The Canada AI Visibility Index measures which local service businesses AI assistants actually recommend. In July 2026 we asked ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude the five questions a real customer asks, for 8 trades in 46 Canadian cities and boroughs: 7,360 answers across 368 local markets. The headline findings: in 87% of markets the AI favourite is not the Google review leader, and in 40% of markets the review leader was never mentioned in a single answer.
This is the first edition. The same sweep re-runs on a schedule with an identical method, so these numbers become a trendline: the first public record of how AI recommendations of Canadian local businesses shift over time.
How we built the index
For every market (one trade in one city, “plumber in Halifax”) we asked the five questions a homeowner actually types or says: what’s the best one, who should I call for this specific emergency, recommend someone reliable, who is most trusted according to reviews, and which one do locals actually use. Each question went to four models: Perplexity Sonar Pro, GPT-4o with browsing, Gemini 2.5 Flash with browsing, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 without web access as the training-memory control. Twenty answers per market, identical wording everywhere, from Victoria to St. John’s. Toronto is measured as its boroughs (Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough plus the core) because one top-20 list cannot represent a city that size.
We then counted which businesses each answer recommended, matched against the top Google Maps results for that market collected the same week. Three honesty notes on method. First, API answers approximate, not replicate, the consumer apps, which is why the identical sweep matters more than any single answer. Second, businesses whose legal name is just the service itself (“Appliance Repair”) match answers that merely use the phrase, so they are excluded from every named table and from the headline statistics. Third, a business with duplicate Google listings is counted once per answer, and the one market where no tracked business was named at all counts toward the invisibility column. Fourth, Quebec markets were asked in English, so they measure the anglophone assistant surface; a French sweep is a future edition’s job.
Like our Collingwood Review Index, the named tables below only ever name businesses that are winning. Everyone else stays anonymous and aggregated. If you want to know where your own business sits, run the free check, not the leaderboard.
The national numbers
- 46 cities and boroughs across all ten provinces, 368 trade-city markets, 7,360 AI answers
- 9,012 recommendations of identifiable local businesses across those answers
- In 87% of markets (322 of 368), the business AI recommends most often is NOT the business with the most Google reviews
- In 70% of markets (258), the AI favourite has less than HALF the review leader’s count
- In 40% of markets (149), the review leader was never mentioned in any of the 20 answers
- Only 43 markets have a dominant AI favourite (one business taking half or more of all recommendations), and 16 markets are wide open, with no business named more than twice
That first pair of numbers is the finding that should change how Canadian service businesses think about reputation. Being #1 on Google reviews is the outcome most local businesses spend years working toward. In nearly nine out of ten markets, that achievement does not carry over to the AI answer, and in four out of ten it buys literally zero AI visibility.
Reviews still matter, but they are not the algorithm
Do not misread this as “reviews are dead.” Review volume remains the heaviest single lever in local search, as our 2026 local SEO statistics roundup documents, and most AI favourites do have healthy review counts. The finding is narrower and more useful: AI assistants are not ranking by review count. They synthesize from what the live web says about a business, and the businesses that win the AI answer are the ones the web talks about: directories that know they exist, a website that plainly answers the questions people ask, local press, and yes, a solid review base that gives the models something to cite.
The proof that this is a web phenomenon rather than a memory one is the control model. Across all 7,360 answers, the three web-grounded models produced 8,792 recommendations of tracked local businesses. Claude, answering the identical questions from training memory alone, produced 220, or 2.4% of the total. AI models do not “know” Canadian local businesses. They look them up. That means AI visibility is earnable, on a timescale of weeks, by changing what the web says about you. We watched it happen with our own site: three days after publishing structured local content, Perplexity began citing it, while the ungrounded models did not move at all.
Who is winning the AI answer in Canada
The strongest AI favourites in the July 2026 sweep, by how many of their market’s 20 answers named them:
| Business | Market | AI answers naming them | Their reviews | Market review leader holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paysa - Taille de cèdres | Quebec City, landscaping | 16 of 20 | 67 | 180 |
| Muzzell Plumbing | Owen Sound, plumbing | 15 of 20 | 45 | 171 |
| Mr. Appliance of Red Deer | Red Deer, appliance repair | 15 of 20 | 104 | 1,194 |
| Eden Landscaping | Regina, landscaping | 15 of 20 | 8 | 246 |
| Electrafix NB | Fredericton, appliance repair | 14 of 20 | 188 | 941 |
| Ron’s Appliance Service Ltd. | Lethbridge, appliance repair | 14 of 20 | 88 | 935 |
| Mr. Mechanic Auto Repair Inc | Lethbridge, auto repair | 14 of 20 | 289 | 387 |
| Service 2000 | Montreal, appliance repair | 14 of 20 | 502 | 2,037 |
| Mellish Appliance Service | Owen Sound, appliance repair | 14 of 20 | 85 | 156 |
| Sure Flow Plumbing & Heating Ltd. | Saint John, plumbing | 14 of 20 | 72 | 566 |
| Perfection Plumbing & Drain Cleaning Ltd. | Saskatoon, plumbing | 14 of 20 | 765 | 3,054 |
Look at the last two columns. Every business on this list is out-recommending a market review leader that holds two to thirty times its review count. Perfection Plumbing wins Saskatoon with 765 reviews in a market whose review leader holds 3,054. Eden Landscaping wins Regina with eight; the AI models cite its website, not its review count. The AI answer is a different competition with different rules, and right now it is being won by businesses of every size.
Closer to home on Georgian Bay, the same pattern holds: Clearview Plumbing takes more than half of Collingwood’s plumbing answers, Weldon Roofing leads the roofing answers, and Thornbury Auto owns the Blue Mountains auto repair conversation. None of them is the review leader in their market.
What this means if you run a service business
Three practical takeaways from the 2026 data:
- Your review count is not protecting you in the AI channel. If you have spent years becoming the review leader, you have won the Map Pack, not the AI answer. Four in ten review leaders are invisible there. The only way to know your own standing is to measure it, which is what our free AI visibility check does: the same five questions, the same four models, scored for your business.
- The AI answer is still up for grabs almost everywhere. Only 43 of 368 markets have a dominant favourite. The median market’s top business takes just a third of the recommendations. In the AI channel, 2026 Canada looks like Google looked in 2010: early, unclaimed, and cheap to win.
- The inputs are fixable, and reviews are still one of them. Grounded models read the public evidence: your Google profile and reviews, directories, and whether your site answers customer questions in plain language. A systematic done-for-you review engine, the boring kind that asks after every job, now pays twice: once in the Map Pack, once as the citation trail AI models follow.
Frequently asked questions
How did you measure AI visibility? Five buyer-style questions per trade per city (“What’s the best plumber in Halifax, Nova Scotia?”, “I need help with a burst pipe in Halifax. Who should I call?”), each asked to four AI models via their APIs in July 2026, with identical wording in every market. We recorded every local business each answer recommended and matched them against that market’s top Google Maps results collected the same week. It is a snapshot of public AI behaviour, not private data.
Which AI models are included, and what happens when new models launch? The 2026 panel is Perplexity Sonar Pro, GPT-4o with browsing, Gemini 2.5 Flash with browsing, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 as the no-web control. The panel only changes at an annual edition boundary, and when a model is swapped we run old and new side by side for a period and publish the calibration, so the trendline stays honest even as the AI landscape moves.
My business was not named. How do I find out my score? The index names market winners only; nobody is called out for being absent. The free AI visibility check runs the same sweep for your specific business and shows exactly which questions you appear in and who is being recommended instead. If you want the full picture including your review position, start with a free audit.
How can a business with 8 reviews be an AI favourite? Because grounded AI models synthesize from the whole public web, not just the review count. A business with few reviews but a clear website, consistent directory listings, and third-party mentions can out-cite a bigger competitor whose web presence is just a Google profile. That is also the opportunity: these inputs move in weeks, not years.
Why were Quebec markets measured in English? The 2026 edition asks every market the identical English questions so the numbers are comparable coast to coast. For Montreal, Quebec City, Laval and Gatineau, that measures the anglophone assistant surface specifically. A French-language sweep is planned as a companion edition.
Will the index be updated? Yes. The underlying sweep re-runs quarterly with the frozen question set, and we publish annually with the same method so editions compare cleanly. Georgian Bay markets are re-measured monthly.
Compiled by Georgian Bay SEO, Collingwood, Ontario. Local SEO and AI visibility for trades and service businesses. Free audit at https://georgianbayseo.ca, (705) 539-0398.
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