Key Findings
Newsroom Snapshot
- 50 South Carolina businesses in HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical were included in 25 standardized recommendation-style local searches.
- 19 of 50 (38%) surfaced by official domain in the AI search-backed retrieval snapshot.
- 17 of 50 (34%) surfaced by official domain in the conventional live Google result sets for those same query strings.
- 17 businesses surfaced in both environments. Two appeared in the AI retrieval snapshot but not the captured Google set; none were Google-only in this sample.
- 31 of 50 appeared in neither captured result set for the relevant recommendation-style query.
These figures describe the sampled official domains under one day's standardized conditions. They are not statewide market-share estimates and they are not personalized AI recommendation rankings.
The important comparison is the same question, not brand search versus AI
One of the easiest ways to exaggerate AI visibility is to compare two completely different tasks.
Searching Company Name South Carolina asks a search engine to find a business the user already knows. Asking Recommend an HVAC company in Greenville, SC asks the system to choose among many possible businesses.
Those are different problems.
So for this study, SC Marketing & AI used the same 25 recommendation-style query strings in both the AI search-backed retrieval layer and conventional Google. That creates a cleaner question: when the wording is held constant, does the sampled business appear in each environment?
Being easy to find by name is still much easier
The same SC Marketing & AI project also ran 100 branded searches across the full South Carolina research group. Ninety-four of those 100 businesses had their official site in Google's top 10 for the standardized brand query.
That number should not be put head-to-head with the 38% or 34% recommendation-query rates as though they measure the same event. They do not.
But the contrast is useful to a business owner: most companies are findable once a customer knows the name. The competitive part is getting into the conversation before the name has been chosen.
What to measure going forward
A local reporting dashboard in 2026 can track at least four separate things:
1. Branded findability: Can someone who already knows the business find the official site and profile?
2. Traditional discovery: Does the business surface for non-branded local searches?
3. AI/search retrieval: Does the official domain enter the source set for recommendation-style questions?
4. Generated-answer visibility: Does the business actually get named, described, or cited in the final AI answer on the platforms customers use?
Those are related measurements, but they are not interchangeable.
Methodology and limits
The study used 50 businesses from the larger 100-business South Carolina research group: 17 HVAC companies, 12 plumbers, 12 roofers, and 9 electrical companies. Twenty-five standardized prompts covered seven South Carolina markets. The prompt format was Recommend a [service] in [city], SC.
For the AI layer, a sampled business counted only when its official domain appeared in the search-backed retrieval result set. For the Google layer, the identical query was run through live DataForSEO Google SERP data, and a sampled business counted when its official domain appeared in the captured organic or local result structure. Data was collected August 8, 2026.
The AI retrieval layer is not a personalized consumer ChatGPT response and is not equivalent to being named in a final generated answer. Results can vary with time, location, personalization, platform behavior, and query wording. The sample is descriptive and should not be generalized to every South Carolina business.
