Appearance rate
checks naming the organization / all its checks x 100
An appearance means the recorded answer named or recommended the tracked organization for a prompt we ran on its behalf.
Methodology
Show the math. Protect the business.
This is the operating contract behind every Cheers Research number: who enters the panel, what counts as an appearance, how a rate is calculated, and when a result stays private. The September 2, 2026 edition was pulled from Cheers production on September 3, 2026 at 04:05 UTC with read-only queries, and the query file ships in the repository next to the results.
Panel
Who is included
The home-services panel is 119 organizations with prompt checks recorded in the 28 days ending September 2, 2026, carrying 2,671,846 checks between them. Two comparison panels run beside it: 56 real-estate organizations and 47 in beauty and personal care.
market_baseline organizations excluded from every panel cut; organizations without a business_category excluded from vertical cuts (420 uncategorized organizations exist and are not published). An organization enters a published cell only when it matches the stated category, has checks inside the window, and does not drop the cell below 10 organizations.
The Market Baseline is the one Cheers-owned organization we publish, and we name it because it is ours. Organization 1424 exists to sample the market rather than to sell anything, so it is excluded from every customer cut and its own appearance rate is never reported. In this edition it recorded 356,019 citations.
Definitions
Appearance and citation are different
Citation rate
checks citing the organization / all its checks x 100
A citation means the recorded answer carried a source attributed to that organization. A business can be named without being linked, which is why the two rates are reported separately.
Two summaries appear on these pages and they answer different questions. An organization rate gives every business one vote: per organization: appearances / runs across all its tracked prompts, locations, and engines in the window; percentiles and means are taken across organizations (each organization counts once). A pooled rate gives every check one vote: sum of appearances / sum of runs across the cell (used only where stated: prompt shape, weekly trend, engine pooled). Percentile and mean figures are organization rates unless the chart says pooled, and the two diverge most where a handful of brands run enormous prompt volumes.
The weekly aggregates come from prompt_aggregates_weekly in Cheers production, filtered to rows with at least one recorded run. Mention position is recorded only when the engine actually named the business, so a position average is never diluted by the answers that left it out.
The exact method
Every rule this edition ran under
Method notes from the production pull
These lines ship inside the results file. They are reproduced here without editing.
| Rule | As recorded in the pull |
|---|---|
| Organization rate | per organization: appearances / runs across all its tracked prompts, locations, and engines in the window; percentiles and means are taken across organizations (each organization counts once) |
| Pooled rate | sum of appearances / sum of runs across the cell (used only where stated: prompt shape, weekly trend, engine pooled) |
| Exclusions | market_baseline organizations excluded from every panel cut; organizations without a business_category excluded from vertical cuts (420 uncategorized organizations exist and are not published) |
| Cell size | minimum 10 organizations per published cell; cells below 10 are suppressed and named as suppressed |
| Trades | organization.subcategory_ids joined to business_subcategory; an organization with several subcategories counts in each |
| Engines | provider table names: ChatGPT (openai), Gemini (google), Perplexity, GAIO (Google AI Overviews and AI Mode surfaces) |
| Window | 28 days ending 2026-09-02 (weeks with week_start >= 2026-08-05), prompt_aggregates_weekly rows with runs_count > 0 |
| Review velocity | reviews with created_at in the 90 days ending 2026-09-02, not deleted; per-organization monthly rate = 90-day count / 3; response rate = reviews with a non-empty owner response; Google share = reviews whose source contains google |
| Weekly trend | pooled across the home-services panel; week of 2026-08-31 is partial (through 2026-09-02); panel grew from 106 to 119 organizations over the period |
| Prompt shape | prompt text classified by regular expression on the tracked prompt; pooled rates; classes with fewer than 10 organizations suppressed |
| Market Baseline | Cheers Market Baseline (organization 1424, Cheers-owned, not a customer): 32 natural-language home-services prompts (10 HVAC, 8 plumbing, 6 electrical, 2 roofing, and one each for water damage restoration, duct cleaning, garage door, pest control, windows and doors, lawn care) run in 100 metro service areas (64 United States, 36 Canada) on four engines; about 810 runs per metro in the 28-day window (81,012 runs total). Its own appearance is meaningless (it is not a business); the published measure is which domains the engines cite. |
| Metro citation mix | per metro, 28 days, all four engines pooled; columns: citations, google share, directory share, social share, business-or-other share, distinct cited domains. In this pull the media/vendor class is folded into business-or-other. |
Citations
How a cited domain gets classified
The Market Baseline records every domain an engine cites, then sorts each one into a class by an explicit allow list. Anything that is not on a list is a business site, which is where contractor and franchise websites land. Those domains stay out of every published table. Platforms and directories are named because naming them is the useful part.
Domain classes and their members
The full classification used for the 2026-09-02 edition.
| Class | Domains |
|---|---|
| google.com | |
| Directories and review platforms | yelp.com, yelp.ca, bbb.org, angi.com, homeadvisor.com, thumbtack.com, expertise.com, houzz.com, homestars.com, yellowpages.com, yellowpages.ca, threebestrated.com, threebestrated.ca, trustanalytica.org, bestprosintown.com, consumeraffairs.com, trustpilot.com, birdeye.com, homeguide.com, bestpickreports.com, diamondcertified.org, prosgrade.com, proscore.ca, serviceagent.ai, industryoversight.ca, hvacservice.io, porch.com, networx.com |
| Social and forums | reddit.com, facebook.com, nextdoor.com, quora.com, youtube.com, instagram.com, tiktok.com, x.com, twitter.com |
| Media and vendors | forbes.com, yahoo.com, todayshomeowner.com, modernize.com, thisoldhouse.com, bobvila.com, consumerreports.org, usnews.com, housecallpro.com, servicetitan.com, furnaceprices.ca, homedepot.ca, homedepot.com, lowes.com, carrier.com, trane.com, lennox.com |
| Business sites | every other domain (contractor and franchise websites); never published by name |
Privacy
Ten organizations, or the number stays out
Every published customer number stands on at least 10 organizations. A thinner cell is suppressed and named as suppressed. We do not merge it into a nearby category, because merging is how a small group becomes identifiable. This edition suppressed 5 cells, listed on the index page.
Cheers Research never publishes customer names, domains, organization identifiers, raw prompts, raw answers, raw review rows, or location-level customer results. Missing access is reported as unavailable, never as zero. The build itself enforces the floor: the loader throws if a published cell falls below it, and every panel figure quoted in the statistics sourcebook is checked against the results file at build time.
Excluded
- Cheers-owned and internal organizations, including the Market Baseline
- Organizations with no business category recorded
- Weeks with no recorded runs
- Cells under 10 organizations
- Deleted reviews
Refresh record
What happened in this edition
Read-only queries ran against Cheers production on September 3, 2026 at 04:05 UTC and wrote a single aggregate results file. No customer rows were stored. The first edition of this page said the connection was unavailable and withheld four cuts; that pull has now run and those cuts are published here, so the earlier snapshot figures are superseded.
The public research set is reviewed quarterly. The next scheduled review is the fourth quarter of 2026. Every page carries its own last-verified date, and a figure that has not been rechecked keeps the date it was.
Citation
How to cite Cheers Research
Allen-Arnegård, Dylan. "Cheers Research Methodology." Cheers Research, September 2, 2026. https://www.cheers.tech/research/methodology. Accessed [date].
Cite the specific page whenever you can, and keep the published date, the last verified date, and the window attached to the number. See the statistics sourcebook or the 2026 home-services index.