Fix your free BBB profile before you pay for accreditation. BBB keeps free profiles on millions of businesses, accredited or not, and when someone asks AI about a company by name, a business profile is the BBB page it links most. In our public grader's by-name answers about home-service companies from March to October 2026, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity cited a BBB page in 59.6% of answers and mentioned accreditation in only 10.8%.
Last verified: November 1, 2026.
Accreditation is a separate decision. "Who's best" questions are where it may count, since ChatGPT often links BBB's category lists, the pages that list businesses by trade and city, and page one of every list we read was accredited businesses. The sources AI reads give us a clear order of work: clean up every free profile this week, then decide accreditation location by location.
What accreditation adds, and what it costs
BBB's own pages and lists, read November 1, 2026
What every business gets from the BBB, and what accreditation adds
Free
Every business, accredited or not
- A BBB Business Profile, free to claim, with contact details, service area and start date
- A letter grade from A+ to F on 100 points, which a business can earn without paying
- Complaints you can answer; unanswered complaints can cost up to 40 of the 100 points
- Corrections through your local BBB (BBB Eastern North Carolina's update form says it isn't an accreditation application)
Paid
Only with accreditation
- The BBB seal, plus accredited status on the profile
- Get a Quote, which BBB lists among the benefits of accreditation
- On the 90 BBB category lists we read, page one held only accredited businesses (1,350 of 1,350 listings)
- Annual dues set by your local BBB, partly by size ($55 to $58 a month for up to 14 employees at BBB Midwest Plains)
- A B or better at every company-owned location and the headquarters
BBB, Overview of BBB Ratings (dated Sep 11, 2026); BBB Accreditation Standards (modified Oct 20, 2026); Get Accredited; get-listed page; BBB Eastern North Carolina update form; BBB Midwest Plains dues (modified Oct 23, 2026); 90 BBB category lists; all read Nov 1, 2026
The basics cost nothing. Any business can claim its BBB Business Profile, or ask for a new one, through BBB's get-listed page, and BBB's file for AI systems (its llms.txt) says a business can hold an A+ without being accredited. Complaints land on the profile either way, and corrections go through your local BBB.
Accreditation adds the BBB seal and accredited status on the profile, and BBB lists Get a Quote among the benefits, a way for shoppers to request a quote from your profile.
There's no national price: dues come from your local BBB, and BBB's accreditation standards (modified October 20, 2026) say fees rest partly on the size of the business. Two of the 10 local BBB sites we checked published dues: BBB Midwest Plains lists $55 to $58 a month for up to 14 employees (about $660 to $700 a year), and BBB Eastern New England lists plans starting at $30 a month.
The catch for multi-location companies: an accredited business has to keep at least a B rating at every company-owned location and at its headquarters, so one weak branch can hold up the whole application. BBB's national pages don't say how franchise systems are accredited.
Pay when you want the seal on estimates, trucks and your site, or Get a Quote on your profile, or when AI answers in your city link your trade's BBB list and page one of it is all accredited businesses (steps 3 and 4 below). You also have to be ready to hold every location to BBB's standards and its dispute process.
Wait if a location sits below a B or has open complaints nobody has worked, if an acquired brand's profile still shows its old name or phone number, or if you haven't claimed and corrected the free profile yet.
Buying a home-service company? Check each brand's BBB profiles and grades before anyone standardizes the spend; our acquisition due diligence guide covers the other review and AI checks.
What AI says when someone asks about your company by name
Perplexity leaned on the BBB hardest. Across 963 by-name answers about 325 home-service companies, it cited a BBB page in 81.8% of its answers, against 60.9% for ChatGPT and 36.3% for Gemini, and 56.5% of all answers named the BBB.
Cheers AI visibility grader, March to October 2026
By-name answers cited the BBB page and rarely mentioned accreditation
Cheers AI visibility grader, by-name answers dated Mar 17 to Oct 30, 2026, Pacific time (praise-or-complain wording to Oct 3, what-people-say wording from late September); queried Nov 1, 2026
| What the answer did | Asked what customers praise or complain about (814 answers, 274 businesses, to Oct. 3) | Asked what people say (149 answers, 51 businesses, from late September) |
|---|---|---|
| Cited a bbb.org page | 61.3% | 50.3% |
| Named the BBB in the text | 59.0% | 43.0% |
| Described BBB complaints on file | 27.1% | 13.4% |
| Quoted an A+ grade | 11.9% | 15.4% |
| Mentioned BBB accreditation | 10.6% | 12.1% |
The question's wording changed during the period, and the BBB page stayed far ahead of accreditation under both: 61.3% against 10.6%, then 50.3% against 12.1%. When the question asked for complaints, 27.1% of answers described complaints on file, against 13.4% under the newer wording, so most of that gap comes from how we asked.
The clearest sign that accreditation isn't the gate for by-name questions: in 32 answers an engine said a business wasn't accredited, and 28 of those still cited a BBB page.
Star ratings are the other BBB detail these answers repeat. When an answer quoted a business's BBB or Angi star rating, the figure ran 0.2 stars or more below that business's Google rating 44% of the time (27 of 61 ratings, 53 US businesses) and matched it within a tenth of a star 44% of the time. Our guide to why ChatGPT can show a lower star rating than Google covers why: a separate, smaller pool of reviews, quoted next to your Google rating.
What the BBB letter grade measures
The letter grade is mostly a complaint-handling score. BBB's ratings overview, dated September 11, 2026, scores a business on 100 points across 12 line items, and an A+ means 97 to 100. Customer reviews aren't part of the grade, and neither is accreditation; BBB's FAQ says dues don't buy a rating.
Apart from up to 10 points for time in business, every point a business can earn comes from its complaint record: answering complaints is worth up to 40 and resolving them up to 30. Everything else only takes points away. Five items can each cost up to 41, among them competency licensing and showing the seal when you aren't accredited, which BBB treats as misuse of its trademark.
BBB's llms.txt also says it doesn't verify third-party information or guarantee a profile's accuracy, so the profile is only as right as you keep it.
How often ChatGPT links the BBB, trade by trade, and which BBB page
In the Cheers Market Baseline, ChatGPT linked bbb.org in 20.1% of 8,100 US home-service answers with sources in October 2026, or 1,630 answers. By trade it ran from 44.6% for windows and doors down to 6.3% for lawn and landscaping. Five of those trades rest on one question asked in 60 US cities, so read each as that question's result, not the whole trade's.
Cheers Market Baseline, US, October 2026
ChatGPT links the BBB most for windows, restoration, garage doors and roofing
US ChatGPT answers citing bbb.org, October 2026
107 of 240 answers, one question
92 of 239, one question
87 of 237, one question
161 of 479, two questions
655 of 2,565
46 of 238, one question
316 of 2,433
151 of 1,432
15 of 237, one question
Cheers Market Baseline, 60 US cities, answers dated Oct 2 to 31, 2026; queried Nov 1, 2026
| Trade | Share of answers |
|---|---|
| Windows and doors | 44.6% (107 of 240 answers, one question) |
| Water damage restoration | 38.5% (92 of 239, one question) |
| Garage door | 36.7% (87 of 237, one question) |
| Roofing | 33.6% (161 of 479, two questions) |
| HVAC | 25.5% (655 of 2,565) |
| Pest control | 19.3% (46 of 238, one question) |
| Plumbing | 13% (316 of 2,433) |
| Electrical | 10.5% (151 of 1,432) |
| Lawn and landscaping | 6.3% (15 of 237, one question) |
Google's own engines barely touch the BBB: AI Mode linked it in 1.1% of US answers and Gemini in 3.3%.
A study Yelp commissioned, in its Q2 2026 shareholder letter (August 6, 2026), puts the BBB second only to Yelp among the home-services platforms it compared on organic US citations in four AI engines in Q4 2025, at about 149.7K against Yelp's 512.7K.
October's new answer layout changed the citation counts: Sistrix found ChatGPT switched to a building-block layout overnight on Oct. 8 to 9, 2026, and used it in 97% to 100% of sampled answers from Oct. 23. Before the switch, 10.7% of US ChatGPT answers linked the BBB. After it, ChatGPT cited 16.4 distinct sites per answer instead of 4.6, so bbb.org's share of all cited sites fell from 2.36% to 1.39% even as more answers linked it. Every big directory rose over the same split (our October index of local AI answers carries their shares), so read the jump as ChatGPT citing more sites per answer, not as the BBB winning a bigger share.
Which BBB page gets the link matters as much as how often. Of the US answers that linked bbb.org in October, 699 (42.9%) linked one of BBB's category lists. Our grader's buyer questions, like "Who are the best [trade] companies in [city]?", showed a similar split, counted by links: 41.7% of its BBB profile-or-list links went to a list, against 6.8% by name.
So we opened BBB's lists ourselves. On November 1 we read 90, nine categories in 10 of the panel's US cities, on BBB's default "Best Match" sort, the order our grader's category links point at. Every list showed 15 listings on page one, and all 1,350 carried the BBB Accredited Business seal. On the one list we paged to the end, garage door repair near Wichita, Kansas, the 80 accredited businesses among its 215 results came first; BBB doesn't publish how Best Match ranks, so treat that as the order we saw, not a rule.
BBB category lists, read November 1, 2026
Page one of every BBB list we read was accredited businesses
1,350 of 1,350
first-page listings carried the BBB Accredited Business seal
Base: 90 BBB category lists, default "Best Match" sort, 15 listings each, not signed in
42.9%
of US ChatGPT answers that cited the BBB in October linked one of its category lists
699 of 1,630 answers, Cheers Market Baseline
80 of 215
garage door repair listings near Wichita were accredited, and all 80 came before the first one that wasn't
one list read to the last page
BBB category lists for Plumber, Heating and Air Conditioning, Electrician, Roofing Contractors, Garage Door Repair, Pest Control, Water Damage Restoration, Window Installation and Landscape Contractors in Houston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Columbus, Denver, Nashville, Boston, Atlanta, Wichita and Cleveland, read Nov 1, 2026; bbb.org robots.txt and llms.txt; Cheers Market Baseline, US ChatGPT answers, Oct 2 to 31, 2026
| Finding | Value | Base |
|---|---|---|
| first-page listings carried the BBB Accredited Business seal | 1,350 of 1,350 | 90 BBB category lists, default "Best Match" sort, 15 listings each, not signed in |
| of US ChatGPT answers that cited the BBB in October linked one of its category lists | 42.9% | 699 of 1,630 answers, Cheers Market Baseline |
| garage door repair listings near Wichita were accredited, and all 80 came before the first one that wasn't | 80 of 215 | one list read to the last page |
BBB restricts automated access to some later-page URLs. Those directives do not establish what every AI system has seen through other sources or access paths. BBB's robots.txt blocks every URL with a query string except business profiles, for every crawler including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and its llms.txt says category pages past the first aren't crawlable.
For a branch, this makes the cited category page a useful place to check its presence, credentials and contact details.
Our September guides pooled US and Canadian cities from Aug. 31 to Sept. 20, before the layout change, so their numbers differ: our roofing guide had the BBB in 20.8% of roofing answers, against 37.2% across those cities in October, and our September source study had it in 14.5% of ChatGPT answers (9.8% in the US). Our study of which sites AI cites in each trade covers the rest of each answer, and our guide to the trust signals AI repeats about contractors covers how often answers name the BBB.
The license records AI reads next to the BBB
State license boards show up beside the BBB. In October, ChatGPT linked California's Contractors State License Board in 56.7% of answers in our 12 California panel cities, Arizona's Registrar of Contractors in 40.2% in three Arizona cities, and the Texas licensing department or the state plumbing board in 20.1% in eight Texas cities.
Perplexity points the same way. Of the 969 searches it limited to one website on US-city questions in our search log from Aug. 6, 240 went to the BBB and 122 to state license boards and government license pages; our study of what Perplexity searches for local service questions has the rest of that log.
Both state lookups are public, and buyers can run them too. California's Check a License searches by license number, business name, personnel name or HIS registration and shows complaint disclosures, while the Texas license data search covers active licenses only.
Put the same license number on each location page, the way our guide to publishing license and insurance proof lays out, so the state lookup, the BBB profile and your site all match.
A BBB check for every location
Do the first two this week; only step 7 involves paying BBB.
Step 1: Find and claim every profile. Search bbb.org for every location, including old names, DBAs and acquired brands, and claim any you haven't through BBB's get-listed page. Check the name, phone, street address, service area, start date and license number against the Google Business Profile, send corrections through your local BBB, and link each corrected profile from that location's page.
Step 2: Answer every open complaint. Give one person the job of answering each open complaint in good faith and working it toward a resolution. Answering and resolving are the two biggest items a business can earn points on.
Step 3: Run two AI tests. For your busiest locations, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity "What do people say about [company] in [city]?" and "Who are the best [trade] companies in [city]?" Note whether each answer links the BBB, your profile or a category list, what it repeats (complaints, the grade, accreditation, a star rating) and how any BBB star rating compares with your Google rating. Cheers' free AI visibility check is another place to start.
Step 4: Read your trade's BBB list. Open BBB's category list for your trade in each city you serve (bbb.org/us/[state]/[city]/category/[category]), note where you appear, and check whether page one is still all accredited businesses. BBB's crawl directives restrict some later-page URLs, making the default first page especially relevant to this check.
Step 5: Pull any seal you haven't earned. Take the BBB seal or logo off your website, trucks and ads unless you're accredited, because BBB counts that as trademark infringement.
Step 6: Match the license record. Use the same legal name and license number on the state lookup, the BBB profile and the location page.
Step 7: Decide accreditation location by location. Get the dues in writing from each local BBB and confirm every company-owned location and the headquarters holds a B or better. Portfolio teams should track one row per location before standardizing: profile claimed, letter grade, open complaints, accredited or not, and whether it's on page one of its trade's list. Franchise systems should ask the local BBB which locations an application covers.
Once each profile is clean, add its URL to that location's sameAs list, next to its Google, Yelp and Angi profiles; our sameAs guide shows how. An old phone number on a BBB profile is one of the copies ChatGPT can repeat, and our study of phone numbers in ChatGPT's local answers has more.
Fix the free records first, then evaluate accreditation as a credibility and customer-acquisition decision. Set each location's dues against the jobs the seal and Get a Quote need to bring in, and track that result.
Method
The Cheers Market Baseline is our research panel: every week it asks ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini the same 32 home-service questions in 100 metro areas, 60 in the US and 40 in Canada. The numbers here use answers and their cited links from October 2 to 31, 2026. US shares count answers with at least one captured citation: 8,100 for ChatGPT, 8,179 for Google AI Mode and 4,626 for Gemini (partial, since it carried citations only in its cited-answer mode, which grew through October). Each answer's trade comes from the question's wording, and the BBB page type from the path of each cited link.
ChatGPT by trade: windows and doors 44.6% (107 of 240), water damage restoration 38.5% (92 of 239), garage door 36.7% (87 of 237), roofing 33.6% (161 of 479, two questions), HVAC 25.5% (655 of 2,565), pest control 19.3% (46 of 238), plumbing 13.0% (316 of 2,433), electrical 10.5% (151 of 1,432) and lawn 6.3% (15 of 237). From Oct. 2 to 8, 193 of 1,796 US ChatGPT answers linked the BBB. The license-board shares count all 32 questions across both October layouts (915 of 1,615 answers in California, 162 of 403 in Arizona, 217 of 1,077 in Texas). The Perplexity search log runs July 2 to October 14, 2026.
For the BBB lists, we read 90 category pages on bbb.org on November 1, 2026, without signing in, on the default sort and page one only: nine categories (Plumber, Heating and Air Conditioning, Electrician, Roofing Contractors, Garage Door Repair, Pest Control, Water Damage Restoration, Window Installation, and Landscape Contractors standing in for lawn care) in Houston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Columbus, Denver, Nashville, Boston, Atlanta, Wichita and Cleveland. Of the 1,350 first-page listings, 1,229 (91.0%) showed an A+. It's our sample, not the exact pages ChatGPT cited. The same day we checked 10 local BBB sites for dues and read BBB's ratings overview, standards, FAQ, llms.txt and robots.txt.
The Cheers AI visibility grader asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity through each company's developer API, not the consumer apps, with web search on. For each business it asks four buyer questions built from its category and city and one that names the business and asks what customers say about it (until early October, what they praise or complain about), each as a fresh request with no signed-in user, chat history or personalization. Since September 23, ChatGPT and Perplexity also receive the business's city as the asker's approximate location, and the buyer questions changed wording in late September. API answers can differ from what a signed-in person sees in the apps, and engine models change; this sample spans March 17 to October 30, 2026, Pacific time.
The 963 home-service answers cover 325 businesses, 318 with US addresses, from the latest complete grader run for each business with internal runs removed. Perplexity gave 318 of them, ChatGPT 325 and Gemini 320; 12 more requests errored or came back empty. The praise-or-complain wording drew 814 answers about 274 businesses and the what-people-say wording 149 about 51; under the first, 59.0% named the BBB and 11.9% quoted an A+ grade, under the second 43.0% and 15.4%. Text measures are pattern counts, checked against a sample of 40 answers.
Across all 963, 5.4% brought up the complaint record only to say it showed no or few complaints. The profile-versus-list split counts links and covers 291 businesses on each question type (634 of 1,519 links on buyer questions, 45 of 662 by name). The star-rating comparison covers every graded business, in any trade.
To cite this study: Cheers Market Baseline (October 2026) and Cheers AI visibility grader (March to October 2026), BBB citations in home-service AI answers; BBB category lists read November 1, 2026.
Sources
- Submit a business to our directory, BBB, undated. Free profile claims and new listings.
- llms.txt, BBB, undated. A+ without accreditation, profile accuracy, crawlable category pages.
- Get Accredited, BBB, undated. Get a Quote among accreditation benefits.
- BBB Accreditation Standards, BBB, modified October 20, 2026. B-or-better rule and size-based fees.
- Benefits of Accreditation, BBB Midwest Plains, modified October 23, 2026. Published monthly dues.
- Membership Plans, BBB Eastern New England, modified September 27, 2026. Plans starting at $30 a month.
- Overview of BBB Ratings, BBB, September 11, 2026. How the letter grade is scored.
- Frequently asked questions about BBB, BBB, modified October 19, 2026. Dues don't buy a rating.
- Q2 2026 Letter to Shareholders, Yelp Inc. (SEC EDGAR), August 6, 2026. BBB's place in Yelp's commissioned citation study.
- What changed in ChatGPT in October: GPT-6, UTM tracking and sources, Sistrix, October 30, 2026. ChatGPT's October layout switch.
- robots.txt, BBB, undated. AI crawlers kept off pages past the first.
- Check a License, Contractors State License Board (California), undated. California license search fields and complaint disclosures.
- License Data Search, Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, data updated October 31, 2026. Texas search covers active licenses only.
Sources read November 1, 2026.
Dylan Allen-Arnegård is the CEO & Co-Founder of Cheers, the done-for-you local visibility partner for established home-service companies and PE-backed portfolios.