ChatGPT SEO for trades and construction: how to get recommended by AI
ChatGPT SEO, or AI search optimisation, is getting your business named when a customer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini who to call instead of searching Google. There is no switch. Check where you stand in ten minutes, then work through nine jobs in the order they pay, with every figure sourced.
- Written by
- Steve Mark, September 2026
- What you get
- 83 pages, free, no email required
In short
ChatGPT SEO means getting your business named when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation or an answer. Asked to recommend a local tradesperson, the assistants mostly read out directories and lists, so being listed, accurate and well reviewed on those matters more than anything on your own website. Asked a question like “how much should a new boiler cost?”, they look for the clearest answer, so plain, specific pages written by someone who does the work are what get used.
Start by checking whether ChatGPT mentions you today, using the ten-minute check below. Three of the nine jobs in this guide are nearly free and take about a day between them. The rest compound over 12 to 18 months. If you would rather have it done for you, that is what our AI SEO agency work covers, and our free Website & AI Readiness Audit shows what the AI tools say about you now. Construction and civils firms should also read AI SEO for construction companies.
What's in here
Read Part one once. Fifteen minutes. Then work down Part two in order. The order is the money order. Everything in the PDF is on this page, plus a ten-minute ChatGPT check that is on the web edition only.
83 pages, 9 MB. No email required.
The 60-second version
Five things. If you read nothing else on this page, read these.
Nearly half of people now ask an AI assistant for a local business recommendation. A year ago it was one in sixteen.
When someone types “plumber in Hull”, they still get a map. That game hasn't changed.
When someone asks a question like “how much should a new boiler cost?”, they get an AI answer almost every time. That game is new, and most trades businesses aren't in it.
When someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a tradesperson in the UK, it reads a directory out loud. Nine in ten times, your own website has nothing to do with it.
Everything in this guide is one of two jobs: get on the lists, or become the answer.
There is no switch.
Nobody can put you in ChatGPT by Friday, and anyone who says they can is selling you something they cannot deliver.
- The work
- 9jobs, in order of what they cost and what they return
- Free and fast
- 3of them are nearly free and take a day
- The honest timeline
- 12 to 18months for the rest to compound
Check whether ChatGPT mentions you
Ten minutes, free, and the most useful thing you can do before spending a penny on ChatGPT SEO. You are not looking for a ranking, because there isn't one. You are looking for who gets named, and where the assistant got the names from.
Write five questions a customer would ask
Mix the two kinds. “Who do I call” questions, like “who's a good emergency plumber in Hull?” or “which groundworks contractors work in the North West?”, and the question search, like “how much should a new boiler cost?” or “do I need planning permission for a dropped kerb?”. Use your own town, your own trade and the words your customers use.
Ask them in a fresh chat
Open a new chat with memory turned off, or a private window without logging in, so the answer isn't shaped by your own history. Ask each question exactly as you wrote it. If you have time, ask the same five in Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode too.
Write down who is named and what is cited
For each answer, note the businesses named, in order, and the sources the assistant links to. If the sources are Checkatrade, Google reviews, trade bodies or a local newspaper, that is where your work is (Jobs 3, 4 and 5). If they are other firms' guide pages, you need answers of your own (Job 2).
Ask what it knows about you by name
Ask “what do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?”. Wrong services, an old address or a competitor's details mean your listings disagree with each other, which is Job 4. Nothing at all means the assistant hasn't come across enough mentions of you yet.
Repeat it every month, same questions
Answers wander from one day to the next, so one screenshot proves nothing either way. Keep the questions in a spreadsheet, run them on the first Monday of each month and log the names. The trend over three to six months is what tells you whether the work is landing.
What we found when we ran it on ourselves
On 2 November 2026 we put eight questions to ChatGPT about marketing help for trades and construction firms. We Are SMC was named in two of the eight. For “who can help my construction company show up in ChatGPT answers”, we were the first name it gave, and the source it read was our own AI SEO page. In the other six we weren't mentioned at all. That is one run on one day, and it will change, which is exactly why you keep a monthly log rather than trusting a single answer.
If the check shows you are missing, the nine jobs below are the fix, in order. If you would rather we ran the check properly and did the work, that is what our AI SEO agency service is for, and the free Website & AI Readiness Audit includes it.
Steve says
Twenty years marketing trades businesses and the most expensive habit I see is tactic-hopping. A founder gets bombarded from social, from the trade press, from the bloke at the plumbers' yard who “does this and does that”, and scatters across all of it.
The killer detail isn't the wasted money. It's that they never give one thing long enough to work, so they never learn what works. AI is about to become the next great excuse for that. Don't let it be.
What's changing, and what it costs you
Five chapters, fifteen minutes. What the numbers actually say, what they don't, and where the money sits.
Your customer is not only asking Google but ChatGPT
- 2025 to 2026
- 6% → 45%Share of consumers who used an AI tool to get a local business recommendation. A sevenfold jump in twelve months.
- Google's share
- 83% → 71%Google's share of local business discovery over the same year.
- Aged 30 to 44
- 64%Have asked an AI assistant for a business recommendation. This is the person with a mortgage and a house that needs work.
- Over 60
- 24%The same question, the other end of the age range.
BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 1,002 US adults, plus the AI-trust supplement, March 2026. US consumers, not UK homeowners, and “used once” is a low bar.
Two searches, two different games
What the customer types decides which game they're in. These three rows are the whole argument.
| What they type | AI answer appears | Map pack appears |
|---|---|---|
| Trade + town: “plumbers in Hull” | 15% | 93% |
| A question: “why is my radiator cold at the bottom” | 92% | 6% |
| A money question: “how much should a new boiler cost in Hull” | 97% | 17% |
Whitespark, 540 manual searches, three US cities, six trades including plumbers, May 2025. Rounded. US data, over a year old, modest sample.
Row one: the map pack has not been replaced
Trade + town still returns a map with three businesses, more than nine times out of ten. Your Google profile, your reviews and how close you are still win that search. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Row two: a question gets an AI answer
Almost every time. Nine in ten searches that are phrased as a question are answered by Google itself, in a block of text above the results.
Row three: a question with money attached
Google answers it itself, 97% of the time. No map. An answer built from whoever wrote the best page on the subject. If that page isn't yours, it's a national comparison site's. And that site has no interest in your phone ringing.
| The “who do I call” search | The “what should this cost” search | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the customer is | Ready to ring somebody | Two to six weeks out |
| What wins it | Your Google profile, your reviews, being on the lists | Having written the best answer |
| What it feels like | Phone rings today | Phone rings next month, and they already trust you |
| Lead quality | Mixed. Price shoppers included. | Higher. They've read you. They arrive warm. |
| Which jobs | 3, 4, 5, 6 | 1, 2, 8, 9 |
Most trades businesses are half-decent at the left column and absent from the right one. The right column is where the better-margin work sits. Someone who has read your honest page about what a boiler swap actually costs is not ringing round for three quotes.
The uncomfortable UK evidence
A UK agency asked ChatGPT to recommend a tradesperson 80 times. Eight trades, ten UK towns, one consistent wording. They logged all 405 sources it cited. Every single one of the 80 answers cited a trade directory.
- Trade directories
- 71.9%
- Businesses' own websites
- 13.8%
- National operators
- 9.4%
- Other
- 4.9%
Share of the 405 sources ChatGPT cited.
The 237 businesses Google ranks in the map pack
They ran the same searches through Google, captured the map pack, and laid the two side by side. Four in five of the businesses Google thinks are the best answer in town didn't appear in the AI answer at all.
- 80.6%
- 191Not mentioned by ChatGPT at all
- 19.4%
- 46Named by ChatGPT, because a directory had them
- 0.8%
- 2Named, with their own website actually read
Of the 41 named businesses with a website listed on their Google profile, two had that website read.
What actually happens when someone asks
The customer asks
“Can you recommend a good plumber near me?”
The assistant looks for a list
Not for local tradespeople. For a page that has already ranked and vetted them.
It reads the list out
Names, ratings and review counts, lifted straight from the directory listing.
Asked to recommend a local tradesperson, the machine doesn't go looking for local tradespeople. It goes looking for lists of them, and reads the list out.
It's worse in smaller towns
52.1% of answers across the six cities cited at least one business's own website. Across Paisley, Barrhead, Johnstone and Renfrew, that fell to 31.3%. In a smaller town there's less of everything else, so the list is the answer.
Watch out
Treat this as a direction, not a measurement. Eighty prompts on one day, one wording, through the developer version rather than the app, and ChatGPT only. The author says all of that himself, which is exactly why we trust it. What it proves is a pattern, not a percentage.
Murray Digital, 80 prompts, eight trades, ten UK towns, 405 sources, 25 August 2026.
What this changes about where your money goes
If you were about to spend £4,000 on a new website in the hope of being found by AI, stop and read this.
| What you were going to do | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| Rebuild the website to “be AI ready” | Your site was read in 2 out of 41 cases. Fix whether it can be read at all (Job 8, half a day) and spend the rest elsewhere. |
| Ignore directory listings because the leads are poor | The listing is what the machine reads. Even a free, accurate listing is doing a job you weren't counting. |
| Chase more Google reviews only | Nearly every business named came with a rating and review count attached, lifted from a directory. Reviews need to exist in more than one place. |
| Buy “AI optimisation” at £900 a month | Ask which of the nine jobs in Part two they're doing. If they can't answer, that's your answer. |
Why this is actually good news for you
You no longer have to beat the big sites to be quoted. You have to answer one specific question better than they do.
Nobody at a national comparison site can write about the awkward flue positions in 1930s semis in your town. You can. Today. For free.
- Mid-2025 → March 2026
- 76% → 38%AI Overview citations that also ranked in Google's top ten.
- Away from Google
- ~12%of pages cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot were in Google's top ten.
- Not even close
- ~80%weren't in the top hundred for the original search at all.
Ahrefs, 863,000 searches and 4 million AI Overview links, March 2026; Ahrefs late-2025 study for the 12% and 80% figures.
You will never win
“boiler replacement cost UK”
400 firms and three national sites are in that fight.
You can win
“how much does a combi boiler swap cost in Hull”
Maybe six firms are in that fight, and four of them have published nothing.
Six pages like that, done properly, is about six days of someone's time. If two of them get quoted and each brings one enquiry a month, that's 24 enquiries a year. At your close rate and your average job value, for most heating firms that comes out well north of the cost of writing the pages. Illustration, not a promise.
Proof
Six pages beat sixty
- 306%
- Rise in organic clicks, first three months
- Page 1
- Air conditioning service pages, within three months of launch
A renewables and air conditioning client came to us with a new site and a short runway. Instead of publishing broadly, we went narrow on the questions their actual customers were asking. Depth on the questions that matter beats breadth on the ones that don't. Early results on a young site, and we're not done. The lesson holds.
How the machine picks who to name
It looks things up; it doesn't remember. Google's AI fires off a set of related searches at the same time and pulls from all of them. Whoever has decent pages on the side questions gets pulled into the answer, even though nobody searched for them.
It asks itself more questions than the customer did
“Is an air source heat pump worth it in an old house?”
- running costs
- insulation
- radiator sizing
- grants
- noise
- what happens in a cold snap
One customer question becomes six searches behind the scenes. This is why six good pages on one topic beat sixty thin pages on forty topics.
Google Search Central, guidance on generative AI features, May 2026. Google's own example is “how to fix a lawn full of weeds”.
Every AI answer puts your page through three gates
Indexed
Is your page in the index this assistant searches? Shut for most trades sites. Fixed in Job 8.
Readable
When the crawler fetched your page, could it see any words? Shut for most trades sites. Fixed in Job 8.
Citable
Is it the clearest, most trustworthy answer? This is the one everybody spends money on. Fixed in Jobs 1, 2 and 7.
Almost all the money wasted on this gets spent on gate three while gate one is still shut.
There isn't one index
Each assistant searches a different place. Don't try to please six systems. Get Google right, then make sure Bing has you indexed.
| Assistant | Where it gets its facts | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Google's index, plus your Business Profile | Your existing Google work carries over |
| Gemini | Google's index and Knowledge Graph | The only major AI crawler that runs JavaScript |
| ChatGPT | Bing's index, OpenAI's crawl, listing sites | Bing is the floor; directories do the lifting |
| Copilot | Bing's index | If Bing hasn't got you, Copilot can't name you |
| Perplexity | Its own index plus others | Rewards clean pages and public PDFs |
| Claude | Web search when switched on | Rewards specific numbers and named sources |
Unique content is the biggest lever Google names
Generic: Google's example
7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers
Anyone could have written this. So could a machine.
Unique: Google's example
Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line
Only someone who was actually down there with a camera could have written this.
You see things every week that a national website will never see. That's the raw material, and it's the one thing AI can't fake, because it didn't do the job.
What you can ignore: Google's own mythbusting
Google's position is that its AI features run on its normal search ranking and quality systems. AEO, GEO: the same work with new labels. Now you can check a sales pitch against the source.
| What you'll be sold | What Google says |
|---|---|
| An “llms.txt” file | Not needed. Google doesn't use them. Clarified again in June 2026. |
| “Chunking” your content for AI | No requirement. Google handles multi-topic pages fine. |
| Rewriting your site “for AI” | Not needed. The systems understand meaning and synonyms. |
| Buying brand mentions | Seeking inauthentic mentions “isn't as helpful as it might seem”. Spam systems apply to AI features too. |
| Special schema markup for AI | Not required. Keep normal schema for normal search results. |
The nine jobs
There is no single switch. There are nine jobs. They compound, and the order matters, because your money and your time are finite.
Cheap and fast
Jobs 1, 4, 8Nearly free, about a day between them. Nothing else works properly until these are done.
Medium, compounds
Jobs 2, 3, 6, 9Real time and real money, and they build on each other.
Slow, earns everything else
Jobs 5, 7The ones that take a year and cannot be bought.
Don't skip to Job 9 because video sounds fun. The order is the money order.
| # | The job | What it costs | When it shows | Which game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Know what they ask before they ring | Free, 2 weeks | Immediately | Both |
| 2 | Write the five answers only you could write | 5 to 6 days of time | 3 to 9 months | The question search |
| 3 | Get reviews that say something | Free, plus a habit | 1 to 3 months | Who do I call |
| 4 | Be on the lists, spelled right | Free to low | 1 to 3 months | Who do I call |
| 5 | Make your local name leave a footprint | Money you may already spend | 3 to 12 months | Both |
| 6 | Put your accreditations into words | Already paid for | 1 to 2 months | Both |
| 7 | Get talked about | A consequence of 2, 5, 9 | 6 to 18 months | Both |
| 8 | Make sure the machine can read your site | Half a day, once | Immediate once fixed | Both |
| 9 | Point a phone at your work | An hour a week | 3 to 12 months | Both |
Score yourself out of nine
One tick each, honestly.
- I have a written list of the questions customers ask before they book
- I've published proper answers to at least five of them
- I ask every customer for a review, on more than one platform
- My name, address and phone number are identical everywhere online
- Something I sponsor or won has a page about it on someone else's website
- My accreditations are written in words on my site, with numbers
- My business name appears on sites I don't own, at least monthly
- I know for certain an AI crawler can read my website
- There are videos online that say my business name out loud
- 0 to 2 ticks
- Normal. Start with Jobs 1, 4 and 8. Half a day of work, most of it free.
- 3 to 5 ticks
- Ahead of most. Jobs 2 and 3 are where your money should go next.
- 6+ ticks
- Top few per cent of trades businesses in the country. Jobs 7 and 9 are what's left.
Job 1: Know what they ask before they ring
Write down the questions your customers ask in the weeks before they contact anybody, in their words, and rank them by how close each one sits to a job.
95%
of the customer's journey happens before they're ready to ring anyone. Most trades websites are written only for the last 5%.
What's changed
Nothing, and that's the point. Customers have always researched before they bought. What's changed is that Google now answers that research itself, 92 to 97% of the time, using whoever wrote the best page.
So the questions your customers ask are no longer background noise. They're the list of places you can be found. It stops you writing pages nobody asked for, which is the expensive mistake most trades businesses that “do content” make.
- Cost
- £0
- Time
- 2 weeks passive, 3 hours active
- Shows in
- Improves every other job at once
Do this
Mine your own phone
For two weeks, write down every question a customer asks before booking, in their words, not yours. Best research there is, nobody else has it, and it's free.
Split the list into three
Research questions, money questions, ready-to-hire questions. The first two need pages. The third one doesn't. That's Jobs 3 to 6.
Widen it for free
Put your top ten into AlsoAsked and look at Google's “People also ask” boxes. Then ask ChatGPT what UK homeowners ask before replacing a boiler. Use it as a mirror, not a writer.
Rank by distance to a job
Cost questions, “is it worth it” questions, “do I need permission” questions and “what goes wrong” questions sit closest to the money. Start there.
Check who Google answers with today
For your top ten, note whether an AI answer appears and which sites it quotes. National comparison sites and forums mean the door is open. A competitor down the road means someone's already doing this.
Job 2: Write the five answers only you could write
Answer your customers' real questions properly, on your own site, one question per page, written by someone who actually does the work.
44.2%
of the text AI assistants quote is taken from the first 30% of a page. Bury your answer and you lose.
Wix extraction-position analysis, 2026
What's changed
Length stopped winning. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found almost no relationship between how many pages a site has and how often AI names it: a correlation of about 0.19, which is nothing.
Structure started winning. Scannable structure (headings, bullet points, images) scored 10th out of all 187 factors for AI visibility. Not tenth among the new ones. Tenth overall.
And 76% of ChatGPT's most-quoted pages had been updated in the previous 30 days. Freshness matters more than it used to.
- Cost
- 5 to 6 days of time
- Time
- One page a fortnight, ongoing
- Shows in
- 3 to 9 months
Do this
One question, one page
Title it as the question, not “Boiler Replacement Services”. Merge pages that answer the same thing.
Answer in the first 50 words
Before the story, the caveats and the sales pitch. The single biggest change most trades sites need.
Put a real number on every page
Not “affordable” but a range. Not “quickly” but a timescale. Specific figures with context are what gets quoted.
Write the bit only you could write
The awkward flue positions in 1930s semis in your town. Free, and nobody can copy it.
Make it liftable
Headings as questions, short paragraphs, a table where you compare, a numbered list for steps.
Name the author and date it
A real person with a real trade credential, and a visible “last updated” date that only changes when the page does.
Link it together
Every page links to its service page and two sibling questions. Internal linking is the 6th most important local organic factor. Ten minutes a page.
Diarise a quarterly review
Top ten pages, four times a year. Prices, regulations, anything that's changed.
Job 3: Get reviews that say something
Reviews on more than one platform, asked for steadily, with enough detail in them to be worth quoting.
82%
of consumers now read the AI-written summary of your reviews. 23% would decide on that summary alone.
BrightLocal 2026, US adults
What's changed
Reviews used to be a star rating people glanced at. Now they're raw material a machine turns into a paragraph about you. That means the words in your reviews matter, not just the average.
In the UK trades study, nearly every business ChatGPT named came with a rating and review count attached, lifted straight from a directory listing. Your reviews are being read out loud to a customer who never visits any of your pages.
Review signals now account for around 20% of map pack ranking, up from 16% in 2023, second only to your Google profile itself.
- Cost
- £0
- Time
- 10 minutes a week, forever
- Shows in
- 1 to 3 months
Do this
Ask every customer, every time, no conditions
A text with a direct link, the day the job finishes. The main reason a trades business has few reviews is that nobody asks.
Go steady, not in bursts
Sustained flow ranks 14th of 187; recency ranks 11th. Two a month forever beats twenty in one week then silence.
Spread beyond Google
Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Which? Trusted Traders, Trustpilot, Facebook. Pick one second platform to start.
Ask a better question
Never script a customer. But “would you mind mentioning what we did and how it went?” gets far more usable text.
Reply to every one, fast and like a human
Slow or generic replies read as a red flag. A reply that restates the job is also more text machines read.
Ask for photos
Reviews with photos jumped to 43rd of 187 this year, having not existed as a factor before. Rare enough to stand out.
Put a reviews page on your own site
In the main menu. A page you control, collecting your proof in one crawlable place. Almost nobody does it.
Job 4: Be on the lists, spelled right
Your business on the directories and listings that matter, with exactly the same name, address and phone number everywhere.
78 of 80
answers cited Checkatrade when ChatGPT was asked to recommend a UK tradesperson. MyBuilder appeared in 70.
Murray Digital, 80 prompts, 25 August 2026
What's changed
Directory listings spent a decade going out of fashion in local search. They came back in 2026, and AI is the reason.
Three of the top five AI visibility factors are citation factors. In AI search, mentions are the new link.
After Checkatrade and MyBuilder, in order of how often they appeared: Three Best Rated, Yell, TrustATrader, MyJobQuote, Which? Trusted Traders.
- Cost
- £0 to start
- Time
- One focused day, then 30 mins a month
- Shows in
- 1 to 3 months
Do this
Audit what's already out there
Search your name, your number, and your old number. Log every listing, duplicates and previous trading names included.
Fix the free foundations first
Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook. Consistency across the three map platforms ranks 28th of 187.
Fill in every single field
Services, categories, hours, description, photos, payment methods, service areas. Empty fields are free ranking left on the table.
Write one sentence and use it everywhere
“Videtta Heating is a Gas Safe registered heating and plumbing company serving Essex.” That sentence is what a machine lifts.
Ask the assistants which lists matter
Ask ChatGPT and Gemini which directories they consider important for your trade and region. They've just told you what they read.
Chase relevance, not volume
Chamber of commerce, trade association, town business list, the manufacturers you're accredited to. Thirty relevant beat three hundred irrelevant.
Petition the best-of lists
Expert-curated best-of lists rank 48th for local organic. You can't buy your way on. You ask, you provide evidence, some say no.
Job 5: Make your local name leave a footprint
When you sponsor something, win something or get covered by something, make sure it produces a page on somebody else's website with your name on it.
£500
The sponsorship you already pay for. Whether it produces a digital signal or nothing at all comes down to one email asking for a page.
What's changed
This is where sponsoring the under-11s and entering the local business awards stops being a nice gesture and becomes a search asset, but only if it leaves something a machine can read.
A set of shirts with your name on them is invisible online. What counts is a page. Quality of unstructured citations (newspaper articles, blog posts, gov sites, industry associations) ranks 37th of 187 for local organic visibility.
Same £500, four emails: the shirts, plus a page on the club's website naming you, a local paper story with a photo, and your own write-up with real photos. Three crawlable mentions of your business name, next to words like “best”, your trade and your town.
- Cost
- Money you may already spend
- Time
- A few hours a month
- Shows in
- 3 to 12 months
Do this
List everything you already sponsor
Clubs, schools, events, charity raffles, the church roof. Write it down. Twenty minutes.
Email every one of them asking for a page
A listing that names your business, links to your site and says what you do. The highest-return email in this guide.
Write it up on your own site too
With real photos. The actual team in the actual kit, not a stock photo.
Enter awards, and treat the shortlist as the prize
A shortlist gets you named on the organiser's site, in the local paper and in the roundups. Winning is better. Shortlisting is most of the value.
Give the local paper something it wants
Local numbers and local human stories. How many breakdowns you attended in the first cold snap. The apprentice now running a van.
Be the person they ring
Email your local business editor, say you're available for comment, and be genuinely useful when they call at short notice.
Find out which local outlets the assistants trust
Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity about your trade and area, and note which local publications appear in the sources. Those are your targets.
Job 6: Put your accreditations into words
Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, TrustMark, MCS, FMB, manufacturer schemes: say them in text, with numbers, and link to the register.
£0
extra. You already pay for these. Most trades businesses use them as a logo in the footer and stop there.
What's changed
An assistant asked to recommend a gas engineer is trying to avoid one thing: recommending someone unqualified. Your register entry is a page on a trusted website that confirms you exist, do what you say, and work where you say. That's the machine checking you out, and it can only check what it can read.
When Google's AI answered questions about choosing a plumber, the things it thought mattered were safety, expertise, work quality and warranties. That's exactly what an accreditation answers.
A logo is an image. An image has no words in it. Keep the logo, but write the sentence too: “Gas Safe registered, registration number 123456, covering Hull and East Yorkshire.”
- Cost
- Already paid for
- Time
- 2 to 3 hours, once
- Shows in
- 1 to 2 months
Do this
Check every register entry is right
Trading name, address, phone, scope of work, area. Registers are notorious for holding details from three years ago. Ring them and fix it.
Make sure your entry is public
Some schemes let you choose visibility. Choose visible, then search your name plus the scheme name and confirm the page comes up.
Write it out in words
On your homepage, your relevant service pages and your Google Business Profile description. Scheme name, registration number, area covered.
Name the number
Registration numbers are specific, checkable facts, and specific checkable facts are what gets quoted.
Link out to your register entry
From your site, to the public page that proves it. Customers use it. So does everything crawling you.
Keep the manufacturer schemes current
Approved installer schemes usually come with a listing on the manufacturer's site: a high-authority page naming your business and your area, usually free with the accreditation.
Job 7: Get talked about
The number of places on the web where your business name appears, and the words sitting next to it.
3x
Being talked about across the web correlates roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than the number of links pointing at your site.
Ahrefs, 75,000 brands, December 2025. Spearman correlation, and correlation is not proof of cause.
What's changed
This is the strongest measurable signal there is. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to see which signals lined up with being named by ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. The results reorder everything most agencies still sell.
Brands earning the most web mentions got up to ten times more AI Overview mentions than the next group down. And 26% of brands got no mentions at all.
The ranked correlations: mentions on YouTube 0.737, mentions across the web 0.66 to 0.71, your name used as link text 0.527, people searching your business name 0.35 to 0.47, domain authority 0.27 to 0.33, number of backlinks 0.218, number of pages on your site 0.194 (basically nothing).
- Cost
- Nothing directly
- Time
- It's the output of Jobs 2, 5, 6 and 9
- Shows in
- 12 to 18 months
Do this
Be consistently nameable
Same business name everywhere, in the same form. Not sometimes “Videtta”, sometimes “Videtta Heating Ltd”, sometimes “Videtta Heating & Plumbing”. Every variant splits the signal.
Get your name next to your trade and your town
Keywords in the text surrounding unlinked brand mentions ranks 47th of 187 for AI visibility. It isn't only whether your name appears. It's whether “boiler”, “Hull” and “heat pump” appear near it.
Watch branded search volume as your real scoreboard
When someone sees your name in an AI answer and searches for you two days later, no referral report will show it. Branded searches will rise. Check that line in Search Console monthly.
Accept the timescale
This compounds over 12 to 18 months. It's the last thing to move and the hardest to fake, which is exactly why it correlates.
Job 8: Make sure the machine can read your site
Half a day of checks that decide whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can see any words on your website at all.
0
Times JavaScript was executed across more than 500 million page fetches by ChatGPT's crawler.
Vercel and MERJ, December 2024
What's changed
Most AI crawlers cannot run JavaScript. They fetch the raw code your server sends, take whatever words are in it, and leave. They don't wait. They don't come back for a second look.
ChatGPT's crawler downloaded JavaScript files in around 11.5% of requests without running them. Anthropic's ClaudeBot downloaded them in around 23.8% and never ran them. The exception is Google's own crawler, because Googlebot has done it for years.
So your page can rank on page one of Google and be a completely blank box to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity at the same time.
- Cost
- £0 to check
- Time
- Half a day
- Shows in
- Immediate once fixed
Do this
Do the view-source test: 30 seconds
Right-click your most important page, View Page Source, not Inspect Element. Ctrl+F for a sentence of your body text. There: you're fine. Not there: most AI crawlers see nothing.
If it fails, get it server-rendered
A developer job, not a marketing one. Astro, Next.js, Nuxt and plain static HTML all do this by default. A single-page app built 2018 to 2024 fails until you've checked.
Check your robots.txt isn't shutting the door
The big AI bots respect robots.txt consistently. Your instructions are honoured, and so are your mistakes.
Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools
Free, fifteen minutes, one click to import from Search Console. The most commonly skipped job in the whole guide, and the gateway to ChatGPT and Copilot.
Turn on IndexNow
Pings search engines the moment you publish instead of waiting to be crawled. Most WordPress SEO plugins have a toggle. Five minutes.
Give every service its own page
The single highest-scoring local organic factor of all 187. Lumping boilers, bathrooms, heat pumps and landlord certificates onto one page is the most common structural mistake in trades websites.
Then stop
HTTPS. Mobile-friendly. Under two seconds. Name, address and phone in the page text, matching your Google profile. Accurate local business schema. No more technical spend until Jobs 1 to 7 are underway.
Job 9: Point a phone at your work
Videos that say your business name out loud, on YouTube, embedded on the matching page of your site.
0.737
Mentions on YouTube showed the strongest link with AI visibility of any factor tested, stronger than web mentions, links or domain authority.
Ahrefs, 75,000 brands
What's changed
This job is on almost nobody's list. The data says it should be near the top. A “YouTube mention” means your business name appearing in a video title, description or transcript.
It's heavily quoted. YouTube is the most-cited website in Ahrefs' AI Overview tracking, and ChatGPT's sixth most-cited site, despite OpenAI not owning it. It's in the training data too: GPT-4 was reported to have been trained on over a million hours of YouTube transcripts.
The number of mentions mattered slightly more than views. You don't need a viral video. You need to be named, by name, in videos that exist.
- Cost
- £0, you own a phone
- Time
- 1 hour a week
- Shows in
- 3 to 12 months
Do this
Say your business name out loud in every video
At the start and at the end. It gets transcribed. That's the whole mechanism. A video where you never say who you are contributes nothing to this.
Film the work you're already doing
A three-minute walkthrough of a boiler swap. A before-and-after on a rewire. An honest explanation of why a quote came in where it did. Phone footage is fine.
Answer your question list on camera
Take the list from Job 1 and film the top twenty. One question per video, titled as the question. Then embed each video on the matching page from Job 2.
Write real descriptions
Business name, what the video shows, where you work, and a link back to the matching page on your site. The description is text, and text gets read.
Get other people's videos to mention you
A supplier's installer feature. A local business podcast. A manufacturer's case study. A customer's own review video. Each one is a mention you didn't have to film.
Doing it
The 90-day plan, how to tell if it's working, what doesn't work, and the three-job version for anyone with half a day.
The 90-day plan
This assumes one person inside the business giving it a few hours a week, plus a developer for a day. If that person is you and you're on the tools, halve the ambition and double the timeline.
| Week | Do this | Job |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Run your top ten questions through Google, ChatGPT and Gemini. Record who's named and whether you are. Do the same for your trade plus your town. Screenshot it and date it. | 1 |
| 2 | View-source test on five key pages. Check robots.txt. Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, turn on IndexNow. Fix anything broken. | 8 |
| 3 | Write your one-line entity sentence and put it everywhere. Audit every directory and register entry against it. Fill every empty field on Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps and Facebook. | 4, 6 |
| 4 | Brief whoever answers the phone to log every pre-booking question in the customer's words. Set up an automatic review request. Reply to every unanswered review you have. | 1, 3 |
| 5 to 6 | Take the top five questions from your list. One page each. Answer in the first 50 words. Real numbers. The bit only you could write. Named author. Dated. Film each one while you're at it. | 2, 9 |
| 7 | If your services are lumped on one page, split them. One page per service, the highest-scoring local organic factor of 187, and it's a day's work. | 8 |
| 8 | List everything you sponsor. Email each one asking for a page. Introduce yourself to your local business editor. Diarise two award deadlines. | 5 |
| 9 to 11 | Five more pages. Five more videos. Start asking for reviews on a second platform. Submit the award entries. Pitch one local story with a number in it. | 2, 3, 5, 9 |
| 12 | Re-run the week 1 baseline. Same questions, same wording, same day of the week. Compare. Check branded searches in Search Console. Then decide what to keep and what to drop. | 7 |
Week 12 is a review, not a verdict. The parts that matter most compound over 12 to 18 months.
- Cash out of the door
- £0 to £500unless the site needs server-rendering work
- Internal time
- 6 to 8 daysspread across three months
- Developer time
- Half a dayor a few days if the view-source test failed
What's realistically moved by day 90
Listings fixed. Ten pages live and indexed. Reviews accumulating on two platforms. Two award entries in. Three or four new mentions earned. Baseline measured twice.
What hasn't moved yet
Being reliably named by AI assistants. That's a 12 to 18 month job, and nobody can shorten it.
If somebody promises you AI visibility in 90 days, this plan is the thing to hold them to. Ask which of these twelve weeks they're doing, and what they expect each one to move.
How to tell if it's working
There is no rank tracker for this. AI Overview content changes for the same search about 70% of the time, and half the sources get swapped when it regenerates. Named Tuesday, gone Thursday, nothing changed at your end. Anyone selling you a guaranteed position, a “ChatGPT ranking” or a score from a tool they claim uses Google's internal data is confused or lying. So measure it the way you'd measure word of mouth: directionally, cumulatively, honestly.
Enquiries, and where they say they came from
Add one question to your enquiry process: “How did you find us?” Then log the answer. When “ChatGPT told me about you” or “I read your page about boiler pressure” starts appearing, you'll know before any tool tells you. Five minutes to set up.
People searching your business name
In Google Search Console, filter to searches containing your business name and watch the monthly trend. When someone sees you in an AI answer and looks you up two days later, this is the only place it shows. Only about one in ten marketers monitors this.
Your own prompt log
Twenty questions, three assistants, once a month, same wording, same day of the week. Columns: date, question, assistant, did an AI answer appear, were you named, who else was named, which sources were quoted. Half an hour a month, and more honest than most paid tools.
Google's Generative AI report
Search Console gained dedicated reporting for AI features in 2026: impressions, pages, devices, visibility over time. It rolled out to some sites before others, so check whether you have it. The only first-party data anyone gets.
Visits from AI assistants
In Analytics, look for referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. Expect small numbers: Google sends roughly 190 times more traffic to websites. Low volume, often high intent.
Bing index coverage
In Bing Webmaster Tools, confirm your important pages are actually indexed. It's gate one for ChatGPT and Copilot, so treat it as an early warning rather than a result.
Nine things that don't work
Each of these gets sold hard. Each has evidence against it. Now you can check a sales pitch against the source.
llms.txt files
Google says it doesn't use them. Nearly 300,000 domains showed no measurable link with AI citations.
Schema markup as an AI strategy
1,885 pages added it; AI citations moved −4.6% to +2.4%. Keep accurate schema for normal search results.
“Chunking” your content for AI
Google's guidance: no requirement. Its systems handle multi-topic pages fine.
Rewriting your site “for AI”
Google's guidance: not needed. The systems understand meaning and synonyms.
Buying brand mentions
Google names inauthentic mentions as a tactic that isn't as helpful as it seems. Bought can actively hurt.
Wire press releases
Negligible share of AI citations across 3,600 prompts and ten industries. Fine for news. Not a route in.
“200 listings for £99” packages
200 nearly-right entries you can't easily correct. The data rewards relevance, not volume.
Mass-producing pages for every town
Named in Google's scaled content abuse policy, and page count barely correlates with AI visibility.
Guaranteed placements in AI answers
Nobody can deliver this. The offer itself tells you everything about the seller.
If you build for other builders, read this
The nine jobs are the same. The buyer is completely different, and that changes where the money goes. A procurement lead isn't asking “who would you recommend”. They're shortlisting, then looking for reasons to strike a name off.
| Home services | Construction and civils | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's asking | Homeowner, panicking or planning | Procurement, developer, main contractor |
| What they're doing | Finding someone to ring | Shortlisting, then verifying |
| What convinces them | Reviews, photos, accreditations, answering the phone | Track record, accreditations, financial standing, safety record, named schemes |
| The lists that matter | Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Which? Trusted Traders | Constructionline, CHAS, SSIP, approved supplier lists, trade associations |
| The press that matters | Local paper, community sites | Construction trade press, regional business press |
| The platform that matters | Google, Facebook | LinkedIn, by a distance |
| The proof that matters | A finished bathroom | A completed scheme, with value, duration and client named |
Six changes for a construction buyer
Make your project record public and specific
One page per scheme: client, location, value or value band, duration, scope, what was difficult, what was delivered. That's “unique content” in Google's exact sense.
Treat accreditations as the spine, not the footer
Constructionline, CHAS, SSIP, ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001, your safety record. Named, numbered, linked to the public register, stated in words.
Put LinkedIn at the centre
Company page current. Directors posting about real schemes. Consistent naming. This is Job 7, delivered on the platform your market actually reads.
Get into the trade press
Regional construction titles, sector publications, contract award announcements. It does for you what the local paper does for a plumber, and carries more weight.
Ask your existing clients why they chose you
In civils the insight lives inside your current client base. Their answer is your positioning, your messaging and your content plan, and it's usually not what you'd have guessed.
Answer the pre-tender questions in public
How you handle RAMS, how you sequence works on a live site, what your programme looks like, how you deal with unexpected ground conditions. Trust before the first conversation.
The three-job version
Most of this guide is optional. Three things are not. About six days spread over three months, close to £0, and it puts you ahead of the overwhelming majority of trades and construction businesses in the country.
- 1
Make sure you can be read
Right-click your most important page, View Page Source, search for a sentence of your body text. If it isn't there, nothing else in this guide can work. Then verify in Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm your key pages are indexed. 30 seconds to check, half a day to fix.
- 2
Be on the lists, spelled right
Google Business Profile complete and correct. Bing Places, Apple Maps and Facebook the same. Every directory and register entry matching one consistent sentence. Reviews requested from every customer, on more than one platform, steadily. One focused day.
- 3
Publish the five answers only you could write
The five questions customers ask most often before they book. Honest, specific, numbered answers, with the detail that only comes from doing the job in your town. Name the author. Date it. Film each one while you're at it. Five days, spread over ten weeks.
Sources
Every figure, with its method and its limits.
- Google Search Central, optimising for generative AI features
- Published 15 May 2026, updated 10 July 2026. Source for the mythbusting list, query fan-out, the unique-content examples and the Search Console report.
- Whitespark, The Prevalence of AI Overviews in Local Search
- 540 manual searches, three US cities, six trades, May 2025. Limits: US data, over a year old, modest sample.
- Murray Digital, what ChatGPT recommends for local trades
- 80 prompts, eight trades, ten UK towns, 405 sources, 25 August 2026. Limits, stated by the author: one day, one wording, developer version, ChatGPT only.
- BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
- 1,002 US adults, 11 February 2026, plus the AI-trust supplement of 10 March 2026. Limits: US consumers, not UK.
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026
- 47 experts scoring 187 factors, 6 November 2025. Limits: an expert opinion survey, not measurement.
- Ahrefs: citations, brand factors and schema
- 863,000 searches and 4m AI Overview links (March 2026); 75,000 brands (December 2025); 1,885 pages adding schema (May 2026). Correlation is not cause.
- Vercel and MERJ, The Rise of the AI Crawler
- Over 500m GPTBot fetches, 17 December 2024. Limits: no public re-measurement since.
- Also cited
- SE Ranking (llms.txt, ~300,000 domains, observational); Peec AI (ChatGPT retrieval sources, May to July 2026); Wix (extraction position); BuzzStream and Citation Labs (3,600 prompts on press releases); searchVIU (live retrieval).
Compiled September 2026. Figures move. Re-check four before every reprint: AI Overview prevalence, the BrightLocal adoption number, the UK ChatGPT trades study, and Google's guidance page.
Common questions
What is ChatGPT SEO?
ChatGPT SEO, also called AI search optimisation, is the work of getting your business named when someone asks an AI assistant who to call or what something costs. For local trades it is mostly about being listed, accurate and well reviewed on the directories and lists the assistants read. For questions, it is about publishing the clearest, most specific answer. It builds on ordinary SEO rather than replacing it.
How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?
Write five questions a customer would ask, with your town and trade in them. Ask each one in a fresh ChatGPT chat with memory off, and note who is named and which sources are cited. Then ask what it knows about your business by name. Repeat the same questions monthly, because answers change from day to day and the trend matters more than any single answer.
Can anyone get my business into ChatGPT quickly?
No. There is no switch, and anyone who says they can put you in ChatGPT by Friday is selling you something they cannot deliver. Three of the nine jobs in this guide are nearly free and take about a day between them. The rest compound over 12 to 18 months. That is the honest timeline.
How do AI assistants decide which tradesperson to recommend?
Asked to recommend a local tradesperson, an assistant doesn't go looking for local tradespeople. It goes looking for lists of them and reads the list out. In a UK study of 80 prompts, 71.9% of the sources ChatGPT cited were trade directories and only 13.8% were businesses' own websites. Checkatrade appeared in 78 of the 80 answers.
Do I need a new website to be found by AI?
Almost certainly not. In that same UK study, of the 41 named businesses with a website on their Google profile, two had that website actually read. What matters is whether a crawler can see any words on your page at all. Right-click your most important page, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence of your body text. If it's there, you're fine, and a rebuild will not improve your AI visibility.
Does an llms.txt file help you get cited by AI?
No. Google has said plainly that it does not use them, clarified again in June 2026. A study of nearly 300,000 domains found no measurable link with AI citations. The same goes for “chunking” your content, rewriting your site “for AI” and special AI schema markup: Google's position is that its AI features run on normal search ranking and quality systems.
What actually moves the needle on AI visibility?
Mentions. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, being talked about across the web correlated roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than the number of links pointing at your site, and mentions on YouTube were the single strongest factor tested at 0.737. The number of pages on your site correlated at 0.194, which is nothing.
How do I measure whether this is working?
Not with a rank tracker, because there isn't one. AI Overview content changes for the same search about 70% of the time. Measure three things instead: ask every enquiry how they found you and log the answer; watch branded searches in Google Search Console; and keep your own prompt log of twenty questions across three assistants, run monthly with the same wording.
Does this work the same way for construction and civils firms?
The nine jobs are the same, but the buyer is completely different. A procurement lead is shortlisting and then looking for reasons to strike a name off, not asking for a recommendation. That moves the money towards public project records with real values and durations, accreditations like Constructionline, CHAS and SSIP stated in words, LinkedIn rather than Facebook, and the construction trade press rather than the local paper.
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