How Do Roofing Companies Get Recommended by ChatGPT?

Roofing companies get recommended by ChatGPT mostly through other people's pages. On the two roofing questions in the Cheers Market Baseline, August 31 to September 20, 2026, ChatGPT cited a roofing company's own website in 17.8% of its 600 answers, while at least 82% cited a directory, review site or "best of" list; for HVAC, plumbing and electrical, 44% to 54% of ChatGPT answers cited a contractor's own site. For a roofing group, that makes the first ChatGPT fix the way those lists describe each branch. The homepage still matters, mostly on Google AI Mode, which cited business websites in 87.2% of its roofing answers.

Last verified: September 23, 2026.

A homeowner who asks ChatGPT for a roofer after a hailstorm gets a short list assembled from pages like Expertise.com, Angi and BBB. A branch that isn't on those pages, or is listed with last year's phone number, starts behind however good its website is. Below is what each engine cited for roofing, what the roofers it named looked like on reviews and ratings, and what I'd change first. If you'd rather see your own markets before reading on, the free AI visibility check runs this kind of question against your business.

ChatGPT reads the lists before it reads the roofer

On the roofing questions, ChatGPT cited Expertise.com in 40.0% of its answers, Angi or HomeAdvisor in 34.5%, HomeStars in 25.7% and BBB in 20.8%. The chart at the top of this page sets roofing's 17.8% own-site rate beside plumbing at 53.7% and HVAC at 44.0%; electrical (53.6%) and pest control (43.0%) sat up there too. Only garage door repair, at 13.3%, came in lower.

Perplexity leaned on lists even harder. It cited BBB in 59.6% of its roofing answers and Angi or HomeAdvisor in 47.9%, and a roofing company's own site in 64.0%, the lowest business-site rate Perplexity showed on any trade we ask about more than once.

The directory set changes at the border, too. Across all 32 questions, ChatGPT cited HomeStars in 40% of its Canadian answers and in none of its US answers, while Angi and Expertise.com were effectively absent from Canadian answers. For a roofer that works on both sides of the border, an audit built on US directories misses the listing ChatGPT reads most in Canada.

What to do with this is unglamorous. Open the directory pages ChatGPT cited for your five biggest metros and check whether each branch appears at all, and whether its name, phone, service area and services match its Google Business Profile. Where a competitor shows up and you don't, that page is the one ChatGPT is reading instead of yours.

Google AI Mode starts from the roofer's homepage

Google AI Mode behaved the other way. It cited roofing company websites in 87.2% of its roofing answers and showed rated business cards in 92.7% of them. When any of the four engines cited a roofing company's site, 67.7% of those citations went to the homepage, against 45.8% for HVAC and 35.7% for plumbing. Blog posts drew 3.6%.

My read, and it's an inference, is that Google AI Mode follows the website link on each Business Profile, so whatever page that link opens becomes the roofer's evidence. If every branch profile links to the national homepage, the homepage has to name the markets, the storm and insurance process and the warranty. The other option is linking each profile to its branch page, a bigger change that our guide to linking a Business Profile to a location page walks through.

One thing roofers can stop worrying about is online booking. Only 1.8% of Google AI Mode's roofing answers linked to a booking page, the lowest of any trade we track, against 39.4% for plumbing and 38.9% for HVAC. Roofing work starts with an inspection rather than a booked slot, so the inspection request form and the phone number on each branch page are the conversion paths worth testing.

Named roofers had fewer reviews than you'd guess

The median roofer Google AI Mode named had 130 Google reviews and a 4.9 rating. The median HVAC company it named had 449. Just 4.1% of named roofers had 1,000 or more reviews, against 30.8% in HVAC, and 23.6% of AI Mode's roofing answers named at least one roofer with fewer than 20. Across all 32 questions the median was 226, and our guide to how many Google reviews you need for AI recommendations has the full spread.

Ratings were the firmer floor. Only 0.6% of the roofers AI Mode named showed under 4.0 stars, and 84.1% showed 4.8 or higher. Gemini's cards (September 14 to 22) put the median roofer at 152 reviews and ChatGPT's (September 18 to 22) at 91, so all three engines named roofers with review counts a regional company can reach.

A roofing branch with 150 honest reviews and a 4.8 sits inside the range these engines name. Volume looks more like the price of staying named: across every trade, businesses Google AI Mode named with 1,000 or more reviews came back in at least two of our three weekly checks 43% of the time, against 26% for businesses with under 20. Of the trades we ask about more than once, electricians are the one where the bar sat lower still; the electrician guide has that detail.

ChatGPT's map was the one place roofers' ratings dipped. In 22.5% of its roofing answers with map cards, at least one roofer showed under 4.0 stars. About a third of ChatGPT's roofing cards (34.4%) linked to Yelp, and the Yelp cards had a median of 15 reviews against 135 for the rest, so a thin Yelp page can put a sub-4.0 rating beside a roofer who shows 4.9 on Google. Pest control is where that problem bit hardest, and the pest control guide covers what a company can and can't do about it.

Storm, insurance and warranty language fills the repair answers

The two roofing questions pulled different answers. On "who are the best roofing companies for roof repair or replacement?", 72.7% of ChatGPT's answers and 72.4% of Gemini's mentioned storms, hail or wind damage, against 37.7% and 58.0% on the reviews-and-pricing question. Google AI Mode went from 38.0% to 54.7%, and Perplexity from 16.3% to 34.2%. Insurance claims came up in 39.3% of Google AI Mode's repair answers and 45.9% of Gemini's.

Warranties came up almost everywhere. ChatGPT mentioned a warranty or guarantee in 96.3% of its roofing answers, against 54.1% of its HVAC answers, and Gemini did in 84.4%. Gemini named a shingle manufacturer's contractor program (GAF, Owens Corning, CertainTeed and the like) in 56.3% of its roofing answers and Google AI Mode in 31.3%, and Gemini cited manufacturer or trade-body sites in 15.2% of the roofing answers where we captured its citations. Price belonged to the pricing question: ChatGPT put a dollar figure in 51.3% of its reviews-and-pricing answers and 9.0% of its repair answers.

These are mention rates, so they show what the answers talk about rather than why an engine picked a roofer. They still make a good brief. Each branch page should say, in plain words and only where it's true, how storm inspections work, what help the branch gives with an insurance claim, which warranty is the company's own workmanship warranty and which is the manufacturer's (our workmanship warranty guide covers that split), which manufacturer programs the crews actually hold, and the license number for that state.

That last item deserves more attention than its 21.8% mention rate on ChatGPT suggests. The FTC's storm-season advice to homeowners opens its list of scam signs with "Scammers claim they don't need to be licensed to do the work," and its advice on vetting a contractor reads: "Check with your state or county government to confirm a contractor's license, and ask the contractor for proof of insurance." A branch page that shows its license and insurance up front answers that check before the homeowner makes it. Google's Local Services Ads screening already asks roofers for general and professional liability insurance and state-level licenses where local law requires them, so the paperwork exists.

Storm crews that travel should leave their Business Profiles where they are. Google's guidelines say a service area "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based." And when a storm job turns into interior water damage, the evidence a homeowner needs changes; the restoration guide picks up there.

There's no national roofing brand to beat

Only 0.9% of roofing answers across the four engines named a national franchise brand, and those brands filled 0.3% of the named slots. On our pest control question, 60.1% of answers named one; on garage door repair, 40.6%, and the garage door guide looks at what that does to a local company's odds. In roofing, nearly every name in these answers belonged to an independent or regional company.

For a roofing group with 20 or 30 branches, that cuts both ways. No brand name carries a weak branch into the answer, and no national competitor is taking a fixed share of it. Each metro is its own contest, and the evidence on the table is that branch's listings, reviews and page.

What to change this week

• Run both roofing questions in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode for your five biggest metros and write down every directory and list ChatGPT cites.
• Open each of those pages and fix what's wrong: missing branches, old phone numbers, service areas that don't match the Business Profile, descriptions that never mention repair, replacement or storm damage.
• Rewrite the top of whichever page each Business Profile links to so it names the service area, the storm inspection and insurance process, the warranty split and the state license number.
• Ask every customer for a Google review at the final walkthrough, while the crew is still on the property.

The Cheers roofing program is built around that last step: review requests at closeout, tied to the crew that did the job, with AI visibility tracked by market.

Methodology

Every week, Cheers asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode the same 32 home-services questions in 100 metro areas across the United States and Canada, and records every business each engine names, with its star rating, review count and map position where the engine shows one, and every source it cites. This analysis covers the three weeks from August 31 to September 20, 2026: 34,742 usable answers (9,434 from ChatGPT, 9,435 from Google AI Mode, 9,364 from Gemini and 6,509 from Perplexity) across 60 US and 40 Canadian metros. We excluded empty or cut-off answers, most of them from a Perplexity collection outage. Each question was asked once per city per week, so week-to-week changes include normal answer-to-answer variation. Business names were extracted automatically; a hand check of 40 answers found the extraction caught about three in four of the businesses a reader would count, so counts are lower bounds. Star ratings and review counts are the figures each engine displayed; for ChatGPT and Gemini we captured them from September 18 and September 14 onward. Findings describe associations in this sample, not how any engine ranks businesses.

Roofing is two of the 32 questions: "which roofers have the strongest reviews and fair pricing?" and "who are the best roofing companies for roof repair or replacement?" They drew 600 answers from ChatGPT, 600 from Google AI Mode, 590 from Gemini and 386 from Perplexity. Google AI Mode's rating figures cover 2,426 rated appearances in 556 answers; ChatGPT's cover 1,183 in 200 answers from September 18 to 22, and Gemini's 875 in 243 answers from September 14 to 22. Gemini citation shares use the 323 roofing answers where its citations were captured. The storm, insurance, manufacturer-program and per-question dollar rates, and the Yelp split of ChatGPT's roofing cards, are extra counts we ran on September 23, 2026 over the same answers with the same exclusions. How the Market Baseline works is on our research methodology page.

Sources

• Cheers Market Baseline, Cheers-owned organization, 34,742 usable answers from four AI engines, August 31 to September 20, 2026. Source of every roofing and cross-trade figure above. Method: research methodology.
• How To Avoid Scams After Weather Emergencies and Natural Disasters. Federal Trade Commission, September 2025, checked September 23, 2026. Source of the quoted scam sign and the license check.
• Guidelines for representing your business on Google. Google Business Profile Help, undated, checked September 23, 2026. Source of the two-hour service-area quote.
• Business screening and verification requirements, United States. Google Local Services Help, undated, checked September 23, 2026. Source of the roofing insurance and license requirements.

Dylan Allen-Arnegård is the CEO & Co-Founder of Cheers, the local search platform for multi-location service businesses.