How we measure what AI recommends
AI Syndicate Local exists to make one invisible channel measurable: when a customer asks an AI assistant who to hire, who gets named. Everything published in the index comes from the weekly pipeline below — recorded, not curated.
The pipeline, step by step
Seven rules, applied identically to every metro and category, every week.
Fix a question set per metro and category
Each measurement cell — one metro crossed with one service category — gets a small, fixed set of consumer-phrased questions (for example, "Who are the best plumbers in Tampa, FL?"), with phrasing variants for recommendation and price intent. The set is frozen: movement over time reflects the assistants changing their answers, never us changing the questions. Every ranking page lists its own question set verbatim.
Put identical questions to all 12 assistants
The same wording goes to every assistant we can reach: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Siri, Alexa, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Mistral. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot run in live, web-connected mode — the configuration a real customer reaches. Siri and Alexa answer through the voice stack. Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Mistral answer from model knowledge only, because no consumer live-retrieval API is available for them; their answers are recorded and labeled as such, never presented as evidence of what the web says today. An assistant we cannot reach in a given week is absent from that week's sample rather than counted as a non-answer.
Record every answer, append-only
Every run is stored as raw data — the full answer text and every source the assistant cited. Nothing is edited or overwritten after the fact; each week's edition is derived from the accumulated history, so any figure on the site can be traced back to the runs that produced it.
Resolve names to real businesses
Assistants name the same business in different ways — with and without an LLC suffix, with a location qualifier, with a franchise prefix. Name variants are folded into one canonical entity so counts never double-credit a business for spelling differences.
Drop what can't be verified
A name that appears in only a single run and resolves to no verifiable business is treated as a probable hallucination and excluded from rankings. A business must be named in at least two independent runs to be listed. Ranking pages disclose how many names were dropped this way.
Link each business to its own site, or to nothing
A ranked business is linked to its own website in one of two ways, and never any other. Either an assistant cited or wrote that domain and it matches the business name; or a verified business-listing lookup returned that exact business by name and gave its site. We never guess a domain and never infer one from a similar name: a wrong link would send a company's customers to a competitor, so a business we cannot confirm is shown with no link at all. Every page the assistants cited is published alongside the ranking too, whether or not it belongs to a ranked business.
Rank by measured consensus
A business's rank in a cell reflects how often it was named across the week's runs and how many distinct assistants named it. A name four engines repeat is a different signal from one that surfaced once, and the per-row detail shows exactly which assistants named each business.
Enforce a sample floor
A cell publishes a ranking only after enough answers accumulate in a week to make the ordering meaningful. Below the floor the page says "recording" — an honest gap rather than a confident-looking ranking built on noise.
What we don't do
We don't sell placement
No business can pay to appear, rank higher, or have a bad week removed. Rankings are derived from assistant outputs alone, and the derivation is described on this page in full.
We don't cherry-pick runs
Every recorded run enters the history, including weeks where the assistants disagree or reverse themselves. Movement you see is movement that happened.
We don't pad thin data
Cells that haven't cleared the sample floor say "recording." An invented ranking would be easier to ship and worthless to trust.
Corrections and removal
If a listing misidentifies your business, or you want your business excluded from the index, email support@aisyndicate.com and we'll resolve it — the record keeps the raw runs, but the published pages will reflect the correction.
Want this measurement on your own business?
The index measures whole markets weekly. Our platform runs the same measurement on a single business daily — with the levers to move it.