An HVAC AI citation audit should separate repair, replacement, maintenance, heat-pump, emergency, and brand-specific prompts in the same city. The platforms can name different contractors for each job. Several API runs per prompt produce a mention rate and a list of cited directories, review sites, local articles, and company pages behind those answers.
A homeowner with no cooling asks a different question from someone comparing a planned heat-pump replacement. If every prompt is collapsed into “best HVAC company,” the report hides the service pages and sources that matter. The local audit preserves the buyer's wording and reports which public entities the platform associated with that job and place.
What the record changes
The source pass checks business name, service area, address where appropriate, phone number, hours, and service-page coverage. It also notes whether the same company is split across old names or locations. The fix list can identify a missing service or location page, but it cannot promise that creating one will make an AI platform name the company.
- Home services were one of the verticals selected in the original offer research because buyer-intent prompts have clear service and city inputs.
- The report preserves every dated answer and computes rates rather than presenting a single generated list as an absolute ranking.
- No customer records, call logs, or private lead data are needed to run the public citation check.
How to use this answer
An AI citation check defines buyer-intent prompts for one service and place, runs each prompt several times through the platforms' APIs, and records every named practice and cited source. The report uses mention and citation rates over a stated run count because a single answer can change on the next run. Entity checks then compare the practice's name, address, phone, service, and location pages across the sources that appeared.
- Choose the service, city, and buyer question before naming the practice you want to measure.
- Run each prompt several times on each API, save the verbatim dated answers, and calculate rates from the full run set.
- Inspect the cited directories, articles, and local pages for entity consistency, then prioritize fixes on surfaces the practice controls.
Where the service stops
Reality Contact, LLC runs prompts through platform APIs and reports dated sampled answers. API output is a proxy for consumer-app output and can differ from it. We report who appears and which sources the answer cites. We do not get a practice named, cited, ranked, or recommended, and we do not rate competitors. This is not legal advice or financial advice, and it is not advertising-compliance advice.
Sources: OpenAI web-search documentation; Perplexity Sonar documentation; Google Gemini grounding documentation.