The independent scoreboard for whether AI recommends your business.
Free monthly Chicago HVAC Index. Soft-launch pilot. Payment never touches the grade.
When someone asks AI who to hire — does it say your name?
Pilot edition Chicago HVAC · Aug 2026 — scores from a multimodel visibility battery and a readiness probe. How scoring works
My furnace is blowing cold air — who should I call near Schaumburg?
A few options serving Schaumburg: Engler Heating & Air Conditioning — same-day furnace repair and 24/7 emergency service… Bartlett Heating & Air Conditioning — specifically serves Schaumburg… Oasis Plumbing, Heating & Cooling — 24/7-listed and handles furnace repair…
Three names. No page of blue links. 36 of 58 Chicago HVAC businesses never get named at all.
See the Chicago HVAC Index Find your business
Free to look. Free to be scored. New edition monthly.
Before you assume this is handled
Your marketing company can't be the scoreboard. They may be doing excellent work — that isn't the problem. The problem is arithmetic. An agency measuring its own AI visibility is a student grading their own exam, and every client on earth discounts that number to zero.
Every SEO shop could have built Moz. Not one of them did. They pay for the independent number instead, because a rank you produce yourself isn't evidence — it's a claim.
Lodestar is that number, for exactly one question: when someone asks AI who to hire, does it say your name?
Why an independent has to exist
Every grader is conflicted
Agencies grade their own work. Platforms grade the businesses that buy ads from them. Lead-gen "indexes" rank whoever pays for the lead. Good intentions don't fix that — the incentive does the deciding.
So the score is free
Every business in a covered market is scored, whether they have heard of us or not. You cannot buy your way in and you cannot buy your way out. There is no tier that moves a grade.
And watching isn't buying
We charge to tell you when your number moves. We do not charge to move it. If a retainer could change a score, the score would be worth nothing — to you, and to whoever you forward it to.
What this is not
We are not an AI-SEO tool. There is no box to paste your URL into and no instant grade with a package attached. We index an entire market at once — every business in it, asked or not.
We are the referee, not the coach. The query battery, the probe protocol and the reliability number are published so anyone can check our work. Payment never touches the grade.
One month is a snapshot. Twelve is a record.
Anyone can screenshot a good month
What nobody can do is back-date a history. Each edition adds a row that cannot be edited later.
The market moves under you
Named in March, silent by September. Models update, competitors improve, and the answer to "who should I call" quietly changes.
A year in, it answers the real question
Did the work move the needle, or did the market just move? Only a run of editions can tell you — which is why it is worth watching rather than checking.
What is free, and what costs money
For a business
Your scorecard is free and permanent whether you ever speak to us or not. Pay only if you would rather be told than remember to look: each month, what moved and what caused it.
$149 / month, one business
For an agency
A number you did not grade yourself, across a whole book of clients. Twelve editions in, you are handing over a case study instead of a claim.
$500–1,500 / month, by book size
Never for sale at any price: the ranking, placement in it, or a lead. Watching buys the alert, never the number.
36 of 58
Chicago HVAC businesses are never recommended by an AI assistant — including ones spending thousands a month on marketing.
“Payment never touches the grade. A trust index that flips on re-probe is not a trust index. The score can't be bought — only earned.”