AI Answer Engine Visibility for a Local Home-Service Business: Weekly Checks Across Google AI Mode, Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT (2026)

Weekly measurements of whether AI answer engines name a specific local home-service business when asked the questions its customers ask. Eight checks from 2026-09-30 to 2026-11-02 across four engines (Google AI Mode, Bing Copilot Search, Perplexity and ChatGPT), 206 question-engine results in total. Collected by Rashaun Reynolds at Tru Service, a family-run repair company in San Jose, California (truservice.co), as part of building automated visibility monitoring for small home-service businesses. Method: the same set of questions (for example "who does pre-listing repairs for real estate agents in San Jose" and "handyman for rental properties in San Jose") was sent to each engine on each check date with an automated browser. ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity ran signed out; Google AI Mode ran signed in as the business owner, so its rows reflect a personalized view. Each row records the answer status (ok, empty, login wall, error), whether the business was named, and the outside domains the answer linked to (video and map tile hosts removed). Summary: of 112 answered non-brand questions, the business was named in 26. The business's own site was the most-linked domain in those answers, followed by competing repair and property-service sites. A separate observation on 2026-11-03: signed-out ChatGPT local business cards for a San Jose gutter-cleaning query were sourced from a Yelp data feed (provider field "yelp-feed" in the response). Limits: one business, one metro area, a small fixed question set, and engine output that changes over time. Treat as a case study, not a general benchmark.