Named, Not Booked: What ChatGPT and Gemini Actually Do When Homeowners Ask for a Local Service Company — 5,788 Paired Answers Across 20 Southeast US Metros (October 2026)

When a homeowner asks an AI assistant to recommend — or book — a local home-service company, what happens next? We asked ChatGPT and Gemini the same 12 homeowner-style questions for each of 12 home-service trades in 20 Southeast US metros, capturing 5,788 AI answers in October 2026. The assistants almost always name companies (99% of answers), but the two platforms named the identical #1 company in only 10.3% of paired questions. Being named rarely leads anywhere bookable: 79.1% of answers contained no booking path and no connector mention of any kind, and the connectors that were mentioned were overwhelmingly directories and marketplaces (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, Thumbtack) rather than the operator's own scheduling system — an operator's own scheduling platform (Housecall Pro, Jobber class) was named in just 4 of 5,788 answers. AI assistants have become a recommendation surface for local services; they are not yet a booking surface. The deposit includes the paper and a CSV of metro × trade × platform aggregates computed from the full dataset.