What a real AltisAI audit reveals about the new competitive battlefield for local service businesses
A homeowner in Nanaimo, BC types one question into ChatGPT: "Who should I call for AC repair in Nanaimo BC?"
No scrolling. No comparing five websites. The AI just answers — and recommends a business. Maybe yours. Maybe your competitor's.
We ran a full AltisAI audit on a real HVAC contractor in Nanaimo to see exactly how that plays out in practice. The results are a wake-up call for every local service business that thinks "we rank fine on Google" is enough.
The Score Collapsed — Without Anything Visibly Changing
Here's the company's AI visibility score over the past two months:
| Date | AI Visibility Score |
|---|---|
| May 21 | 2% |
| May 21 | 3% |
| May 22 | 0% |
| May 22 | 32% |
| July 23 (current) | 9.4% |
That's not a typo. The score swung from 0% to 32% within a single day, then drifted back down to under 10% two months later — with no obvious change to the business itself. This is the core danger AltisAI exists to catch: AI engines update their answers constantly, and your visibility can erode without you doing anything wrong.
The Competitive Field Is Brutal — and Concentrated
The audit tracked 20 local competitors by how often each one gets cited across real AI queries. The picture is lopsided: the top two competitors alone account for over 60% of all AI citations in the local market, while our subject business holds roughly 8.5% share — a "moderate threat" tier, well back from the leaders.
The engines aren't spreading recommendations evenly across every business in town. They're consolidating attention around a small number of "authority" businesses — and once a competitor establishes that authority, it compounds.
Why the Leaders Win (And It's Not Mysterious)
The audit didn't just show who was winning — it showed why, in plain language:
- The top competitor offers 24-hour emergency service, which the AI explicitly cites as a differentiator.
- Another leading competitor is recognized for a strong customer-service reputation and specialization.
- A third wins citations specifically for heat-pump and central-AC expertise, reinforced by strong recent reviews.
None of these are secrets. They're the same trust signals homeowners have always cared about — service breadth, availability, and reviews. What's changed is that AI models are now reading and synthesizing those signals automatically, then acting as the gatekeeper between the homeowner and the phone call.
The Technical Gap Underneath It All
Beneath the visibility score, the audit also scores a business's underlying "AI readiness" — how easy it is for AI crawlers to actually parse and trust the site. This business scored 50 out of 100:
Working in their favor:
- An llms.txt file (giving AI tools direct context about the business)
- Schema.org structured data (helping AI understand services offered)
Working against them:
- No AI-specific rules in robots.txt, leaving crawler access ambiguous
- No clean Markdown content negotiation — AI crawlers get messy HTML instead of clean, parseable content
- No MCP server card, meaning the business exposes no standardized way for AI agents to interact with it
Half the readiness gaps are invisible to a normal visitor and even to a normal SEO audit. They only show up when you specifically test how AI systems consume the site.
The Takeaway for HVAC Contractors (and Every Local Service Business)
Three things stand out from this single audit that likely hold true industry-wide:
- AI visibility is volatile. A score can move 30+ points in a single scan cycle with no warning — monthly or one-time checks aren't enough to catch it.
- AI citations concentrate around a few "winners" per market. If you're not actively working on this, the gap between you and the leaders tends to widen, not stay flat.
- The fixes are concrete, not mysterious. Emergency availability, service specialization, and review strength are things AI models pick up on directly — and technical readiness (schema,
llms.txt, clean content delivery) determines whether AI can even read that story correctly in the first place.
If your business hasn't checked what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity are actually telling customers about you, it's worth 60 seconds to find out.
Run your free AI visibility audit →
Methodology note: This case study is based on a single AltisAI audit of a real HVAC contractor in Nanaimo, BC, conducted across 100 AI queries spanning ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. The business name has been withheld at this time. This reflects one company's results in one local market, not an industry-wide average — we're expanding this into a broader "State of AI Visibility" study across more HVAC businesses and markets, which we'll publish as that data comes in.