Which managed it support companies in Portsmouth do AI assistants actually recommend?

We put the 14 questions a person in Portsmouth asks before choosing a managed it support company — 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. 30 firms in Portsmouth were checked against those answers. 11 of them were named at least once. The rest were not recommended in a single answer. Below are the 11 firms named most often; the others are told their result privately.

The top of the table

Firms are ranked by the number of answers that named them, then by how many different questions. The top 10 of the 30 firms checked are listed (the top ten, or the top third, whichever is smaller), plus any firm level with the last one in; a rank number that is skipped belongs to a firm that is not named here: it asked not to be, or the name the assistants used is a trade body, a national chain or a description rather than a local firm. 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.

A further 19 firms were checked and are not listed here: 0 named in at least one answer but below the cut, 19 not named at all. Each has a private report, sent to the firm on request and to nobody else.

Is this your firm? If anything here is wrong, or you would rather your firm were not listed, email hello@aether-agency.co.uk or use the contact form. We acknowledge within two working days, correct a factual error as soon as it is confirmed, and take a firm off the public page on request; the measurement itself is not changed, because it records what the assistants said on the day.

The questions we asked

1. best managed IT support and helpdesk companies near Portsmouth
2. how much does managed IT support and helpdesk cost per month for a small business
3. our office server keeps crashing and we need someone to fix it fast, who covers Portsmouth
4. what should be included in a managed IT support contract and SLA response times
5. best cybersecurity and threat protection providers near Portsmouth UK
6. how much does cybersecurity and threat protection cost for a small business
7. do I need cybersecurity threat protection if I already have antivirus software
8. managed IT support vs cybersecurity services, which do we need first for our business
9. we had a phishing email get through, who can audit our network security near Portsmouth
10. companies that set up Microsoft 365 and cloud services for small offices near Portsmouth
11. how much cloud storage do you get with Microsoft 365 business plans
12. moving our files from an old server to the cloud, who can help with Microsoft 365 migration
13. backup and disaster recovery providers for small business near Portsmouth
14. do I really need a separate disaster recovery plan if I already back up to the cloud

How this was measured

• Date: 23 October 2026, the day the answers were collected. This is one day, not a trend; the index is re-measured monthly and each month’s date is shown.
• Sample: 14 questions × 1 assistant × 5 runs = 70 answers. 30 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.
• What is public: the 11 firms named most often, by name. Every other firm’s result is private to that firm. A firm can have itself taken off this page on request (see above).
• 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. This measures what the assistants said; it is not a judgement of the quality of any firm’s work.