We asked AI to recommend a roofer in Langley. Most local companies never came up.

When a homeowner asks an AI assistant for a roofer, it gives one answer, names a handful of companies and links a few websites. We measured which local companies those are.

What we tested

On 26 September 2026 we asked Google's AI — with live web search switched on — six questions a Fraser Valley homeowner would actually type:

• best roofing company in Langley BC
• roof replacement cost Fraser Valley
• emergency roof repair Surrey BC
• best HVAC company Langley BC
• furnace replacement Surrey BC cost
• emergency plumber Langley BC

Then we checked each answer against 22 real local companies — roofing, heating and plumbing firms serving Langley, Surrey and Abbotsford, every one with a working website. That is 132 answers, all of them drawn from a live search rather than the model's memory.

For each we recorded whether the company was named in the answer and whether its own website was linked as a source.

The result

Of 22 companies, 7 were linked at least once. 14 were never named and never linked, across all six questions.

Four of the seven won on the same question — “best roofing company in Langley BC”. That single query is, in effect, the local shortlist. If you are not on it, an AI assistant asked that question does not mention your company exists.

We are not publishing the list of the fourteen. They are ordinary local businesses and the point is not to embarrass anyone — several of them rank perfectly well on Google. Being absent here is not a mark of quality. It is a mark of a channel nobody told them about.

Why this is different from Google rankings

A Google results page shows ten links and the searcher picks. An AI answer names two or three companies and the searcher picks from those. There is no second page.

The companies that got linked were not the biggest. They were the ones whose own website answered the question being asked. A page titled “Roof replacement cost in the Fraser Valley” answers “roof replacement cost Fraser Valley”. A homepage that says “Quality roofing since 1998” answers nothing, however well it ranks.

This is the same mechanic we measured in software, where eight well-known companies were named in 40% of answers and cited in 4%. The difference in local trades is that the citation goes to the business's own website rather than to a comparison blog — which means it is winnable on your own property. The software study is here.

What the cited companies had that the others did not

Looking at the pages that were actually linked, three things recur:

A page per question, not a page per service. The linked pages answer a specific question — what it costs, what to do in an emergency, how long it takes. Most local sites have a “Services” page instead, which answers none.

The place named in the text. Not just in the footer. “Langley”, “Surrey”, “Fraser Valley” written into headings and sentences, because that is the phrase being matched.

Prices, or at least ranges. Two of the six questions we asked were cost questions. A site that will not discuss money cannot be the answer to them.

None of that is technical. It is four or five pages of honest writing about what you charge and what you do.

Check your own

Do it by hand in ten minutes: open Google's AI mode or ChatGPT, type the six questions above with your city swapped in, and write down who gets named and which links appear. If a competitor shows up and you do not, that is the whole finding.

Or run a free scan — put in your website and it reports which questions you appear for, which competitors are recommended instead, and what to change. It takes about ninety seconds and the first one costs nothing.

We are a web studio in Langley. If the answer is “fix the website” and you would rather not, that is what we do — but the measurement is free and yours either way.