Why ChatGPT Quoted a Software Company Instead of Home Depot

I asked ChatGPT what it costs to start a pressure washing business on the side. Home Depot was in the answer, but only for the price of a pressure washer. The actual number came from a software company. Today I'll show you why that happened and how you can get your own side hustle named in AI Answers. This video is brought to you by SEMrush today. There's a link in the description if you want to check them out. This is exactly the type of question that your customers are typing right now and a lot of them are not typing it into Google, they're typing it into ChatGPT and whoever gets named in the answer gets the click. The trust and the sale eventually. ChatGPT took this question and went out and found an answer. And you can look at the sources of where it got the answer. For how much things cost, it went to Home Depot. And that's what I would expect. That's how Google works usually is that the big brands, you know, the household names, those are going to dominate most of the results. The bottom line, it actually did this Housecall Pro, which is a small company. I've never heard of it before. They actually implement AI to help run and grow your business. Whatever they've done, they've done a good job. They're showing up as the source for answering this question that I'm sure a lot of people are asking. That brings up a really good question. What are these guys doing right? What are they doing different than Home Depot or the other companies that would love to rank in ChatGPT for this question? And to answer that you have to kind of see the data behind both sites and that's where Semrush comes in. Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing platform. They handle SEO, content marketing, competitor research, advertising, local marketing, social media, and AI visibility, all in one tool. Instead of paying for five tools where you're having to jump back and forth between them, this handles pretty much your entire online presence for your business. For what we're doing today, the part that I care about is this AI visibility toolkit. When people ask AI tools about your topic, do you show up? Who shows up ahead of you? Well, Housecallpro.com, 4.2 thousand mentions, 17.7 thousand citations, but what's interesting here is SEMrush gives Housecall Pro a 29 out of 100, so it says that it's low. That score is across every question that people ask AI in their space, but on my specific question they actually got quoted. That's actually one of the points of this video is you don't have to win at every single search phrase people have, but you can target specific search phrases and be the best one to answer that specific question. So I want to see the same data, but for homedepot.com. Home Depot mentioned quite a bit more, a lot more citations, and they are medium on the list here. They do have a lot of good info down here, too, like topic opportunities. These are topics where your competitors are mentioned, but your brand is not there. This is very telling, too, that, you know, one of the biggest home improvement stores in the world, and they're at 44 out of 100 on AI visibility. We're very early. Same tool. I want to flip over to traditional search for the same site. Let's do again, housecallpro.com. This still, it gives kind of an overview of how they're doing in AI. But it also gives their search engine optimization. This is more traditional, you know, what you think of is how often are you showing up in Google's search results. So again, these different tools under one roof. So if you're going with SEMrush One, it includes both the SEO Toolkit and the AI Visibility Toolkit in one subscription. You're watching both kinds from one place. Here's how you could use this for your own business. Put in your own site here or a competitor's site. And look at the prompts where they get named and you don't. Go down again to topic opportunities and see, hey, where are my competitors getting mentioned that I'm not? And this is just one toolkit that SEMrush has, but there's also a local toolkit if you run a service business in your town. They have the social toolkit for your posts, and then they have the traffic and marketing toolkit for sizing up against competitors. You can pick whichever one fits with what you're building. But whether you're focused on SEO, AI search, or content marketing, SEMrush has the tools to help you grow there. They've been around for a long time. I've used I've used them for a really long time. So link will be down below for you to go check out SEMRush for yourself. Let's look a little deeper into Housecall Pro and specifically this article, which is what showed up as the citation for when I asked the question. First thing, their headline is pretty much exactly what I was asking about. That's a good way to rank when you're writing an article. You want it to match kind of the prompt that you're looking to match for. Something that I think they could do better, just noticing this year, but it was posted in 2024 and updated in 2025. But they could update this every few months since it's ranking so high. I mean, I'm a random guy in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I just found this. This is probably one that you could see on SEMrush. Hey, this is getting results. This is getting traffic. This is getting eyes. We should keep that updated every few months. Do you have any idea where you rank? Go type in ChatGPT and type in something that you think you should be an answer to that. Who's the best AI YouTuber with red hair or something like that? Then you can hop into SEMrush. You can look at what's actually in there. You can look at your brand. You can look at your competitors and you can come up with a strategy to get you higher. Sometimes people don't like to focus on search engine optimization or now this AI search optimization because it takes a while to start seeing results. People usually like to focus on paid ads or something where you're going to get to see the results right away, but you can consider this like planting a seed. Okay. These are going to be seeds that if you can start ranking for some of these prompts that people are going to be typing in more and more over time in a year or two years, or maybe five years, that could mean huge traffic to you and to your business. Go pick one or two prompts that you think your business should be ranking for, and then write some content, write some good content. Don't have Claude just throw something together. Claude can help you research it. You know, ChatGPT can help put together an outline, but write some really good content that answers that question better than you think anyone else answers that question. And then keep track of if you start showing up in the search results for that particular prompt. Again, SEMrush link is down in the description. Run your own site through it. We'd love to see some of your insights that you find. Comment down below the best insights that you found about your business using SEMrush. Thank you guys so much for watching, God bless you all, and have a great rest of your day.