Which chartered surveyors in Guildford do AI assistants actually recommend?

We put the 14 questions a person in Guildford asks before choosing chartered surveyor — cost, specialism, who to use, how to check them — to Claude, 5 times each, 70 answers in all, and recorded every firm the answers named. 27 firms in Guildford were checked against those answers. 2 of them were named at least once. The rest were not recommended in a single answer.

The league table

Firms are ranked by the number of answers that named them, then by how many different questions. The assistants do not give identical answers twice, so a difference of one or two mentions is noise; being named on questions a rival is absent from is not.

The questions we asked

1. What does a building survey actually check that a mortgage valuation doesn't?
2. How much does a building survey cost for a Victorian house in Guildford?
3. Do I need a full building survey if the house is only 10 years old?
4. How do I find a RICS chartered surveyor near Guildford I can actually trust for a building survey?
5. Is a Level 2 Homebuyer Report enough or should I pay for a Level 3 Building Survey?
6. How much does a property valuation cost in Guildford for probate purposes?
7. Do I need a professional property valuation for probate or can I use the estate agent's figure?
8. What's the difference between market value and a RICS red book valuation?
9. My neighbour in Godalming wants to extend next to my wall, do I need a party wall surveyor?
10. How much does it cost to get a party wall agreement sorted before building work starts?
11. Can a surveyor act for both me and my neighbour in a party wall dispute or do we each need our own?
12. What does a project monitoring surveyor do for a developer during construction near Woking?
13. What's the typical fee structure for construction monitoring surveyors on a small development contract?
14. I'm a landlord near Farnham and the tenant's lease is ending, do I need a dilapidations survey before they move out?

How this was measured

• Date: 2 October 2026. This is one day, not a trend; the index is re-measured monthly.
• Sample: 14 questions × 1 assistant × 5 runs = 70 answers. 27 firms checked.
• Assistants used: Claude (Anthropic’s Sonnet model, through its API, with web search). Answers from these programming interfaces can differ from what the consumer apps show.
• Counting: a firm is counted when its name appears in an answer. Names are picked out of the answer text automatically, then matched to the firm list.
• Limits: the assistants vary between runs, so small gaps are noise. Firms that were not named may still be recommended by an assistant or a question we did not ask. National chains are left off the list.