Sources: every statistic on this site
Four studies are cited across this site. Each is listed below with its publisher, date, sample size, and the scope limits the study itself states. Four other figures that circulate widely in this category were removed rather than published with a vague attribution, and they are named here with the reason.
Where do these numbers come from?
Every figure on this site comes from a named third-party study, listed below with its publisher, date, sample, and the scope limits the study itself states. None of the numbers are ours. Four statistics commonly repeated in this category were removed rather than published with a vague attribution, and they are named below with the reason, because a claim to be careful with sources is worth nothing if the working is not shown.
- 5W Public Relations, The Local Services AI Visibility Crisis 2026: national chains, platform aggregators, and the structural exclusion of independent operators, April 2026. 320+ consumer-intent prompts across 10 US metros and six service categories (plumbing, electrical, personal injury law, family medicine, dentistry, HVAC) — 60 metro-category combinations — tested through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews in Q1 2026. Two things worth knowing: 5W labels its citation-share figures estimated, and 5W is a PR firm publishing its own research rather than a peer-reviewed source. Remodeling and interior design were not among the six categories.View the study ↗
- Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update, 4 November 2025. 3,119 search terms across 42 of Seer’s own client organizations; 25.1 million organic and 1.1 million paid impressions, June 2024 to September 2025. Two caveats the study states and we repeat: the 61% is a decline over time among AI-Overview queries rather than a with-versus-without comparison, and the sample is informational queries only — Seer explicitly warns results may differ for commercial, transactional, and local queries, which is the class most remodeling prompts fall into.View the study ↗
- Seer Interactive, Study: Content Recency’s Impact on AI Visibility in 2026, 24 July 2026. 7,683 dateable pages carrying 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, March to June 2026. The 72%-updated versus 42%-newly-published split comes from a smaller subset of 4,124 pages where both dates were readable. Scope caveat the study states and we repeat: the pages analysed were those cited in answers about four brands (a pet retailer, a vacation-rental marketplace, an energy provider, and a bank). No local or home-services vertical was included.View the study ↗
- Adobe Digital Insights, AI traffic analysis, January 2026. US retail traffic over the 2025 holiday season. Retail, not home services — treat as directional for other industries.View the study ↗
The four figures removed, and why
- Gartner: 25% of search volume shifts to AI assistants by 2028
- Traceable but wrong as usually quoted. Gartner's actual claim, in a February 2024 press release, was that search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026. It is a forecast rather than a measurement, the date is routinely misquoted, and the outcome has been publicly reported as not having occurred.
- Content updated within 60 days is ~1.9x more likely to be cited
- No primary source found for this multiplier or window. Replaced with the measured findings of the Seer recency study.
- AI-referred visitors convert at ~14% vs ~3% for organic
- No primary source found. Replaced with Adobe Digital Insights' measured 31% relative uplift.
- Yelp and Angi capture more citations than all national chains combined
- Contradicted by the source study, which shows the national chain Roto-Rooter at 7.5%, above Angi's 7.0%.
Why does a marketing site publish a removals list?
Because the alternative is asking a buyer to take carefulness on faith, and this site sells measurement. Four statistics that appear on most competitor pages in this category do not appear here: a Gartner search-volume projection, a freshness multiplier, an AI conversion comparison, and a claim about directories out-citing national chains. Each was checked against its primary source and each failed, in a different way. Naming them costs nothing if the claim to rigour is true, and it is the cheapest available test of whether it is.
The same standard is applied to client work. A citation-share figure that cannot be reproduced by someone who does not work here does not go in a report, however good the number looks. The vendor checklist puts this in the form of questions you can ask any practice in this category, including this one.
How should these figures be read?
Carefully, and with their scope in mind, which is why the scope limits are printed above rather than left in the studies. None of the four was conducted on residential remodeling or interior design firms. The 5W study covered six other local-service categories. The Seer click-through study covered informational queries and warns that local and commercial queries may behave differently. The Seer recency study covered pages cited in answers about four large brands. The Adobe figures are US retail. They describe the shape of a problem, not your firm's score.
Your firm's actual score is the thing an audit measures: roughly 25 buyer prompts for your market and services, run three times each from clean signed-out sessions across four engines, with dated screenshots. That number is first-party and specific to you. Everything on this page is context for why it is worth measuring at all.
If a figure on this site ever looks wrong, or a study is updated or retracted, write to hello@aivispartners.com and it will be corrected here with the change noted.
What else should you know about these sources?
Is 5W Public Relations an independent source?
Not entirely, and that is worth stating. 5W is a public relations firm publishing its own research, not a peer-reviewed study or an academic dataset, and it has a commercial interest in the finding that businesses are invisible in AI answers. Its methodology is published and its figures are labelled as estimates, which is better than most vendor research in this category, but it should be weighted as industry research rather than independent science.
Why is there no first-party data on this site yet?
Because the practice was founded in 2026 and its first client engagement is still inside its measurement window. A first-party study of ten metros in residential remodeling is in production, and it publishes when the measurement is finished rather than on a content schedule. Until then this site cites other people's work and says so, which is preferable to presenting an illustrative example as a finding.
What happens if one of these studies is updated or contradicted?
The figure gets changed on this page. Every figure on the site traces to one of the four entries above, so a correction is a single edit rather than a hunt. Where a study is superseded, the page will say what changed rather than quietly swapping the number, because a site that silently revises its evidence is doing the thing this page exists to argue against.
Where should you read next?
The pages that use these figures, and the checklist that turns them into questions for a vendor.
Austin Brewer founded AI Visibility Partners in 2026, and also founded the interior design studio Astratto Design — a connection disclosed on who we work with because this practice sells to design firms. hello@aivispartners.com