Best aluminum extruders in Canada, according to AI

What does AI say about Canadian aluminum extrusion suppliers?

Dajcor Aluminum is named most, on 21.9 percent of 256 mentions, and the other 82 companies share the rest.

1. Asked who supplies, AI names a Canadian extruder on 42.1 percent of questions; asked how to decide, on 8.3 percent.

   Figure 2

2. No company owns the category: 83 companies were named across 256 mentions, and the leader took 21.9 percent.

   Figure 1

3. The most cited supplier site in the category, after the subject's own, is a Chinese extruder with 52 citations.

   Figure 3

4. Google AI Overview named the leading company in 15 percent of answers, against 36 for ChatGPT and 39 for Perplexity.

   Figure 4

5. Four directory sites carry 117 citations, more than three times the most cited Canadian extruder's own domain at 37.

   Figure 3

Which aluminum extrusion companies does AI name most often?

Dajcor Aluminum, on 21.9 percent of 256 mentions, then Can Art at 7.4 and Hydro at 7.0. Eighty-three companies were named in total.

Forty-three of the 50 questions describe a need and leave the engine to choose who to name. Across those the three engines produced 256 company mentions spread over 83 companies, and the leader holds 21.9 percent of them while being absent from 21 of the 43 questions.

Can Art and Hydro follow at 7.4 and 7.0 percent, and below them the list falls into single mentions. Eight of the ten most named companies are Canadian, so on questions of this shape the engines do reach for local suppliers.

Figure 1

The full ranking

No company holds more than 22 percent of the mentions, and 83 are named

Canadian extruder or supplierSupplier based outside CanadaOrigin not confirmed

1. 01Dajcor Aluminum21.9%1st of 1014.5 points ahead of Can ArtMentions56 of 256Questions naming it22 of 43
2. 02Can Art7.4%2nd of 1014.5 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions19 of 256
3. 03Hydro7.0%3rd of 1014.9 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions18 of 256Legal nameNorsk Hydro ASA
4. 04Apex Aluminum Extrusions4.3%4th of 1017.6 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions11 of 256
5. 05Spectra Aluminum Products2.3%5th of 10, tied with 119.6 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions6 of 256
6. 06Macfab ManufacturingCNC SHOP2.3%5th of 10, tied with 119.6 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions6 of 256
7. 07APEL Extrusions2.0%7th of 10, tied with 119.9 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions5 of 256
8. 08Bonnell Aluminum2.0%7th of 10, tied with 119.9 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions5 of 256
9. 09Signature Aluminum Canada1.6%9th of 10, tied with 120.3 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions4 of 256
10. 10MAP Inc.DISTRIBUTOR1.6%9th of 10, tied with 120.3 points behind Dajcor AluminumMentions4 of 256

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Data behind Figure 110 rows · CSV · JSON · PNG

Share of the 256 company mentions across the 43 questions that name no company. The Prompt Group, 29 September 2026.

Dajcor Aluminum leads and is still absent from 21 of those 43 questions. Origin is our classification, made by opening each company's own site; where a site did not state a head office we left it unconfirmed rather than guess.

Name	Value	Mentions	Questions naming it	Legal name
Dajcor Aluminum	21.9%	56 of 256	22 of 43
Can Art	7.4%	19 of 256
Hydro	7.0%	18 of 256		Norsk Hydro ASA
Apex Aluminum Extrusions	4.3%	11 of 256
Spectra Aluminum Products	2.3%	6 of 256
Macfab Manufacturing	2.3%	6 of 256
APEL Extrusions	2.0%	5 of 256
Bonnell Aluminum	2.0%	5 of 256
Signature Aluminum Canada	1.6%	4 of 256
MAP Inc.	1.6%	4 of 256

Two names in the top ten do not extrude anything. MAP Inc. in Waterloo distributes MayTec t-slot framing and Macfab in Mississauga is a CNC machine shop; both supply aluminum parts and neither runs a press.

The questions do not separate extrusion from machining or framing, and the answers do not either, so a buyer building a shortlist from them would be comparing three different kinds of supplier.

Which websites does AI cite when answering about aluminum extrusion?

Supplier guides, directories and social pages. The most cited supplier site in the category, after the subject's own, belongs to a Chinese extruder.

The 300 answers carried 2,512 citations across 916 domains. Setting the subject's own site aside, shengxinaluminium.com is the most cited supplier domain at 52 citations from all three engines, and it belongs to Anhui Shengxin Aluminum in Anhui Province, China. Its pages carry titles such as Anodized Aluminum Extrusion: Why Your Alloy Choice Makes Or Breaks The Finish, which answers the question a Canadian engineer typed.

Directories carry another large block: iqsdirectory.com, ensun.io, thomasnet.com and alibaba.com together hold 117 citations, more than three times canart.com at 37.

Figure 3

Most cited domains

The most cited supplier site in the category is a Chinese extruder

Canadian supplier siteSupplier site outside CanadaDirectory or ranked listSocial, search or institution

1. 01linkedin.com621st of 1410 ahead of shengxinaluminium.comPages cited33
2. 02shengxinaluminium.com522nd of 1410 behind linkedin.comPages cited26CompanyAnhui Shengxin Aluminum, China
3. 03canada.ca453rd of 14, tied with 117 behind linkedin.comPages cited43
4. 04iqsdirectory.com453rd of 14, tied with 117 behind linkedin.comPages cited23
5. 05ensun.io415th of 1421 behind linkedin.comPages cited20
6. 06google.com406th of 1422 behind linkedin.comPages cited36
7. 07canart.com377th of 1425 behind linkedin.comPages cited15
8. 08hydro.com368th of 1426 behind linkedin.comPages cited30
9. 09apexextrusions.ca309th of 1432 behind linkedin.comPages cited13
10. 10aec.org2710th of 1435 behind linkedin.comPages cited21BodyAluminum Extruders Council
11. 11facebook.com2511th of 1437 behind linkedin.comPages cited21
12. 12thomasnet.com1612th of 1446 behind linkedin.comPages cited12
13. 13alibaba.com1513th of 14, tied with 147 behind linkedin.comPages cited14
14. 14yjing-extrusion.com1513th of 14, tied with 147 behind linkedin.comPages cited7CompanyFoshan Yejing Machinery, China

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Data behind Figure 314 rows · CSV · JSON · PNG

Citations by source domain across all 300 answers. The Prompt Group, 29 September 2026.

The subject's own site is left out: seven questions name it, which guarantees it citations and would put it off the scale at 267. Anhui Shengxin publishes guides on anodizing, alloys and finishing, the kind of page these answers reach for.

Domain	Value	Pages cited	Company	Body
linkedin.com	62	33
shengxinaluminium.com	52	26	Anhui Shengxin Aluminum, China
canada.ca	45	43
iqsdirectory.com	45	23
ensun.io	41	20
google.com	40	36
canart.com	37	15
hydro.com	36	30
apexextrusions.ca	30	13
aec.org	27	21		Aluminum Extruders Council
facebook.com	25	21
thomasnet.com	16	12
alibaba.com	15	14
yjing-extrusion.com	15	7	Foshan Yejing Machinery, China

The engines are reaching for explanation rather than for suppliers, and whoever published the explanation is cited. yjing-extrusion.com, which sells extrusion presses rather than extrusions, is cited 15 times as evidence about buying them.

One question shows the instability directly. Asked why anodizing improves an extrusion's performance, one run cited ten sources with no Canadian company among them, and a second run six minutes later cited the Aluminum Anodizers Council, AluQuebec, Apex Extrusions and Can Art.

Do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview name the same aluminum extruders?

No. On identical questions collected on the same day, Google AI Overview named the leading company in 15 percent of answers against 36 for ChatGPT and 39 for Perplexity.

Google AI Overview answered less rather than differently. It produced 259 citations against 447 and 497 for the other two engines, and frequently returned a general explanation with no supplier named at all.

The seven questions that name the company lift all three engines equally, so the level is flattered and the gap between engines is not.

Figure 4

Engine by engine

Google AI Overview names the company less than half as often as the other two

0%10%20%30%40%

1. 39%Perplexity43 percent of all 90Answers100Citations497
2. 36%ChatGPT40 percent of all 90Answers100Citations447
3. 15%Google AI Overview17 percent of all 90Answers100Citations259

Data behind Figure 43 rows · CSV · JSON · PNG

How often each engine named Dajcor Aluminum, across all 50 questions and both runs. The Prompt Group, 29 September 2026.

The seven questions that name the company lift all three engines equally, so the level is flattered and the gap between engines is not.

Name	Value	Answers	Citations
Perplexity	39%	100	497
ChatGPT	36%	100	447
Google AI Overview	15%	100	259

That makes the three engines three separate channels for a manufacturer. A page built for Perplexity's appetite for citable technical detail does not automatically earn a place in an AI Overview, which draws on a narrower set of sources.

The difference here is in how often an answer names anyone at all rather than in who it names, which is a different problem from the rank reversals seen in other categories.

How can an aluminum extruder get named in AI answers?

Publish the technical explanation the pre-shortlist questions are assembled from, and say on the page where the plant is.

The category is lost before the shortlist. A Canadian extruder appears on 42.1 percent of questions asking who supplies and 8.3 percent of questions asking how to decide. On nineteen of the twenty-six technical questions none appears at all, so there is no position to improve.

Publish explanations, not capability lists. The most cited supplier domain after the subject's own belongs to a Chinese extruder publishing technical guides on anodizing, alloys and finishing. The engines cited it 52 times for explanation, not as a supplier.

Directories hold more of the evidence layer. iqsdirectory.com, ensun.io, thomasnet.com and alibaba.com together carry 117 citations against 37 for canart.com, the most cited Canadian extruder's own site.

Say on the page where the plant is. Only 2 of the 43 unbranded questions mention Canada, and eight of the ten most named companies are Canadian anyway. The pages cited to support those names largely are not.

How was this aluminum extrusion benchmark measured?

50 questions about custom aluminum extrusion, 43 of which name no company, put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview twice each for a Canadian location, giving 300 answers.

The panel

Fifty questions about custom aluminum extrusion, anodizing, CNC machining, finishing and design support, put to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview. Each question was run twice on each engine, producing 300 answers. All answers were collected for a Canadian location.

Branded and unbranded

Seven of the 50 questions name Dajcor Aluminum in their text. The other 43 do not. We classify by reading the question text, not by the flag that ships with the question set: that flag marks six of the seven, and misses Does Dajcor offer design support for my extrusion project. Every category figure here uses the 43 unbranded questions only, and says so.

Share of company mentions

Every time an answer names a company, that is one mention. Share is a company's mentions as a percentage of all 256 mentions collected on the 43 unbranded questions. It measures how much of the conversation a name takes, not how many buyers would choose it.

Visibility

The percentage of answers to a given question that name the company in question. A question scores zero when no answer to it named that company in either run.

Sources and citations

A citation is one reference to one URL inside one answer. Domains are counted across all 300 answers, including the seven branded questions, which is why the subject's own domain is excluded from the source figure rather than shown at the top of it.

Identifying companies

Company websites were confirmed by opening them, not by taking the domain attached to the name in the data. That mattered: the roster in the source data lists Spectra Aluminum Products against a data broker's domain and MAP Inc. against a mapping software company. Where a head office could not be confirmed on the company's own site, the company is marked as origin not confirmed rather than assigned a country.

Two runs

Each question was run twice, a few minutes apart. That is enough to show run to run instability and not enough to average it away. Where the two runs disagree, the report says so rather than reporting the mean as settled.

Limitations

This is one collection day and two runs, which is a snapshot and not a trend. Answer engines vary run to run, and this set shows it plainly. The same anodizing question on the same engine, six minutes apart, returned two entirely different source lists: one with no Canadian company in it, and one built on Canadian institutions. Treat the ordering below about 3 percent as unstable. The question set was built around one manufacturer's capabilities, so it over-represents design support, one-stop fabrication and anodizing relative to the category as a whole. A company strong in those areas will look better here than a broader question set would show. Share of mentions measures presence in answers, not market share, revenue or quality. Nothing here says which supplier a buyer should choose.

Frequently asked questions about AI and aluminum extrusion suppliers

Written by

Anton Sopov

Founder, The Prompt Group

Anton Sopov is the founder of The Prompt Group, an AI brand strategy and agentic discovery firm. He works with brands on how they are ranked, cited and described in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answers, and is the author of The Delegation Curve.

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