sydney Air Co · Urban Connect Electrical · Warrick Leggo Electrical · Waters Electrical and Solar |
Carpenter — 32 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 5 | MJ Leckie Carpentry |
| 3 | Coastal Decking · Mastercraft Carpentry |
| 2 | CGB Carpentry · Dependabuild · Elo Silo · HRJ Carpentry & Building · Skilled Carpenters Services · UrbanArch Building |
| 1 | Bark Construction · Bond Maintenance · Brandboy · DeKing Carpentry · Eddie Keeng Constructions · Fine Line Finishes · Giddey Building Services · Got Wood Carpentry and Construction · Grand Solution Projects · HMT Home Made Transformations · Impact Carpenters and Installers Northern Beaches · Kovacs Carpentry · MILLSTONE Roof repair + Carpentry · NF Build · Northern Beaches Deck Builders · Ozzie Pro Building · Pergola Land · Precision Decking · SLR Constructions · Solid Decking Solutions · St Tolo’s Property Maintenance · Thomas Taylor Carpentry · Wilson Made |
Landscaper — 27 businesses across 12 tests (new this edition)
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 4 | Eclipse Landscapes |
| 3 | Mother Nature’s Landscapes |
| 2 | ETF Gardening & Landscaping · Formed Gardens · Hudson Landscaping · Justice Gardens · Lone Pine Landscapes · Northern Beaches Landscaping Group · Outdoor Oasis Gardens · ScapeMaster Landscapes |
| 1 | 360 Enviroscapes · ARTIST-TREE & LANDSCAPING SERVICES · Beaches Landscapes · Blake Landscapes · By The Sea Landscaping · CC&M Landscapes · Dapple Landscape Design · Fresh Retaining Walls · Hortkraft · LDM Gardens · MOSS Landscape Design · Melaleuca Landscapes · Northern Beaches Landscapers · Northstrand · Peaceful Landscapes · Podology · Vogue & Vine |
What this edition doesn’t tell you
- It is not what a signed-in person on her phone sees. Edition One measured that. This edition measures the answer with no account, no history and no location. That is cleaner and more repeatable, but it is a different view, and the published comparisons above say so.
- The Google column is search results, not AI Overviews. Google did not return an AI Overview to an automated request on any question this month.
- These answers are not fixed. The same question asked twice can return different names. That is why the questions are locked and why this runs every month.
- Two Google results were left out because they gave a page title but no business name we could confirm.
- Two Google carpentry results were cut short. One list stopped mid-way and one gave only part of a business name, so at least one more carpenter was named that we could not read.
- Nobody is listed as missing. This Index reports who was named. It will never publish a list of who was not.
What we’d take from it this month
The question decides whether you get named, more than the trade does. No amount of FAQ answers will put your name in an answer to a how question. A page that says who does this, here is a different page.
Being named once is still luck. 72% of the businesses this month were named a single time. The ones that matter are the ones named again, by more than one engine, next month.
The new trades are wide open. Nobody owns landscaping in the AI answers yet. Four mentions out of twelve was enough to top it.
Edition Three: November 2026
The same twelve questions, run the same way, plus one new trade. From Edition Three onwards the method does not change, so the question becomes simply who moved.
Edition One — September 2026
Somebody who needs a plumber at seven in the morning does not open ten tabs any more. She asks her phone, and her phone gives her three names.
Ask one of them for a plumber and you get four or five names back. There are a great deal more than four or five plumbers on this peninsula.
So the question worth measuring is not whether AI is coming for local search — that argument is over — but a plainer one. When somebody asks, who actually gets named?
Nobody in Australia publishes that. So we started measuring it. This is the first edition, it is free, and the method is below the way it should be: before the results, not after them.
How this was done
Run on Saturday 12 September 2026, between 7:00am and 10:45am AEST. One sitting, one location, the Northern Beaches.
Nine locked questions, three for each trade, pasted word for word with no greeting, no framing and no follow-up:
| Plumber | Electrician | Carpenter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | emergency plumber Northern Beaches | emergency electrician Northern Beaches | deck builder Northern Beaches |
| 2 | my hot water stopped working who do I call | who installs split system air con Northern Beaches | do I need council approval for a deck |
| 3 | best plumber Northern Beaches | best electrician Northern Beaches | best carpenter Northern Beaches |
These never change. Not next month, not next year. New trades can be added; a question cannot be reworded, because the moment it is the trend line is worthless.
Four engines: ChatGPT with browsing on · Claude with web search on · Perplexity on its default model · Google AI Overviews.
Thirty-six separate conversations. One question, one fresh session, then closed. Never two questions in the same window — ask for an emergency plumber and then the best plumber in one chat and the second answer is built on the first. The first response was recorded every time, because that is what a real person sees. Screenshots were taken of all 36.
What was not controlled, and why
These were not run in incognito, deliberately. A homeowner asking her phone for a tradie is signed in, has a history, and carries whatever her account has picked up along the way. Testing in a sterile window measures something nobody actually experiences. This measures the answer a real person gets, which is the more useful number and the less tidy one.
That has one visible consequence, and it is in the data. Invision Plumbing was named twice — both times by Claude, and by no other engine. Claude is the assistant used daily in this business, so it may well have prior exposure to that name. That is precisely the fingerprint you would expect contamination to leave, showing up precisely where you would expect it.
So: do not read Invision Plumbing’s result as market visibility. It is the one entry this edition with a known problem. That the problem is visible, confined to one engine and limited to one business is itself reasonable evidence the other 78 results are clean.
Next edition adds a control — one question repeated in a clean session — so the size of that effect gets measured instead of argued about.
The numbers
| Tests run | 36 — 3 trades × 3 questions × 4 engines |
| Distinct businesses named | 79 |
| Named by all four engines on the same question | 1 |
| Named exactly once across all 36 tests | 51 |
| Questions that returned no business at all | 11 of 12 cells, across two trades |
Four things the data says
1. Ask a question, and nobody gets named
This was not the finding we went looking for, and it is the most useful one.
The middle question in each trade is the conversational one — the way a person actually talks. The results split completely:
| Question | ChatGPT | Claude | Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| my hot water stopped working who do I call | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| do I need council approval for a deck | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| who installs split system air con Northern Beaches | 4 | 6 | 6 | 4 |
Eleven of the twelve plumbing and carpentry cells returned nobody at all. Every air-conditioning cell returned businesses.
The difference is not the trade. It is the grammar.
“Do I need council approval for a deck” is a question about a rule. All four engines answered it — properly, helpfully, at length — and did not name a single carpenter. “My hot water stopped working who do I call” contains the words who do I call, and three of the four still replied with troubleshooting steps and no name.
“Who installs split system air con” is the only one of the three that asks for a person rather than for information. It is the only one that produced names.
The practical consequence is the reverse of what most advice assumes. The FAQ page answering homeowner questions is worth having — but on this evidence it does not get you named, because the machine answers the question itself and stops. Names appear on questions shaped like who does this. They are two different jobs, and one will not do the other’s work.
2. Sparkies have lost the air-con job to air-con brands
Twenty businesses were named on who installs split system air con Northern Beaches. Barely any of them were electricians.
Named: Platinum AC (all four engines), Bennett Air Con (three), Ozcon Air Solutions (two), then Peninsula Air Conditioning, Sydney Heating & Cooling, Northern Beaches Air Conditioning, Luxe Air, Alpine Air, Breezy AC, CB Climate Control, ClimaCool and Endeavour Air Conditioning.
The only business on that list reading as an electrician is Ready Electrical, named by two engines.
Installing a split system is licensed electrical work. Every one of those jobs is open to a sparkie. But the businesses getting named are the ones whose name, category and website say air conditioning — the machine is matching the job to the words, not to the licence.
Platinum AC was named by all four engines. It is the only business in this entire Index to do that on any question.
3. There is no “best”. There are four different answers.
Asked for the best plumber Northern Beaches, the four engines named 15 different businesses. Not one appeared in all four. Only three appeared in even two.
| Asked for the best… | Businesses named | In all four | In two or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | 15 | 0 | 3 |
| Electrician | 17 | 0 | 4 |
| Carpenter | 10 | 1 | 4 |
One business in the whole Index was named by all four engines on the same question: MJ Leckie Carpentry, for best carpenter Northern Beaches.
A homeowner who asks two assistants the same question gets two different lists. Which one she happened to open decides who gets the call.
4. Sixty-five per cent were named once, and once is luck
Of the 79 businesses, 51 were named exactly once across 36 tests. Named once, by one engine, on one question, is not visibility. Given how much these answers vary, it is a coin landing the right way up.
The businesses with real presence are few:
| Business | Trade | Named in |
|---|---|---|
| Plateau Electrical | Electrician | 7 of 12 |
| MJ Leckie Carpentry | Carpenter | 6 of 12 |
| Hello Plumbing | Plumber | 5 of 12 |
| DM Electrical | Electrician | 5 of 12 |
| Northside Electrical | Electrician | 5 of 12 |
| Curl Curl Plumbing | Plumber | 4 of 12 |
| Platinum AC | Air conditioning | 4 of 12 |
| Precision Decking | Carpenter | 4 of 12 |
Eight businesses, out of 79, hold the peninsula.
Everyone who was named
Plumber — 24 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 5 | Hello Plumbing |
| 4 | Curl Curl Plumbing |
| 3 | Plumd In Plumbing · LKB Plumbing |
| 2 | At Your Service Plumbing · Safeguard Plumbing · Greenway Plumbing · Invision Plumbing · 4 Elements Plumbing |
| 1 | Eze-Flow Plumbing · Service Today Plumber Dee Why · Fix It Now Plumbing · JAB Plumbing Solutions · Tai Irwin Plumbing · Aptec Plumbing · Pearla Plumbing · Wild Water Plumbing · The Clean Plumber · Drip Drop Plumbing · Triple Zero Plumbing · Good As Gold Plumbing · Dee Why Plumbers · Ready Plumbing · Mitchell Plumbing Co |
Electrician — 36 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 7 | Plateau Electrical |
| 5 | DM Electrical · Northside Electrical |
| 4 | Platinum AC |
| 3 | Connery Electrical · Overhead Electrical · Bennett Air Con |
| 2 | Northern Beaches Electrical · Ozcon Air Solutions · Ready Electrical |
| 1 | Ervan Electrical · Northern Beaches Emergency Level 2 Electricians · AB Electrical · Waters Electrical and Solar · Sydney Heating & Cooling · Alpine Air · Luxe Air · Northern Beaches Air Conditioning · Breezy AC · CB Climate Control · ClimaCool · Endeavour Air Conditioning · Peninsula Air Conditioning · Hello Electrical · Curran-T Electrical · All Phases Electrical and Solar · Pica Electrical · Whale Shark · Matt Young Electrical · Perfect Power · Get Amped Electrical Services · Matty James Electrical · Chris Wood Electrical · Beach Hill Electrical · Schrader Electrical |
One more was named that is not a business at all: electriciansnorthernbeaches.com, offered as a name by one engine. It is a domain, not a trading name — which tells you something about how these lists get assembled.
Carpenter and joiner — 19 businesses across 12 tests
| Named in | Business |
|---|---|
| 6 | MJ Leckie Carpentry |
| 4 | Precision Decking |
| 3 | Nail It Construction · SLR Constructions · Bark Construction |
| 2 | Coastal Decking · CGB Carpentry · Jensen Carpentry · Thomas Taylor Carpentry |
| 1 | EAP Constructions · By Request Handyman · Get Decked Out · lo Silo · Dependabuild · Northern Carpentry & Joinery · Wilson Made · Matiere · Mastercraft Carpentry · FORDS Carpentry |
The smallest field and the clearest result. Nineteen businesses named, against 36 for electricians — and MJ Leckie Carpentry named in half of every test run. Carpentry is the least crowded of the three trades in the AI layer, by a distance.
What this doesn’t tell you
- These answers are not fixed. The same question in two fresh sessions can return different names. That is how the technology works, not a fault in the measuring — and it is exactly why the questions are locked and why this gets repeated.
- These are whole-peninsula questions. Suburb-level questions return different answers. A business invisible on “best plumber Northern Beaches” may well be the first name on “plumber Narrabeen”.
- Location changes everything on a local question. It was set once and not moved.
- Nobody is listed as missing. This Index reports who was named. It will never publish a list of who was not.
What we’d take from it
The FAQ page and the “who does this” page are different jobs. Answering homeowner questions is worth doing, but on this evidence it does not get you named. Build for both and stop expecting one to cover the other.
The machine matches words, not licences. A sparkie who installs split systems loses that question to businesses with “air” in the name. The fix is not more work — it is saying the work you already do, in the words the job gets asked for.
There is no single result to win. Four engines, four different lists, almost no overlap. Being named by one is a start and nothing more. The target is not first place; it is appearing at all, in more than one.
Once is not a result. Sixty-five per cent of these businesses were named a single time. Repeat presence, across engines and across months, is the only signal worth anything — which is the whole reason this is published again next month rather than once.
There is nothing to compare this to yet
No trend line. There cannot be one — this is the first edition.
That is not an apology, it is the reason to start. Next month these 79 names get run against the same nine questions, and the question stops being who is named and becomes who moved. That number does not exist anywhere in Australia right now.
Edition two: October 2026.
Questions
How was this measured?
Locked questions, three per trade, are sent word for word to four engines, one fresh request at a time, and every business named in each answer is recorded. Edition One (12 September 2026) was run by hand in a browser; from Edition Two (10 October 2026) it runs automatically through each engine’s API. The questions never change, so each edition can be compared to the last.
Which AI assistants were tested?
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, each with web search, plus Google. In Edition One Google meant Google AI Overviews in a browser. In Edition Two Google returned no AI Overview to automated requests, so the Google column records the businesses named in Google’s top five search results, and is labelled that way.
Why did the method change in Edition Two?
To make the Index repeatable every month and identical to the free AI Visibility Snapshot, so a tradie can compare his own result with the published one. The trade-off is that it no longer reflects one signed-in person’s account. Both editions stay on the page, and the change is stated wherever the two are compared.
Why are the questions locked and never changed?
Because a reworded question is a different question. Ask “best plumber Northern Beaches” one month and “who’s a good plumber around here” the next, and any change in the results was caused by the wording, not by the market. New trades can be added. Existing questions never change.
Why weren’t the tests run in incognito mode?
Because homeowners aren’t in incognito. A real person asking her phone for a plumber is signed in and carries her own history. The trade-off was personalisation, and Edition One flagged one case. Edition Two removed it: with no account and no history, that business was not named by any engine.
How do AI assistants decide which local businesses to name?
They assemble an answer from whatever they can read and quote: your website, your Google listing, your reviews, directories and third-party lists. They favour businesses that state plainly what they do, where they work and what it costs. They cannot quote what isn’t written down, which is why some excellent businesses never appear.
Does ChatGPT actually recommend tradies in Australia?
Yes. In Edition Two ChatGPT named businesses on nine of twelve questions, up to eight businesses at a time. It named no one only on the questions about a fault, a rule or a type of tradesperson. This is not a future problem. It happens every time somebody asks.
Why do the four assistants name different businesses?
Because they read different sources and weight them differently, and because these answers are not fixed. The same question asked twice can return different names. In Edition Two, of 131 businesses named, only two were named by all four engines on the same question.
Why did “do I need council approval for a deck” name nobody?
Because it asks about a rule, not for a business. In both editions every engine answered it and none named a carpenter. Questions shaped like who does this, here produce names. Questions shaped like how does this work or what kind of tradesperson do I need produce explanations.
Why isn’t my business on this list?
This page lists every business named at least once. It does not publish a list of businesses that were not named, and it never will. If you are not here, none of the four engines named you on these questions on the day of the run. That is all it means.
Does being named mean a business is better?
No. It means the business is easier for an assistant to find, read and quote, usually because its website, Google listing and reviews say plainly what it does and where. Plenty of excellent trade businesses were not named. Visibility and quality are different things and this page only measures one.
Can a business pay to appear here?
No. There is no paid placement, no sponsorship, and no way to buy a mention. Businesses appear because an engine named them, or they do not appear. Nobody was contacted beforehand and nobody was charged. That is the only thing that makes the number worth publishing at all.
Why is a marketing agency publishing this for free?
Because it is the most useful thing we can prove rather than claim, and because a tradie who reads it is more likely to talk to us later. Both of those are true and the second one is self-interested. The data is unaffected either way: it says what it says, including where it is flawed and where we got it wrong.
If you want to know where you stand
This Index measures three trades across the whole peninsula. It will not tell you about your business, in your suburb, by name.
The free Snapshot will. Ninety seconds, twelve questions, four assistants, and it tells you whether any of them name you. No credit card, no email gate on the result.
Northern Beaches Trade Visibility Index, Edition Two. Run 10 October 2026. Published by Strategic AI Marketing, Northern Beaches. Every business on this page was named by at least one of the four engines during the run. Method above; questions locked; Edition Three in November
Ask me
Tell me your trade and the suburbs you work. I will tell you what I would do first and roughly what it would take.
That reply costs you nothing and it is not a call in disguise.
[email protected] +61 420 745 357
Rowan Shead. Fifteen years quoting and marketing trade and building businesses before this one — locksmiths, sparkies, plumbers, chippies, builders, fabricators. Manly Chamber of Commerce, seven years. One person, not a rotating account manager.
