Short answer: we asked ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity 12 buying questions about field service management software, 3 times each. The 108 answers carried 1,493 citations. Only 312 pointed at the websites of the 18 vendors we tracked. The other 1,181 pointed at comparison pages, pricing guides, roundups and the blogs of other software companies. ServiceTitan was named in more answers than any other brand (55), and in 22 of those, none of its own pages was the source.
Who is asking
I am Elizabeta Kuzevska, Co-Founder of Revenue Experts. I spent more than twenty years in finance, including running the financial department of a government office, before I moved into marketing and AI. Finance taught me one rule I still work by: a claim you cannot trace is a claim you cannot trust.
At Revenue Experts we apply that rule to AI search. We run public studies of one buying category at a time and record two things for every answer: which companies the AI assistant names, and which pages it uses as the source. This is our third public study, after retail point-of-sale software (NRS) and AI governance software (OAIS). Everything behind it, from the frozen questions to the 108 answer records, is in the evidence package listed under Sources.
Key facts from the study
| Fact | Count |
| Buying questions (frozen before the run, no brand names) | 12 |
| AI assistants | 3: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity |
| Runs per question per assistant | 3 |
| Answers analysed (all with web search confirmed) | 108 |
| Citations in those answers | 1,493 |
| Citations to the 18 tracked vendors’ own websites | 312 |
| Citations to other sites | 1,181 |
| Citations of myquoteiq.com, the second most cited site | 63 |
| Answers naming ServiceTitan | 55 of 108 |
| Answers citing ServiceTitan’s own pages | 37 of 108 |
| Answers naming ServiceTitan with none of its own pages cited | 22 of 55 |
| Run date | 19 September 2026 |
Why field service software?
Field service management software runs the crews of HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies: scheduling, dispatch, quotes, invoices and service agreements. The buyer we wrote for is the owner or operations leader of an established contracting company with roughly 20 to 200 field technicians, choosing or switching software.
That buyer asks practical questions. Three of the twelve we used, word for word:
- “What are the best software platforms for running an HVAC company with 50 field technicians?”
- “Flat monthly software fee vs paying per technician seat, which pricing model saves money as I add techs?”
- “We keep losing track of jobs and double-booking techs. How do other shops fix this?”
The category has one clear leader, ServiceTitan, and several strong challengers. If the biggest brand in a category has gaps in AI answers, every smaller company should check its own.
The scorecard: named versus cited
We counted, for each brand, how many answers named it and how many cited a page on its own website. Nine brands appeared often enough to rank (named in at least 2 different questions).
| Brand | Answers naming it (of 108) | Answers citing its own pages | Named, none of its pages cited | Own page cited, never named |
| ServiceTitan | 55 | 37 | 22 | 4 |
| Jobber | 45 | 25 | 20 | 0 |
| Housecall Pro | 44 | 33 | 14 | 3 |
| FieldEdge | 22 | 15 | 14 | 7 |
| FieldPulse | 17 | 19 | 6 | 8 |
| Service Fusion | 17 | 20 | 7 | 10 |
| Workiz | 15 | 16 | 7 | 8 |
| Simpro | 13 | 6 | 7 | 0 |
| BuildOps | 12 | 18 | 5 | 11 |
The last two columns show the two ways a company loses control of its own story in AI answers. In the first, the assistant knows your name and uses someone else’s page. In the second, it uses your page and never tells the reader it was yours. The other nine vendors on our list were named in fewer than 2 questions and are not ranked.
Question by question
Each question was asked 9 times (3 assistants, 3 runs). This table shows which brand was named most and whose own pages were cited most on each one.
| Buying question (shortened) | Named most (of 9) | Own pages cited most (of 9) |
| Best platforms for an HVAC company with 50 technicians | ServiceTitan and FieldEdge (9 each) | Housecall Pro and Workiz (6 each) |
| All-in-one tools for scheduling and dispatching a plumbing crew | ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro (9 each) | ServiceTitan (8) |
| Losing track of jobs and double-booking technicians | Housecall Pro (3) | Housecall Pro (4) |
| Office staff on the phone all day, leads slipping through | None of the tracked vendors | None |
| All-in-one platform or separate scheduling and invoicing tools | ServiceTitan (4) | ServiceTitan (4) |
| Flat monthly fee or paying per technician seat | None of the tracked vendors | Service Fusion (5) |
| Locked-in payments and financing, or keep your own | ServiceTitan and Jobber (4 each) | Jobber and FieldPulse (3 each) |
| Should a 40-technician electrical company buy software, and the full cost | ServiceTitan (7) | Service Fusion (6) |
| How service agreements and memberships work, and their cost | Housecall Pro (6) | Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan (6 each) |
| What happens when the software goes down or a technician loses internet | ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro (1 each) | One Salesforce page (1) |
| Dispatch and reporting across five branches | ServiceTitan (8) | BuildOps (5) |
| US phone support, payroll and sales tax | Jobber and Housecall Pro (9 each) | Jobber and ServiceTitan (6 each) |
Two patterns stand out. On the questions about cost, the brand named most was rarely the brand whose pages were cited. And two questions were close to unclaimed.
Where did the 1,493 citations go?
312 of the 1,493 citations pointed at the websites of the 18 vendors on our list. The other 1,181 pointed somewhere else.
The second most cited site in the whole study was myquoteiq.com, with 63 citations. It is the blog of QuoteIQ, a field service software company that was not on our list of 18. Its citations went to roundups such as “Top 10 Plumbing Field Service Software In 2026”. QuoteIQ was also named in 8 answers. Only ServiceTitan’s own website was cited more, 68 times.
These are the third-party pages cited most often, by the title each page returned:
| Page title | Site | Citations |
| Best Software for HVAC Field Service Companies | fieldservicesoftware.io | 14 |
| Field Service Software Pricing: What FSM Really Costs | swivl.tech | 12 |
| Best Dispatching Softwares for Field Service Businesses in 2026 | arrivy.com | 12 |
| Service Agreement Software for Field Service Businesses | aptora.com | 11 |
| FSM Software vs All-in-One Platforms | intelligenthq.com | 10 |
| Per-Seat vs Flat-Fee FSM Pricing | fsmadvisor.com | 10 |
| How Much Does Field Service Software Cost? (2026 Pricing Guide) | fieldserviceguide.com | 10 |
Each one is a comparison, a price breakdown, or a direct answer to one narrow buying question. Three of the seven are about price. None is a vendor homepage. Several sit on the blogs of other field service software companies.
Even the leader does not own every answer about itself
ServiceTitan was named in 55 answers and its own pages were cited in 37, more than any other brand on both counts. A standard AI visibility scan would put it on top and stop there.
In 22 of the 55 answers that named ServiceTitan, none of its own pages was cited. The assistant knew the brand, described it, and backed the description with someone else’s page.
Look at which ServiceTitan pages did get cited. We opened the 27 distinct ServiceTitan addresses the assistants used; 26 loaded and 1 returned an access error. Besides product pages (features, dispatching, payments, pricing), they included ServiceTitan’s own comparison content, such as “ServiceTitan vs Housecall Pro”, “ServiceTitan vs. Jobber” and “7 Best Field Service CRMs”, and help-centre articles on dispatching, payments, memberships and sales tax. Where the leader had published the answer to a buyer’s comparison or how-to question, the assistants used it.
The assistants did not reward the same companies
On ChatGPT, the leaders’ own pages dominated: ServiceTitan’s were cited in 21 of 36 answers, Housecall Pro’s in 19 and Jobber’s in 18. On Perplexity, FieldPulse, Service Fusion, Workiz and BuildOps were each cited in 9 answers, as many as Housecall Pro, while ServiceTitan was cited in 6 and Jobber in 3. Claude sat in between.
Same questions, same day, same brands. A single AI visibility score averaged across the three would hide all of this.
What each competitor’s result teaches
ServiceTitan and Jobber: being known did not make them the source. Named in 55 and 45 answers, with none of their own pages cited in 22 and 20 of them. Jobber’s pages were never cited in an answer that did not already name Jobber. What it means for you: a mention count measures the easy half.
Housecall Pro: pages for real questions closed the gap. Named in 44 answers and cited in 33, the smallest gap of the three leaders. It was the most cited brand on the double-booking question and matched its mentions 6 for 6 on memberships. What it means for you: map each buying question to a page.
Service Fusion: answering the price question made it the source. On the pricing question, none of the 18 tracked vendors was named, yet Service Fusion’s pages were cited in 5 of 9 answers, and in 6 on the full-cost question. What it means for you: the assistants answer the price question whether you publish price information or not.
BuildOps: the page worked, the name did not travel. Cited in 18 answers, named in 12; in 11 answers a BuildOps page was a source and the reader never saw the name. Service Fusion had the same pattern in 10. What it means for you: put your company name in the sentences that define, compare and quantify.
FieldEdge: a name without proof pages is fragile. Named in 22 answers, with none of its pages cited in 14. On Claude it was named 10 times and cited twice. What it means for you: publish the pages that prove what buyers already say about you.
QuoteIQ: the roundup page wins citations. A software company we were not even tracking earned 63 citations, close to the market leader’s 68, with “best software” roundups on its own blog. What it means for you: if buyers ask for a list of options, someone will publish that list. It can be you.
How to improve: six moves, in order
These come from what the study shows. They are well-founded bets to test on your own category, not guarantees.
- Publish a price explainer. Title it as the question your buyers ask about cost. Explain how you price, what changes the price and a typical range. First step: search your own site for “how much does [your category] cost” and see what comes up.
- Give each real buying question its own page. Question as the title, answer in the first screen, a table where it helps. First step: list the 10 questions your sales team hears before a deal and write next to each the page that answers it.
- Publish an honest comparison or roundup of your category, competitors included, with a “best for” line per option. First step: check who wrote the comparison pages your buyers find today.
- Put your name inside the facts. Definitions, table headers and page titles should carry your company name. First step: rewrite the first sentence of your three most important pages.
- Make your help centre readable. Help articles were part of the leader’s cited pages. First step: open three help articles in a private browser window and confirm they load without a login.
- Measure each assistant on its own, then re-run. First step: ask one buying question in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity and mark, for each, whether you were named and whether your own page was cited. Repeat in 4 weeks after you publish a new page.
Is this you?
If two of these sound familiar, your category probably has the same gaps:
- Your sales team hears “ChatGPT suggested you” or “ChatGPT suggested them”, and nobody knows which page it used.
- No page on your site answers “how much does it cost” or “which option fits a company like mine”.
- The comparison pages in your category were written by review sites or by your competitors.
- Nobody on your team has asked the same buying question in all three assistants and compared the sources.
How the study was run
- Buyer: owner or operations leader of an established US home or commercial services company (HVAC, plumbing, electrical), roughly 20 to 200 field technicians.
- Questions: 12, brand-neutral, written the way a buyer types them, frozen and pushed to a version-controlled repository before the first query on 19 September 2026.
- Assistants: ChatGPT (gpt-5.6-luna), Claude (claude-opus-4-8) and Perplexity (sonar-pro), through their APIs with web search required (Claude through a prompt instruction). This measures the assistants when they search, not the consumer apps. Gemini was excluded under Google Cloud’s service terms.
- Runs: 3 per question per assistant, a fresh session each time. 108 planned, 108 completed, 108 with confirmed search.
- Brands: a frozen list of 18 field service vendors. A citation counted for a brand only when the page sat on the brand’s own domain, subdomains included. Every other page was logged as third-party, including the blogs of software companies not on the list.
- Page check: each cited page was opened on 20 September 2026 to confirm it loads and to record its title, and the pages named in this article were opened again on 3 October 2026. Whether each page supports the sentence beside it was not checked in this run.
The prediction we wrote before the run
Before the first question, we recorded a prediction: 0.70 agreement between the “named most” and “cited most” rankings. The result was 0.745. By the rule we also set in advance, that is inconclusive. Only 9 brands qualified and our rule needs 10, so the result is also underpowered and we applied no verdict. The counts in this article do not depend on that statistic.
A mistake we caught
Our first scoring pass matched citations to the exact web address, so pages on a vendor’s subdomains, such as help.servicetitan.com, were not counted as that vendor’s own. It undercounted owned citations for ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber. We fixed it before writing the report, and no published figure used the first pass. When we ran this kind of check on our own website in June, revenueexperts.ai was cited only on the 4 questions that used our name, out of 50. We hold ourselves to the same test.
What the study did not measure
This is one category on one date, with 3 runs per question, so the results are counts, not rates. The study records which brands were named and which pages were cited. It does not show what any buyer did, and a missing citation is not a lost sale.
Frequently asked questions
Which field service software do AI assistants name most often?
In this study, ServiceTitan was named in 55 of 108 answers, followed by Jobber (45) and Housecall Pro (44). ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity were each asked 12 buying questions three times on 19 September 2026.
Do AI assistants cite vendor websites when recommending field service software?
Less often than other sites. Of 1,493 citations, 312 pointed at the websites of the 18 vendors tracked and 1,181 pointed at comparison pages, pricing guides, roundups and other software companies’ blogs.
Is being named by an AI assistant the same as being cited?
No. In 22 of the 55 answers that named ServiceTitan, none of its own pages was cited. BuildOps had the reverse: its pages were cited in 11 answers that never named it.
Which brand’s pages were cited on the pricing question?
On the question of a flat monthly fee versus paying per technician seat, none of the 18 tracked vendors was named in 9 answers. Service Fusion’s pages were cited in 5, and the blog of QuoteIQ, a software company not on the list, in 3.
Do ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity cite the same companies?
Not in this study. On ChatGPT, ServiceTitan’s pages were cited in 21 of 36 answers; on Perplexity, in 6. Four challengers were each cited in 9 Perplexity answers.
How many AI answers did the study analyse?
108: 12 questions, 3 assistants, 3 runs each, all with web search confirmed.
Want this study for your own category?
This study used 12 questions. Our audit runs the same method on your category and your competitors. We write your buyers’ questions with you and freeze them before the run, ask them in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, separate being named from being cited, open the pages the assistants cite in your place, check whether AI assistants can reach your site, and hand you the fixes in order. The audit costs $1,495 and takes 2 to 5 days.
The easy first step is free: a 12-prompt sample report on your category. Ask for it here: https://revenueexperts.ai/aeo-service/. We answer within two working days.
To talk it through, book a 20-minute fit call with John Bush, Co-Founder of Revenue Experts: https://meetings.hubspot.com/john2956
Sources
- Revenue Experts, ServiceTitan study, run 19 September 2026. Evidence package (frozen questions, brand list, assistant settings, prediction, the 108 answer records with their citations, page check; full answer text withheld): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15LmHMNGXGXt0VUXtkHltRYQk2AunqUlr?usp=sharing
- Third-party pages cited, with citation counts from the study. Each loaded at the 20 September 2026 page check and was opened again on 3 October 2026:
- QuoteIQ blog, for example “Top 10 Plumbing Field Service Software In 2026”: https://myquoteiq.com/top-10-plumbing-field-service-software-in-2026/ (loaded 3 Oct)
- “Best Software for HVAC Field Service Companies”: https://fieldservicesoftware.io/best-field-service-software/best-software-for-hvac-field-service-companies/ (loaded 3 Oct)
- “Field Service Software Pricing: What FSM Really Costs”: https://swivl.tech/blog/field-service-software-cost-guide (loaded 3 Oct)
- “Best Dispatching Softwares for Field Service Businesses in 2026”: https://www.arrivy.com/blog/best-dispatching-softwares-for-field-service-businesses/ (loaded 3 Oct)
- “Service Agreement Software for Field Service Businesses”: https://www.aptora.com/features/service-agreements (loaded 3 Oct)
- “FSM Software vs All-in-One Platforms”: https://www.intelligenthq.com/fsm-software-vs-all-in-one-platforms-how-should-field-service-teams-choose/ (loaded 20 Sep; the site could not be reached on 3 Oct)
- “Per-Seat vs Flat-Fee FSM Pricing”: https://www.fsmadvisor.com/guides/per-seat-vs-flat-pricing (loaded 3 Oct)
- “How Much Does Field Service Software Cost? (2026 Pricing Guide)”: https://fieldserviceguide.com/field-service-software-cost-pricing/ (loaded 3 Oct)
- ServiceTitan pages cited in the study, opened again on 3 October 2026 (all loaded): https://www.servicetitan.com/comparison/servicetitan-vs-housecall-pro · https://www.servicetitan.com/comparison/servicetitan-vs-jobber · https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/field-service-crm ·
https://www.servicetitan.com/pricing ·
https://help.servicetitan.com/docs/dispatching - Method: RE-METH-AIV-003, Case Study Testing and Execution Methodology, Revenue Experts.