We Asked the AI Assistants Who Does Home Care Best. One Brand Won 68% of the Answers.
So here's a scene that's playing out a few thousand times a day right now.
A 45-year-old is sitting in a hospital parking lot. Mom fell. She's okay, but she can't be home alone anymore, and the discharge planner just said the words "in-home care" for the first time. Ten years ago that person would have opened Google and spent an evening in tabs. Today they open ChatGPT, or they type the question into Google and read whatever the AI Overview hands back, and they ask: who are the best in-home senior care agencies near me?
They get back five to seven names. Not a page of links. Names.
I wanted to know whose names. So we measured it.
What we did
This is the second category we've run through our first-party measurement harness. The first was kids' swim lessons, which became our Winner-Take-Few study. Same methodology here: 20 home care prompts, two phrasings, ten US metros from New York down to Des Moines, asked three times each across the four assistants people actually use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. 240 queries. 235 responses that named at least one business.
No vendor funded this. Nobody selling an AI visibility tool touched it. I ran it because every statistic on this subject comes from a company that sells the cure, and I wanted numbers I could stand behind in a room full of skeptical operators.
What came back
Home Instead was named in 67.7% of all answers. Two out of three times a machine built a home care shortlist in our study, Home Instead was on it. And in one out of every four answers, it was the first name out.
The full top five:
| Rank | Brand | Named in | First name out |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Home Instead | 67.7% of answers | 24.7% |
| 2 | Right at Home | 54.0% | 14.5% |
| 3 | Visiting Angels | 37.4% | 5.1% |
| 4 | TheKey | 27.2% | 8.1% |
| 5 | SYNERGY HomeCare | 19.6% | 0.9% |
Sixteen more brands cleared at least 5% of answers. Twenty-one total. In a category with hundreds of national, regional, and local operators, the machines keep handing back the same short list.
Now look at that first-name column again, because that's the finding I keep coming back to. Right at Home gets named in more than half of all answers. Genuinely strong. But the gap between being named and being named first is brutal all the way down the table. SYNERGY made the top five and was the first name out twice. In 235 answers. Twice.
Being on the list and being the answer are two different games. So.
The part that should change your priorities
Here's where it gets useful, because we also captured what the assistants were reading when they built these answers.
In our swim study, Reddit dominated the citations. By a mile. I expected the same here and I was wrong. In home care, the most-cited source is caring.com, followed by the brands' own websites and the senior-care directory layer. Reddit shows up, but it's not the plumbing. The plumbing is caregiver review platforms and directories.
That matters because it means there is no single generic "AI visibility playbook." The citation layer is different category by category. What wins swim lessons is not what wins home care. You have to actually measure your category to know where your answers come from. And most brands have never looked.
One more pattern from the broader study, and I'll keep this one anonymous because the specifics belong to the brands involved: we found multiple national franchises with real, open, operating locations in major metros where the assistants named them exactly zero times. Not underweighted. Zero. A family in that city asking that machine will never hear that brand exists, while the location three miles away pays royalties and wonders why the phone is quieter than it used to be.
Everybody spent the last decade building beautiful websites for humans. The machines don't read them the way humans do. They read the data behind them, and the third-party layer around them. If that layer is thin, you're invisible, and you won't even know it. Right?
What I'd do with this if I ran one of these brands
Three things, in order.
First, get measured. Not by a vendor selling the fix. Find out your share of shortlist, where you're named first, and which metros come back zero, against your actual footprint.
Second, fix the citation layer before touching anything else. In this category that means the directory and review infrastructure: presence, freshness, volume, response. It's not glamorous. It's plumbing. It's also what the machines are actually reading.
Third, re-measure quarterly. These surfaces move. A snapshot from last year is a story, not a strategy.
Where this study goes next
Home care is the second category in what's becoming a running benchmark. More verticals are in the queue. If you lead marketing or technology at a franchise brand and you want to see where you stand against your category's panel, I'll run your brand through the same instrument and send you a one-page scorecard. Share of shortlist, first-name rate, surface coverage, and what the machines read when they skipped you.
No call required. Email me: parnell@thefranchisecto.com.
Methodology: 4 AI surfaces × 20 prompts (2 phrasings × 10 metros) × 3 runs, captured July 2026. 237 of 240 queries returned a valid response; 235 named at least one business. Location-suffixed mentions rolled up to parent brands; the same normalization was applied to every brand measured. AI surfaces evolve; this is a dated snapshot. The Franchise CTO has no financial relationship with any brand named in this study.
