Web Cited Research / Head-to-Head

Roto-Rooter vs Mr. Rooter in AI search.

We asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity 5 buyer questions about emergency and residential plumbing services. Then we counted how often each brand showed up.

Published May 15, 2026 · National plumbing service franchises (service area)
Roto-Rooter
21 / 60
LLM responses cited Roto-Rooter
Mr. Rooter
23 / 60
LLM responses cited Mr. Rooter

Mr. Rooter is more visible in AI search across this prompt set, by 2 citations.

The finding in one paragraph

Service-area businesses (plumbing, HVAC, electrical) compete for the moment a customer types an emergency search into Google or, increasingly, an AI assistant. We tested 5 standardized buyer questions a homeowner or facility manager might plausibly ask. Each question ran 3 times per engine across 4 engines. The result, per-engine breakdown, and per-prompt comparison are below.

Per-engine breakdown

Engine Roto-Rooter Mr. Rooter Edge
ChatGPT12 / 156 / 15Roto-Rooter by 6
Claude3 / 159 / 15Mr. Rooter by 6
Gemini0 / 153 / 15Mr. Rooter by 3
Perplexity6 / 155 / 15Roto-Rooter by 1

Per-prompt comparison

Each prompt was asked 12 times (4 engines × 3 trials). The cells show how often each brand showed up in those 12 responses.

Buyer prompt Roto-Rooter Mr. Rooter
Who is the best national plumbing service for emergency repairs in the United States?7 / 126 / 12
What national plumbing franchise has the most US coverage and 24-hour availability?4 / 127 / 12
Which plumbing service provides the fastest emergency response for residential customers?2 / 125 / 12
What are the top national plumbing service companies for commercial buildings?4 / 125 / 12
Who should a homeowner call for an emergency clogged drain or backed-up sewer line?4 / 120 / 12

What the full audit would fix for a service-area business brand

The head-to-head above measures citation share on a single shared prompt set. The paid SXO Audit produces specific, copy-paste-ready fix recommendations across the categories below. Counts are the approximate number of distinct fix recommendations the audit pipeline can produce per brand; the exact count varies by site.

Fix category Fix recommendations
Core fix categories (every audit)
AI Search Visibility (LLM citations across 4 engines)8
Schema Markup & JSON-LD (Organization, Product, FAQPage)6
Buyer-Prompt-Matching FAQ + Content5
Technical SEO Foundations (crawlability, render, canonicals)7
Knowledge Graph & Entity Signals4
Citation Footprints (third-party signals)5
Core Web Vitals & Performance4
Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)5
Core subtotal~44
Additional service-area-specific fix categories
Service-Area Business Configuration (GBP service areas, not pin)6
AI Search for Emergency + Urgent Queries7
Service Schema (Service, OfferCatalog, ServiceArea)5
"Near Me" + Service-Specific Optimization6
Phone + Booking Path Optimization4
Trust Signals (Licensing, Certifications, BBB)5
24/7 Availability + Hours Schema4
Service-Area Review Aggregation5
Additional subtotal~42
Total fix recommendations per brand~86

Every Web Cited audit includes the core fix categories above. A service-area business brand gets all of those PLUS the additional fix categories specific to service-area business businesses, because the channels and signals AI assistants consult for service-area business brands are different. The result is a meaningfully larger fix set for service-area business brands (~86 recommendations) than for online-only brands (~44 recommendations). The Playbook ships every fix as a copy-paste-ready remediation with the file, code, or content change spelled out.

Methodology

Identical to the Web Cited AI Visibility Index methodology. Replicable by anyone with API access to the four engines.

Engines tested
OpenAI ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini)
Anthropic Claude (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001)
Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash-lite)
Perplexity (sonar)
Settings
temperature 0.2
max_tokens 800
N = 3 trials per (engine, prompt)
Total LLM calls
120
2 brands × 4 engines × 5 prompts × 3 trials
Match criteria
case-insensitive substring match of brand domain OR brand name anywhere in the response

The 5 standardized buyer prompts

  1. Who is the best national plumbing service for emergency repairs in the United States?
  2. What national plumbing franchise has the most US coverage and 24-hour availability?
  3. Which plumbing service provides the fastest emergency response for residential customers?
  4. What are the top national plumbing service companies for commercial buildings?
  5. Who should a homeowner call for an emergency clogged drain or backed-up sewer line?
Known limitations. Substring matching can miss paraphrased mentions. LLM responses vary; N=3 reduces but does not eliminate variance. Same domain-based methodology as the full Web Cited audit.

Want to know how your brand stacks up?

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