About Gist Local

Who is listed

We start from Overture Maps Foundation places data (release 2026-09-23.1), which is open data under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 licence. For Los Angeles we took every plumber, HVAC company, roofer, electrician and handyman service inside the City of Los Angeles boundary, then kept a business only when:

• it isn’t marked closed, and isn’t a supplier or a store;
• it has a website of its own (not only a Yelp or Facebook page), not shared by several differently named listings, which is the mark of a chain, a franchise or a lead-generation network;
• that website loaded on October 20, 2026, mentions the trade, shows the business’s name or listed phone, and shows that it is in Los Angeles.

That left 618 businesses. A business we left out isn’t judged in any way: most simply had no working website we could check.

How we check

On October 20, 2026 we visited each website once, the way an AI search crawler would, under our own name (GistGEO-SiteCheck), and obeyed each site’s robots.txt. A business passes a check when:

• AI search crawlers allowed. robots.txt lets the crawlers that fetch pages for AI answers read the page: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Googlebot (Google, including AI Overviews) and Bingbot (Bing and Copilot). Training crawlers such as GPTBot are not counted.
• Readable without scripts. The page’s HTML holds at least 600 characters of text before any JavaScript runs. Some AI crawlers read the HTML without running scripts.
• Business details marked up. The page carries schema.org LocalBusiness data, or a more specific type such as Plumber or HVACBusiness. A bare Organization doesn’t count.
• Listed phone on the website. The phone number in the business’s public listings appears on the page. Search engines and AI tools match a business across sources by its name, address and phone.

We also note whether the site uses a secure connection and whether it has an llms.txt file. Neither is counted. A site that changes after October 20, 2026 won’t show the change until the next check.

Sources

1. Overture Maps Foundation places data, release 2026-09-23.1, under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 licence. Business names, categories, addresses, phone numbers and websites.
2. Website checks by Gist GEO, October 20, 2026.
3. Overview of OpenAI crawlers. OpenAI
4. Does Anthropic crawl data from the web? Anthropic
5. Perplexity crawlers. Perplexity
6. Google’s common crawlers. Google

Questions