Ask three AI assistants for a renovation firm and you get three different lists

The question a homeowner types

“I just collected the keys to my BTO flat in Punggol, Singapore. Which renovation contractors would you recommend?”

That is one of the 24. The others asked about a 4-room resale flat, a kitchen and two bathrooms, a S$40,000 budget, a condo, HDB-licensed contractors with good reviews, a Scandinavian look and the most trustworthy companies, each in Tampines, Punggol and Jurong West. The words were fixed before the run, and a firm counts only when its name is in the answer.

Each assistant keeps its own list

Gemini names Swiss Interior in 60 of its 72 answers; ChatGPT names The Interior Lab in 60 of its 72 answers; Perplexity names Starry Homestead in 27 of its 72 answers. Only eight firms were named by all three assistants, and 84% of all the names came from one assistant only. A homeowner who opens a different app hears about different firms, before reviews come into it at all.

Named by AI, reviewed by homeowners

The stars do not separate these firms: six of the 15 hold 4.8 or more on Google. The review counts do, and their order is not the assistants’ order. Ranked side by side, review counts and AI mentions show a weak link (rank correlation 0.29, where 1 is the same order); stars and mentions show a weak link (-0.28).

Age does not sort them either. We found a reliable opening year for fifteen of the 15; the oldest, Darwin Interior, has been in business since 1995. Set the years against the answers and you get no link we could measure (rank correlation -0.09).

The estate barely matters, and the list moves

We asked the same questions for Tampines, Punggol and Jurong West. 26 names came up in all three, and the leaders were named about as often in each. The assistants answer “renovation in Singapore”, not “renovation in this estate”.

Asked the same question again, the same assistant gives a different list. Of the names one assistant gave for one question, 25% came back in all three runs.

What it means

For homeowners. Read an assistant’s list as names to look up, not a verdict, and ask a second assistant before you shortlist. The checks that protect you still do the work: the firm’s HDB renovation permit status for an HDB flat, its reviews, a written quotation and a visit to a finished home. One name in our answers, TCB Sports Pte Ltd, which builds running tracks, tennis courts and sports floors, is not a renovation firm at all. An assistant can repeat a directory listing without checking what the business does.

For firm owners. Being reviewed and being named are separate things; an assistant does not add up your Google reviews for you. It repeats what it finds written about a firm, on the firm’s own site and elsewhere, and one run cannot say which source weighs most. We also ran our free scan on the 15 websites on 13 November 2026: twelve of 15 score under 80 for search readability, and the firm named most is not the one with the cleanest site. A readable site does not put a firm in the answer. It decides whether the assistant can read what the firm says about itself once it looks.

How we did it

24 questions (8 topics in 3 areas), each asked three times on each of three assistants through their APIs, with no location and no history: 216 answers, between 13 November 2026 and the next hour. Models: openai/gpt-6-luna, google/gemini-3.5-flash, perplexity/sonar. A second model listed the names in each answer; code kept a name only when it appears in the stored answer, and counted. Spelling and suffix variants of one brand were merged by hand (18 reviewed pairs). Directories and portals such as Qanvast are counted as names but are not firms, and are not in the table. Each of the 15 firms was checked against its own website. Google Maps was read on 13 November 2026: for each firm, every listing in the results for its name and for its name plus “renovation”, scrolled to the end, whose website link is the firm’s own domain; review counts are summed across those listings. Opening years come from the firm’s own site where it gives one, otherwise from its company registration; where we could not open the source, we leave the year blank. The rank correlation is Spearman’s, over the 15 firms.

What this does not show

One run in November 2026. Assistants change their answers, and the apps a homeowner uses, signed in and with a location, may answer differently from the API. Long answers were cut at a fixed length, so a firm named at the end of a long list may be missing. Fifteen firms is a small set, so the correlations are a reading, not a law. A Maps listing that does not link to the firm’s site is not counted, and ratings move every day. A firm named more often is not a better firm, and one named less is not a worse one; this is why we print no star rating or score per firm. If a figure about your firm is wrong, write to hello@aiqsight.com and we will correct it.

The first edition of the Index covered tuition centres. To see what an assistant can and cannot read on your own site, run the free scan.