Essex has 45% of East Anglia’s firms. AI search gives it 9% of the names.

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode for the best accountants, solicitors, recruitment agencies, IT support firms, architects and estate agents in each of Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire, then in “East Anglia”. 3,600 answers in all, each matched against every firm Google Maps lists in the four counties. In their own county,1,364 of 7,952 firms were ever named. Asked for the region, the engines named 690 of 7,631, and most of those were in Norfolk and Suffolk.

The four counties, side by side

Each county is its own study: the same six sectors, the same four questions with the county’s name in them, 10 runs each on each engine. Click through for the sector tables and the firms named.

Sector by sector, county by county

The share of firms in each sector never named by any engine when asked about their own county.

Ask for East Anglia, and who answers

The same six sectors, asked about the region: “best X in East Anglia”, “recommend an X in East Anglia”, “X in East Anglia” and “who are the top X in East Anglia”. 720 answers. This table sets each county’s share of the region’s firms against its share of the names the engines gave. A firm with listings in more than one county is counted once, in its own row.

Two things are going on. The engines treat “East Anglia” as Norfolk and Suffolk; Cambridgeshire and Essex both get well under their share of the firms. And a firm with offices in two or three counties, the Birketts and Larking Gowens of the region, reads to an engine as a regional firm, so it is the safe answer to a regional question. A single-office firm in Chelmsford or Peterborough is not in that answer however good it is.

The sources behind the regional answers

Summed across all 6 sectors. Google’s own Maps links are left out. Asked about a region rather than a county, ChatGPT moves up a level, to national rankings such as Chambers and the Legal 500 for solicitors and the RIBA for architects.

The six sectors, asked for East Anglia

Each block is 120 answers to the regional questions, measured against every firm listed in the four counties. The bars are the share of answers in which the firm was named.

Method

• The denominator. Every Google Maps listing in each sector’s categories, pulled through DataForSEO’s Business Listings data and filtered to each county’s postcodes. Essex is the ceremonial county, with Southend and Thurrock; Cambridgeshire includes Peterborough. Postcodes that straddle a border count only where the address names the county. Wrong categories and permanently closed listings are removed, and firms with more than one office are grouped by website. The regional denominator is the four county lists together.
• The prompts. Per county: “best X in [county]”, “recommend an X in [county]”, “X near [county town]” (Ipswich, Norwich, Chelmsford, Cambridge) and “who are the top X in [county]”. For the region, the four questions above. Each run10 times per engine, logged out, UK location.
• The engines and dates. ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, collected through DataForSEO’s scrapers with ChatGPT’s web search on. Suffolk on 18 September 2026; Norfolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and the regional questions on 27 September 2026.
• A mention is the firm’s name, or its website, in the answer. A firm whose only distinctive word is also part of another firm’s name, as in “Fosters”, is counted only when the answer does not name that other firm in full. Place names never count as distinctive, so “Essex Law” is not matched by every answer that says “in Essex”. Matching was automatic, then checked by hand at the top and bottom of every table.
• What it cannot tell you. It is a snapshot and the engines move. Firms without a Google listing are not in the count. The list of firms that were not named is deliberately not published.

The per-firm data is available to journalists and trade bodies on request:hello@1weeksites.com. If you cite the study, link to this page. I will re-run it quarterly and keep the URLs.