We tested 18 South Florida plumbing companies. 15 were completely invisible to AI — while competitors got free emergency calls worth $61 a click.
Plumbing is one of the most expensive verticals in local search advertising. A single click from someone searching "emergency plumber near me" costs over $60. A homeowner with a burst pipe doesn't shop around — they call the first name they trust, which means the conversion rate on that click is high. The cost reflects it.
But a growing number of homeowners don't start with a Google search. They ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview. And those customers never see your ad.
"Best plumber in Broward County for water heater repair" — typed into ChatGPT by a homeowner right now. Which company got recommended? Almost certainly not the one spending the most on ads.
We ran this test across 18 plumbing companies in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties. Here's what the data showed.
Before the results: here are the actual average costs per click for plumbing-related searches in South Florida, based on current Google Ads data.
| Search Term | Avg. Monthly Volume | Cost Per Click |
|---|---|---|
| plumber near me | 937,250 | $47.27 |
| plumbing services near me | 40,500 | $51.91 |
| water heater repair near me | 90,500 | $48.66 |
| emergency plumber near me | 110,000 | $60.45 |
| 24 hour plumber near me | 60,500 | $61.05 |
Every homeowner who skips your ad and asks ChatGPT instead is a lead you paid to attract — and didn't capture. The company AI recommends gets that call at zero cost. At $60 per click, that's real money leaving your business every single day.
We asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overview to recommend plumbing contractors across Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. We tested each of the 18 companies against their own city and primary service category.
The same pattern held as in our roofing and contractor tests: AI visibility has almost nothing to do with ad spend. The companies that showed up consistently were the ones with the strongest organic footprint — service-specific content, consistent local citations, and recent reviews that name specific services and locations.
Plumbing is different from other home services in one important way: a significant share of calls are emergencies. Burst pipes, sewage backups, no hot water at 10 PM — these customers aren't comparing four contractors. They're asking for a name they can call immediately.
Emergency plumbing searches carry the highest CPCs precisely because the intent is so high. When someone types "24 hour plumber near me," they're already going to hire someone. The only question is who AI surfaces first.
A plumbing company visible in AI captures those emergency calls for free. A company that isn't visible — even if they're the best in the area, even if they have 200 Google reviews — doesn't get the call at all.
AI tools pull heavily from organic search signals. If your website doesn't rank on page 1 for "plumber [your city]" or "water heater repair [your city]," you are almost certainly absent from AI recommendations as well. The correlation in our testing was near 1:1.
Your business name, address, phone number, and service category need to be consistent across Google, Yelp, BBB, HomeAdvisor, Angi, and Thumbtack. Inconsistencies — even small ones like abbreviating "Street" to "St." inconsistently — create trust signals that push you out of AI recommendations.
Generic five-star reviews carry much less weight than reviews that name the specific service and location: "fast water heater repair in Coral Springs" or "best emergency plumber in Boca Raton." A company with 20 recent, specific reviews outranks one with 300 generic reviews from 2021.
Your Google Ads are reaching customers who start with Google. But the growing segment of customers who start with AI — asking "who's the best plumber near me?" or "who handles slab leaks in Palm Beach County?" — is a separate audience your ads can't reach.
For a plumbing company running any ads at all, that's a meaningful slice of potential calls going directly to whoever AI has decided to trust. And that decision was made months ago, based on organic signals you may not have optimized.
The question isn't whether this is happening to your business. Based on our testing, it almost certainly is. The question is what it would take to fix it — and how many emergency calls you've already missed while someone else got recommended.
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