Across 840 trade-and-metro leaderboards, the dominance of national chains ranges from half of all mentions in moving to effectively zero in five other trades.
SACRAMENTO, Calif., August 28, 2026 — According to data released today by MentionedOn, across 840 local-service leaderboards covering 21 trades in 40 US metropolitan areas, AI assistants recommended an average of 9.2 businesses per trade, yet 56.2% of all mentions went to just three of them.
Key statistics:
• 56.2% of mentions go to the top three: In any given trade and metro, the three most frequently named businesses received more than half of all mentions. As a result, a listing in fourth place gets very little of the available attention.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
• 24.7% of mentions go to the top one: The single most-mentioned business captured roughly a quarter of every mention available in its trade and metro.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
• 9.2 businesses named on average (median 10): Assistants listed a limited set per trade and metro, rather than surveying the full local market.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
• 54 brands, 17.9% of all mentions: National brands—defined as names appearing in at least 10 of the 40 metros—accounted for a small minority of overall mentions.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
• 2 brands present in all 40 metros: Only two brands in the entire study were named in every one of the 40 metros surveyed: Two Men and a Truck, and Terminix.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
• movers 51%, pest control 42%, accountants 37%, versus 0% in five trades: Chain dominance is not a universal feature of AI local search. It is concentrated in a few trades, while others were almost entirely independent businesses.
Source: MentionedOn leaderboard dataset, 840 reports through 2026-08-22
For a single business owner, the key insight is the concentration of recommendations, not the presence of chains. When an AI assistant responds to a query like "who is the best plumber in Sacramento", it doesn’t generate a full directory. Instead, it creates a short list, and that list is heavily weighted toward its top entries. Being ranked fourth in a trade yields only a fraction of the visibility that being first does.
The narrative around national brands proved to be much more inconsistent than anticipated. In moving services, 51% of all mentions went to brands that appear across at least a quarter of the metros studied, and pest control saw 42% of mentions go to such brands. Only two names—Two Men and a Truck and Terminix—appeared in all 40 metros within the entire dataset.
In five out of the 21 trades examined, that share was essentially zero. HVAC, legal services, veterinary care, real estate, and medical spas were addressed almost exclusively with independent local businesses. Owners in those trades have a wide-open field. In contrast, for moving or pest control, roughly half of the available recommendation space is already taken before any local market factors come into play.
Overall, the assistants named 5,552 unique businesses across the entire dataset, underscoring that these systems aren’t merely listing the biggest advertiser in each category. Instead, they produce a brief, specific, and highly concentrated answer, and the businesses included vary greatly depending on the trade.
"Business owners often ask whether AI is aware of their existence. The more relevant question is whether AI places them among the first three names, because beyond that, the gap between being mentioned and being invisible becomes minimal," stated John Arndt, Founder of MentionedOn.
Methodology
MentionedOn generates a public leaderboard for each combination of 21 local-service trades and 40 US metropolitan areas by asking five category questions to two AI assistants and extracting the business names each one recommends. The figures above use the most recent leaderboard per trade and metro as of 2026-08-22, covering 840 leaderboards and 8,400 assistant answers, from a corpus that began on 2026-06-18. "National brand" is defined as a name appearing in at least 10 of the 40 metros; no external brand list is used. The 21 trades and 40 metros were selected by MentionedOn and are not a random sample of US local businesses, so shares should be interpreted as descriptive of this corpus rather than as national estimates. Mention counts measure how often a name was recommended, not revenue, quality, or customer satisfaction.
More information: https://mentioned-on.com/top
John Arndt
MentionedOn
hello@mentioned-on.com
