What ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity actually say when a metro Detroit homeowner asks who should paint their house, measured across 360 answers, and what the companies that beat Ellison are doing differently.
Ellison is winning. It is the most-recommended residential painter in metro Detroit across the four major answer engines, at nearly double the next name (CertaPro at 25.1%, Somerset at 24.6%). When Ellison is named it is usually named first, at an average position of 1.4.
All four companies Brad asked about rank below Ellison, and two of them barely register. The real rivals in AI answers are companies he did not name.
There is one clear hole. On ChatGPT, by far the most-used engine, Ellison appears in only 23% of answers against 49% to 64% everywhere else. That gap has a specific, fixable cause, and it is the spine of this report.
Answer presence rate is the share of the 360 answers in which a brand was named anywhere. Diamonds mark the four companies Brad asked about.
| Company | Presence | 95% CI | Avg. position | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ellison Painting the client | 46.9% | 42 to 52 | 1.4 | |
| CertaPro Painters franchise, Birmingham and Troy | 25.0% | 21 to 29 | 2.0 | |
| Somerset Painting Detroit, painting plus carpentry | 24.4% | 20 to 29 | 1.8 | |
| MacFarland Painting Livonia, largely commercial | 14.4% | 11 to 18 | 1.5 | |
| Top Shelf Painting Oakland and Macomb | 12.5% | 9 to 16 | 1.9 | |
| Roy & Paul cabinet specialist, Birmingham | 12.2% | 9 to 16 | 1.9 | |
| The Exterior Painters Rochester Hills, exterior only | 9.2% | 6 to 12 | 1.6 | |
| IntegrityPRO Painters | 5.8% | 3 to 8 | 2.8 | |
| Elite Paint Company identity unconfirmed, see open questions | 4.2% | 2 to 6 | 1.3 | |
| Expert Painting & Maintenance Macomb, trading since 1975 | 3.6% | 2 to 6 | 2.4 | |
| Wize Painting | 3.6% | 2 to 6 | 3.5 | |
| Four Season Painting | 3.6% | 2 to 6 | 3.1 | |
| Diamond Painting Rochester Hills | 3.1% | 1 to 5 | 2.8 | |
| M.V.P. Painting Sterling Heights | 2.5% | 1 to 4 | 2.6 | |
| Walls-N-All Painting Oxford | 2.2% | 1 to 4 | 1.9 | |
| Birmingham Bloomfield Painting | 2.2% | 1 to 4 | 1.8 |
All four sit below Ellison overall. They are not interchangeable though: each one is strong in a different engine and a different set of towns, and two of them beat Ellison somewhere.
The strongest of your four, and the only one that beats Ellison in any city: Grosse Pointe, 50% to 42%. Gemini likes it most. Absent entirely from Rochester and Ferndale.
Almost entirely a Perplexity phenomenon: 34% there against 3% on ChatGPT. Ties Ellison in Ferndale and Troy. Never appears in Birmingham, West Bloomfield or Rochester.
Narrow but sharp. Named on just 1% of general discovery prompts, so it is not a broad recommendation. It does own Rochester at 33%, the one city where Ellison scores zero. Absent from 8 of 12 cities.
Barely registers anywhere. No engine above 6%, and zero presence in 10 of the 12 cities tested. Only Troy shows anything at 17%.
| Town | Ellison | Exterior Ptrs | MacFarland | Top Shelf | Elite | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rochester Hills | 69% | 3% | 17% | 8% | 0% | Ellison |
| Royal Oak | 58% | 0% | 8% | 8% | 0% | Ellison |
| Birmingham | 56% | 6% | 15% | 0% | 0% | Ellison |
| Bloomfield Hills | 54% | 4% | 4% | 29% | 0% | Ellison |
| West Bloomfield | 50% | 0% | 25% | 0% | 0% | Ellison |
| Ferndale | 50% | 0% | 0% | 50% | 0% | Tied |
| Metro Detroit | 44% | 0% | 22% | 11% | 0% | Ellison |
| Grosse Pointe | 42% | 0% | 50% | 25% | 0% | MacFarland |
| Bloomfield | 42% | 0% | 8% | 0% | 0% | Ellison |
| Troy | 25% | 0% | 8% | 25% | 17% | Tied |
| Oakland County | 22% | 0% | 17% | 17% | 3% | Ellison |
| Rochester | 0% | 33% | 0% | 0% | 0% | The Exterior Painters |
Ellison leads 9 of 12 towns outright and ties 2 more. It loses exactly two, and both are worth knowing about.
Grosse Pointe is a real contest. MacFarland takes it 50% to 42%, the only place any of the four genuinely outperforms Ellison on equal footing.
Rochester is not a contest, it is an absence. The Exterior Painters takes it at 33% while Ellison scores zero, because there is a /rochester-hills/ page and no /rochester/ page. Neighbouring Rochester Hills is Ellison's single strongest town at 69%. That is the cheapest win in this entire report.
Presence rate for Ellison, by engine. Roughly 90 answers behind each number.
ChatGPT answers these questions differently from the other three. It leans almost entirely on directory and aggregator pages rather than reading contractor websites. Across the 360 answers, ChatGPT cited angi.com in 53 runs, bbb.org in 33, reviews.birdeye.com in 26, houzz.com in 19, homeadvisor.com in 15 and expertise.com in 11. Gemini, Claude and Perplexity cited these sources close to never.
Ellison is missing or weak on almost every one of those directories. That is the whole mechanism. It is not a website problem, a content problem or a crawler-blocking problem, and it is worth being precise about that, because those are the three things a team would normally go and fix.
Each item was independently verified by fetching the live page. Findings that did not survive that check were dropped, including the theory that Ellison blocks AI crawlers, which is false.
An old copy of the site was still online and explicitly telling search engines and AI crawlers to index it. It was the source of several claims that appear nowhere on the real site, and ChatGPT quoted it during testing. Two versions of Ellison were competing for the same answers.
This is resolved. Every URL on the subdomain now returns a 301 to the live site, including its sitemaps, so it no longer serves anything indexable.
follow, index, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, and sitemaps listing 81 URLs./blog/ prefix the current site dropped, one passes every other path through unchanged. Both 301, query strings preserved. The 19 posts whose slugs changed during the rebuild had their old slugs registered in WordPress, so the site now redirects those itself. Verified by requesting all 81 URLs: 76 land on a live page, 75 of them on the exact intended target.Expertise.com publishes a curated "best painters" list per city. Thirteen metro Detroit painters are on the Rochester Hills page. Ellison is not one of them. Top Shelf, Expert Painting, M.V.P., Walls-N-All, Diamond and Somerset all are.
expertise.com/review-me for Rochester Hills, Troy and Detroit. Ask them to open a Birmingham page.There is a Rochester Hills profile carrying 3.7 stars from 3 reviews, and a separate Royal Oak profile with no reviews at all. The Royal Oak one is the profile receiving paid placement and generating quote requests. Lead volume is accruing to a listing with no review equity, while the reviewed listing carries a rating well below Ellison's real standing.
Angi was ChatGPT's single most-cited source, appearing in 53 of the answers. Ellison has a profile at 5.0 stars, but it is registered to "Oakland, MI" rather than Rochester Hills, and it does not appear on the Rochester Hills top-ten pages the engine actually reads.
angi.com/companylist/us/mi/oakland/ellison-painting-llc-reviews-1.htm. 5.0 stars, 20 reviews, "in business since 2022". The Rochester Hills list pages contain no Ellison.Houzz was cited in 19 answers, all of them ChatGPT. Ellison has no Michigan profile. Birmingham Bloomfield Painting holds a directory slot on 8 reviews, so presence matters far more than volume here.
BBB was cited in 33 answers. Ellison's profile carries no rating, and the stated reason is that the business has been trading for less than six months. That is provably wrong, and it is one field.
Different city pages ship different review claims in their meta description tags, which is exactly the field an engine reads and repeats. Two pages claim a number materially higher than the verified figure.
/troy/ says "500+ 5-star Google reviews". /royal-oak/ says "800+ five-star reviews". /grosse-pointe/ says "800+ 5-star reviews". Birdeye records 4.9 from 507. An older landing page says "430+".None of Ellison's facts are machine-readable. There is no rating, no service area, no founding date and no service catalogue in the markup. Everything an engine would quote has to be inferred from prose or borrowed from a directory.
aggregateRating, areaServed, foundingDate or hasOfferCatalog.Tenure and warranty are the two things the engines quote most often as the reason to recommend somebody. Expert Painting gets named on "since 1975". Ellison publishes neither, and offers "Satisfaction Guaranteed" instead of a term.
Ellison has 18 city pages, which is competitive in count. They are thin and templated. Measured on a matched pair, MacFarland's Birmingham page runs 1,651 words of body copy against Ellison's 409.
Three query types returned Ellison in zero of twelve runs each, despite Ellison selling all three services.
| Query | Presence | Diagnosis |
|---|---|---|
| Exterior painting in Rochester, Michigan | 0 / 12 | There is a /rochester-hills/ page but no /rochester/ page. Rochester Hills itself scores 69%, the strongest city on the board. Cleanest quick win here. |
| Commercial painting contractors, Oakland County | 0 / 12 | Three commercial pages exist and none of them surface. Pages are present but carry no third-party corroboration. |
| Epoxy garage floor coatings, metro Detroit | 0 / 12 | Same pattern. Two epoxy pages live, zero visibility. Specialist coating firms own these answers. |
| Top rated painters in Troy | 3 / 12 | City page exists. Weakest of the served cities. |
| Reliable house painter, Oakland County | 3 / 12 | County-level phrasing performs far worse than city-level. Worth its own page treatment. |
| Cabinet painting, Rochester Hills | 11 / 12 | The strongest single result in the study. Whatever is working here is worth copying to the other services. |
A separate national mention index shows MacFarland far ahead of Ellison, at 317 mentions to 32. That measures ambient mentions across every topic in the United States, not metro Detroit painting queries, and MacFarland's figure is inflated by a large paint-colour content library. On the question that matters, who gets recommended to a homeowner in Ellison's own market, Ellison leads MacFarland by roughly three to one. We are including the national figure only so it does not surprise you somewhere else.