For franchise systems and multi-location operators
Your brand has one name. AI answers one market at a time.
When a property manager or a facility director asks ChatGPT who to call, it does not answer for your brand. It answers for that city. The answer in Dallas has nothing to do with the answer in Phoenix, and most corporate marketing teams have never seen either one.
We measure it, market by market, and show you exactly who is getting recommended in the markets where you are not.
Being a national brand does not carry into AI answers
This is the part that surprises corporate teams. Brand recognition, ad budget, and being the biggest name in the category do not translate into being the name an AI assistant gives back. Local independents show up instead, in market after market, often with a fraction of the footprint.
Companies we checked across 8 metros on August 10, 2026
Different companies ChatGPT named at least once
Share of those recommendations that went to the three largest national brands combined
That is one category, measured on one day, across 32 real buyer questions. We ran it because nobody in the industry had. In two of those eight metros not one of the three largest national brands came up at all, in any answer, while local independents took every recommendation.
It is not only security. SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index looked at more than 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands and found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of brand locations, against an average 35.9% that appear in Google’s local three-pack. Multi-location brands built their whole playbook for the second number. The first one is where the buyer is moving.
Source: SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index, published January 28, 2026. Measured across US brands with 50 or more locations.
What the program includes
Three levels. Most systems start with the scorecard, because until you have seen the market by market picture there is nothing to decide about.
System Scorecard
One timeThe full picture, market by market.
- Every territory you operate in, measured on ChatGPT the way your buyers actually ask
- The companies getting recommended instead of you, named, in every market
- The source signals behind those answers, including whether anything in your web stack is blocking AI systems from reading your site at all
- A prioritized fix list for each territory, ordered by what moves first
- A written report plus a walkthrough call
Monthly Watch
MonthlyProof that it moved, or proof that it did not.
- The full scorecard re-measured every month against a frozen comparison set, so month over month is genuinely comparable
- Which markets gained, which lost, which competitors entered the answers
- An alert when a market goes from named to not named
- A short written read on what changed, not a dashboard to log into
Full Program
OngoingMeasurement plus the work that changes it.
- Everything in the Scorecard and the Watch
- Structured data built and deployed for each market
- Listings and source work per market, so the systems have something consistent to read
- Pages written to the questions buyers actually ask in that market
- Crawler blocking found and fixed. Worth saying plainly: unblocking alone does not make ChatGPT recommend anyone. It makes the rest of the work possible.
Every engagement is quoted individually. A system with 12 territories and a system with 140 are not the same job, so there is no price list on this page. The first question on the call is how many territories you run, and the quote is built from that. If it is not a fit, I will tell you on that call rather than send you a proposal.
Who you would be working with
I have sat in your chair.
I am Thad Paschall. In 1992 I started a security company with one truck and my own and my family’s savings, before we ever raised outside capital. Over 23 years I built it into one of the largest independent security companies in the country: over $600 million in revenue, in the top 15 of the SDM 100 for more than a decade, before I sold it.
That company was Protect America. You do not have to take my word for any of it. It has its own Wikipedia page, and my name is in the first sentence: founded in 1992, roughly 400,000 customers by 2012, sold to Rockbridge Growth Equity, and credited with producing the first monitored self-installed security system business model in 2005.
So I know what it is to run a national brand and watch the phone ring in some markets and go quiet in others, and to not be able to explain why. What changed is where the buyer starts. It used to be the phone book. Then it was Google. A real share of them now start by asking an AI assistant, and that assistant answers city by city.
I am not a consultant who read about your industry. I lived it, and now I measure it.
Building an independent security company
In revenue before the sale
How we measure, and what we will not claim
We ask ChatGPT, with live web search on, for companies in your category in each of your markets, several different ways in each one, using the words your buyers use. We record every company it names. Your score in a market is how many of those questions named you there.
We report it that way, and never as a rank, for a reason worth being direct about. Ask an AI assistant the same question twice and the answer can change. We tested that ourselves: running the same measurement twice on the same day, the overall share of companies being named held steady to within half a percentage point, but the single top company changed in more than half the markets, because in most markets the top spot was already a tie. So we report how consistently you get named, which holds up, instead of a position, which does not.
Every run is dated on the page. AI answers move, and a dated measurement is honest about that. We will not sell you a guaranteed placement in an AI answer, because nobody can deliver one. What we can do is show you exactly where you stand today, what is behind it, and whether it moved next month.
Request your system scorecard
Tell me your brand and roughly how many territories you run. I will come back with what we can measure and what it would cost. If your category is one we have already measured, I can usually show you a sample of your own numbers before you spend anything.
Thad Paschall, founder, AI Security Edge. More about the background.