AI says where to check a business 218 times, where to complain once

Short answer: the assistants know exactly where to send you to check a business before you hire it. They do it in 218 answers out of 7,481. To say where to take a complaint once the work has gone wrong, they do it once. One answer, in Florianópolis, where Gemini names Procon and the small claims court. In France, across 1,386 answers, the consumer mediator, the fraud authority, its reporting site and the local conciliator never come up at all.

The plumber has left. The joint holds for three days. You call back, nobody answers. France has a route built for exactly this moment: consumer mediation, free for the consumer, which every professional must point their customer to on their website, their terms, or their order forms. The customer can use it if the professional does not reply within two months, and can still go to court afterwards. The commission that supervises the scheme writes, on the economy ministry page read on 2 November 2026, that its essential concern is to inform consumers that this amicable route exists. The assistants never name it.

The assistant tells you where to read other people's complaints. Never where to file your own.

What was measured

We went back to the eight Waseit studies: two buyer questions, the best providers of a trade in a city, then the most recommended and why, across 89 cities in France, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, between 30 July and 16 October 2026, each time in the country's language. That is 3,059 ChatGPT answers (gpt-4o-mini), 3,058 from Gemini, both without web search, and 1,364 from Perplexity, which does search the web and was only asked in three countries. We looked for the names of around thirty bodies outside the deal: mediator, ombudsman, Procon, Better Business Bureau, Trading Standards, licensing board, court, consumer association. Then we read the 355 answers found one by one and sorted each by the role the body plays in it. 109 were set aside as false friends, nearly all of them in the legal sector, where mediation and dispute resolution are practice areas, plus a London salon called Blink Brow Bar (BBB) and an agency named Nouvelles Médiations; 8 more name a body from a different country than the one asked about. A second pass looked for the instruction itself, without the name of a body (file a complaint, porter plainte, acionar o Procon), across each sentence and the one after it: it returns 13 answers, every one of them about claiming on an insurance policy.

Where does the assistant send you, and at which moment?

Before, it knows precisely where. In the United States and Canada it points to the Better Business Bureau in 94 answers and to a state licensing register in 47: check the licence, look at disciplinary history, read the complaints other people have already filed. In Brazil it is Reclame Aqui, 39 times, always before signing. In the United Kingdom it is a badge: Trading Standards Trusted Trader, the Motor Ombudsman, the redress scheme every letting agent must belong to. Afterwards, almost nobody. 19 answers say a dispute route exists, and every one of them frames it as a reason to pick that particular business. In New Zealand, Gemini explains five times that garages in the Motor Trade Association "offer a dispute resolution process if something goes wrong"; in the United Kingdom, that the Motor Ombudsman "provides an extra layer of protection if you have a dispute". That is useful, but it speaks to the buyer who is comparing, not to the customer who already has a problem. One answer speaks to that customer. In Florianópolis, asked about lawyers, Gemini writes that Procon and the Juizado Especial Cível, the small claims court, are the routes to take. One in 7,481. And when it says "if something goes wrong"? 46 further answers open that moment without naming anyone. We read all of them: the remedy is always inside the deal. The trader's insurance, their warranty, the fact that they will come back because they work in the area, the physical office you can walk into. In Calgary, ChatGPT writes that customers can seek recourse if something goes wrong, without saying where.

What it means if you are the business

The customer an assistant sends you arrives with a list of things to check and no idea what to do if it goes badly. That puts you in an uncomfortable position: you are their only recourse. In the 46 answers that open that moment, it is always you, your warranty, your insurance, your office. Two practical consequences. First, what you write about the afterwards sets you apart: a written warranty, a stated time to answer a complaint, and in France the name of the consumer mediator you have appointed, which the law already requires you to publish. Second, the assistants reuse the badges they already know, the Motor Ombudsman, the Motor Trade Association, Trusted Trader, a state register. If your trade has a body like that and you belong to it, write it out in words on your site rather than showing a logo: a logo cannot be read. These are reasonable steps, not levers with a known effect, and we have not measured whether they get a business named more often. One question stays open and it is yours: when the assistant sends your customer to check a reputation before calling, whose does it show them, yours or a competitor's? Yesterday we counted the warnings: Gemini warns of tradesperson scams 253 times, ChatGPT 6.

And your business, what do the assistants say?

The free Waseit audit asks ChatGPT and Gemini the questions your customers actually type, in their language and for your city, then reads the answers one by one. In about 60 seconds you see a score out of 100, the competitors named instead of you, the questions where you do not appear, and the tone of the sentences that mention you. That is exactly where you can read what the assistant shows someone who checks before calling. Free, no account and no card; an email address only unlocks the competitor names and the action plan. It is a dated snapshot, not a ranking: answers change from one day to the next, and we promise no position.

What this does not prove

• These are model answers through their programming interfaces, with no user location; ChatGPT and Gemini answered without web search, Perplexity searched and was only asked in three countries. Each question was asked once, between 30 July and 16 October 2026; ChatGPT here is gpt-4o-mini, not necessarily the model behind the app, and the models may have changed since.
• The questions asked are buying questions: the best plumbers in a city, the most recommended and why. Nobody asked what to do after a bad job. What is measured here is the absence of UNPROMPTED advice; it does not say what an assistant would answer to someone who asks directly.
• The detector starts from a list of names. A body we did not list, or referred to in a roundabout way, could have escaped us; the second pass, which looked for the instruction without the name, added nothing. All 355 answers found were read, but sorting them into three roles remains a reading judgement, not an automatic measurement. The rows of the second table overlap: 10 answers name at least two bodies.
• The French zero is a count of words: consumer mediator or mediation, DGCCRF, the fraud authority, SignalConso, conciliator, consumer association, UFC-Que Choisir, 60 Millions. The four occurrences of the French word recours are something else: administrative appeals listed as a lawyer's specialism, recourse to the head office of a locksmith chain, and twice the everyday sense of turning to someone.
• Consumer mediation does not cover everything: health services provided by health professionals are excluded, so the answers in our corpus about dentists fall outside it. Other countries have their own rules, which we have not checked; only the French page was read.
• Naming a body is not the same as being useful. We did not verify that the badges the assistants cite are current, nor that the businesses they recommend actually belong to them.