August 12, 2026
By Susan Jones, Co-Founder, WebMax Canada
Canadian data on AI recommendations is still limited. WebMax Canada tested 144 responses across four cities and four trades to see which contractors ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude actually recommended.
If you have been reading about AI search and what it could mean for your construction business, you have probably noticed how much of the information comes from the United States.
The cities are American. The businesses are American. The directories, review sites and examples are often American too.
Some of that information is useful here, but Canada is its own market. Contractors work under different licensing systems, belong to different associations and compete in local markets that do not always behave like their U.S. counterparts.
We wanted Canadian data.
During August 2026, WebMax Canada tested contractor recommendations in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto.
We looked at plumbing, electrical, home renovation and landscaping. For each market, we asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to recommend five reputable local businesses and briefly explain their choices.
Each city, trade and platform combination was tested three times.
The primary study produced 144 AI responses and 720 contractor recommendation positions.
The point was not to judge the contractors. We wanted to see who appeared when someone asked an AI service for a local recommendation.
The results were more scattered than we expected.
Across the primary study, 268 different contractor identities appeared.
Of those, 179 appeared on only one of the three AI services. Another 59 appeared on two. Only 30 appeared across all three.
A contractor can therefore look quite visible on one service and barely appear on another.
That is easy to miss if a business owner checks ChatGPT once, sees the company listed and assumes everything is fine.
Customers are not all using the same service.
One person may ask ChatGPT for electricians in Calgary. Another may use Gemini. Someone else may use Claude.
They may get different names.
We also saw differences between trades and cities. Plumbing produced more agreement between the platforms than landscaping did. Calgary had more agreement than Toronto, which produced the most fragmented results of the four cities tested.
There was no single contractor shortlist that all three services consistently agreed on.
A smaller group of companies showed up repeatedly.
In a few markets, the same contractor appeared in every one of the nine primary tests across the three AI services.
Callaway Plumbing & Drains in Victoria, Pioneer Plumbing & Heating in Vancouver, 4-Star Electric in Calgary and MAC Reno Design Build in Victoria were among the businesses with particularly strong repeat visibility.
That does not mean we are calling them the best contractors in their cities.
We did not inspect workmanship, compare quotes or decide who someone should hire.
We measured inclusion.
Did the company make the shortlist when the question was asked?
That is becoming an important distinction.
If a customer receives five names from an AI service and your business is not one of them, they may never reach your website, read your reviews or ask you for a quote.
This was one of the more interesting parts of the research.
We took 16 businesses that appeared frequently and compared them with 16 legitimate local companies that did not appear in any of the nine primary tests for their market.
The missing businesses were not necessarily new, poorly reviewed or hard to find.
Some had been operating for decades.
Some had hundreds of reviews.
Some had professional memberships, licences, accreditation and awards.
Some had good websites with detailed service information.
A Calgary plumbing company in the comparison group had BBB accreditation and more than 1,000 reviews visible through an independent review source. It appeared zero times in nine primary AI tests.
A Toronto renovation company with more than 30 years in business, professional credentials, strong reviews and awards also appeared zero times.
That rules out some of the easy explanations.
A big review count did not guarantee inclusion.
Neither did years in business.
Neither did accreditation.
Neither did having a good website.
There was no single box a contractor could tick and know it would be recommended.
The companies that appeared regularly were often supported by information in several places.
Their own websites tended to be detailed. Reviews were easy to find. Associations, directories, awards, community mentions or other outside sources often backed up the same basic information about the business.
In our first comparison scan, 15 of the 16 highly visible companies had strong website content, and 15 were confirmed across at least four different types of public sources.
Among the 16 businesses that did not appear, 10 had strong website content and seven were confirmed across four or more source types.
We are not presenting that as a formula.
The group was small and there were exceptions.
It does suggest something practical, though.
A business may be easier to make sense of when accurate information about it appears in more than one place.
That means clearly explaining what the company does, where it works, how long it has been operating and why people trust it, then making sure that information does not exist only on the company website.
We also compared the AI results with a separate web-search benchmark.
There was quite a bit of overlap.
In nine of the 16 markets, the contractor with strong AI visibility also had the stronger observable web-search footprint.
One comparison favoured the company that had received no primary AI recommendations. Two were fairly even. Four did not give us enough information to make a reasonable call.
So AI recommendations were related to ordinary online visibility, but they were not simply copying web-search results.
Google Search still matters.
Google Maps still matters.
Reviews, company websites, directories, professional organizations and outside references still matter.
AI adds another way for a customer to sort through that information.
The big difference is the size of the list.
A regular search may present maps, websites, reviews, ads, directories and dozens of companies.
An AI service may give someone five names.
For the business owner, getting into that first group matters.
We noticed something else when we read the explanations attached to the recommendations.
The three services tended to talk about businesses differently.
Claude frequently mentioned reviews and practical details such as quotes or pricing.
Gemini talked more often about company history, awards and professional credentials.
ChatGPT mentioned BBB information much more frequently than the other two services in the responses we tested.
We cannot look inside these systems and know exactly why a company was chosen.
The study only tells us what appeared in the answers.
But it does show that a contractor can be presented differently depending on the service a customer happens to use.
Checking one AI platform is not enough to understand the whole picture.
At WebMax Canada, we have been using three words to describe this change:
Searchable. Included. Selectable.
Being searchable means people can find information about your company.
Being included means your company actually appears when an AI service builds a shortlist.
Being selectable comes later, when the customer looks at the options and decides who deserves the call or quote request.
Canadian contractors have spent years working on the first step.
The middle step is becoming harder to ignore.
Our study covered four contractor categories in four cities. We would not assume the results will look exactly the same in every Canadian industry or every part of the country.
The behaviour itself reaches much further than residential contracting.
A homeowner may ask for a plumber.
A developer may research construction firms.
A property manager may look for maintenance contractors.
A general contractor may search for a specialist.
A purchasing team may use AI to start a supplier list.
The first companies that appear have made it into the conversation.
That is why we wanted to study Canadian markets instead of relying entirely on U.S. examples.
Canadian research in this area is beginning to emerge, but there is still relatively little published information showing what happens when AI services are repeatedly asked to recommend local contractors in Canadian cities.
This study does not answer every question.
It gives us a useful Canadian starting point.
The Canadian Contractor AI Visibility Study 2026 was conducted by WebMax Canada during August 2026.
The full study includes the platform comparisons, repeat recommendation patterns, city and trade findings, web-search benchmark, comparisons of public business information, factual accuracy review, methodology and study limitations.
Canadian businesses, construction organizations, journalists and industry publications can request the full study by contacting WebMax Canada 250-217-5340 or filling in the form on the Contact page at WebMax.ca.
The Canadian Contractor AI Visibility Study 2026 is an observational snapshot of AI recommendation behaviour during August 2026. It records which businesses appeared in AI-generated contractor shortlists. It does not measure contractor quality, leads or sales, and it does not establish why an AI service included or omitted a company. Results can change over time.
Susan Jones is a co-founder of WebMax Canada, a 100% Canadian web design, SEO and AI Visibility company that has worked with Canadian contractors, trades and service businesses for 10 years. WebMax Canada is also the company behind SpottableAI.ca, its AI Visibility service for Canadian businesses.
Explore related articles you won’t want to miss:
Your Phone Number Is Probably Wrong Somewhere, and That’s Costing You
The AI Can Write the Quote. Don’t Let it Add Up the Quote
