We Audited 50 Contractors in Columbus. Here's What We Found.

Over the last six weeks we ran our visibility audit on 50 local contractors in the Columbus metro. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing — about evenly split. Mostly 2-to-12-truck operations, owner-operated, the kind of business that does $500k–$3M in annual revenue.

We weren't looking for problems. We were looking for patterns. We found four that hit nearly every single business on the list.

80% are invisible to AI search

Forty out of fifty contractors had zero citations on ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview for their primary service categories.

We tested each business against 5–8 queries a homeowner might actually type. Things like "best HVAC in Hilliard," "emergency plumber Columbus OH," "roofer near Westerville with good reviews." Most of the businesses we tested were established — 10+ years in business, decent Google profiles, 4-star+ ratings.

It didn't matter. The AI engines didn't know they existed.

The ones that DID show up in AI results had something specific in common, which we'll get to.

60% have no after-hours call coverage

We placed a test call to each business at 8:30pm on a Tuesday. Thirty out of fifty went straight to voicemail or rang out. Of those thirty, only nine returned the call within 24 hours.

Twenty-one businesses received an after-hours call from a "potential customer" and never followed up at all.

Think about what that means. A homeowner with a real problem — leaking water heater, no heat in February, electrical sparking from an outlet — called the business that came up first in their Google search, got nothing, and moved on. The business has no idea it happened.

We audited the same businesses' inbound call logs and found the same pattern in their actual customer data. 25–40% of calls outside 8am–5pm went to voicemail. Most never converted.

40% have fewer than 50 Google reviews

Twenty businesses had review counts under 50. The average was 38. The median was 31.

This is the most fixable problem on the list — and it's the one most owners aren't actively working on. Most of them tell us they "ask customers" but don't have a system. They mention reviews once, hand over a business card with a Google link printed on it, and hope.

Hope is not a strategy. Especially when the contractor down the street has 240 reviews and is asking for one after every single job.

The contractors who scored A grades had one thing in common

Five businesses out of fifty scored A grades on our audit. They differed in size, vertical, age, and marketing budget. One was an HVAC operation doing $4M+/year. One was a 2-truck electrical shop doing maybe $600k. They had different websites, different services, different pricing.

But every single one of them answered every call.

Every. Single. Call.

We tested at 9pm. We tested at 11pm. We tested on a Saturday morning. We tested on a Sunday evening during the Super Bowl. All five A-grade businesses picked up on the first or second ring. One of them was using an AI receptionist. The other four had paid for an answering service or had built rotating on-call schedules with their techs.

The common thread wasn't review count, wasn't AI visibility, wasn't website quality. It was: the phone got answered.

Everything else flows from that. If the phone gets answered, you book the appointment. If you book the appointment, you do the work. If you do the work, you ask for the review. Reviews accumulate. AI engines start to see your business mentioned in fresh content and citations. Your visibility compounds.

Miss the call and none of the rest happens.

What this means for you

If you score A on the "answers the phone 24/7" question, you're 90% of the way to the leaderboard. The remaining 10% is review systems and content visibility, both of which are downstream of the calls you're capturing.

If you don't answer every call, nothing else matters as much. Fix that first, then worry about everything else.

---

Get your free visibility audit → Run it now

We'll grade your business across all four of these dimensions in under 3 minutes. Honest data, no credit card, results in your inbox.