170,000 jobs of proof, none of it where assistants look

The most impressive operating record in the Washington book existed as three numbers on a homepage that nothing outside the domain could verify. Self-reported claims are worth very little to an AI assistant. Citation follows third-party corroboration — 84% of AI citations trace to earned media, and branded web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks. 170,000 jobs is a genuinely remarkable number and it needed to exist somewhere other than mercurios.com.

Audited September 2026: Blog, online scheduling, financing and specials, service-area pages, WordPress on a Click5 Interactive build. The largest and most mature operation in the Washington book. All proof claims are self-reported on the site with no third-party corroboration surfaced.

Days 0–30: Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Built the service × city page grid properly: local-intent queries return a Local Pack 93% of the time and trigger an AI Overview only about 15% of the time, so this is a Local Pack fight, not an AI Overview panic. Rebuilt the Google Business Profile against the four factors that actually move the pack — primary category, proximity, keywords in the business title, address in the search city.

Days 0–30 — Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Days 31–90 — Service × city page grid shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave. Days 91–180 — Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on service and city pages.

The programme was run against four targets: AI assistant mention rate from 21% to 38% (+17 pts); Local Pack top-3 coverage from 44% to 64% (+20 pts); Non-branded organic leads from index 100 to index 128 (+28%); Google review velocity and recency from index 100 to index 240 (+140%). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Mercurio's Heating & Air Conditioning's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.

No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.

Mercurio's Heating & Air Conditioning runs at the Dominance tier — $8,500/mo, covering AI SEO. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.