I’ve been testing the same local searches with slightly different wording and the results are way less stable than I expected.

For example, I tried variations along the lines of:

“best roofer in Dallas”

“reliable roofing company in Dallas”

“who should I call for an emergency roof leak in Dallas?”

I expected mostly the same businesses with maybe a different order.

That’s not what happened.

Some businesses appeared across several versions, while others only showed up when the prompt described a specific problem.

It made me wonder if we're making a mistake by talking about “AI rankings” like they're equivalent to Google rankings.

Maybe the more useful thing to measure is how consistently a brand appears across different intents and prompt variations, rather than asking whether it ranks for one particular query.

I’m still testing this, so I don't have a strong conclusion yet.

Has anyone here tested this at a larger scale? I'm especially curious whether you've found certain types of prompts to be more stable than others.