AEO for Contractors: Getting Named When Someone Asks AI for a Plumber

The referral now happens in a chat window, and nobody tells you that you lost it.

The Question Has Changed Shape

A homeowner with a burst pipe used to search "emergency plumber near me" and get a map with three businesses on it. A growing number of them now open ChatGPT or Gemini and type something closer to what they would say out loud. "My water heater is leaking, who should I call in Cary?"

The answer comes back as a short list of two or three named businesses, sometimes with a sentence about why each one fits. There is no ad slot in that answer, no map pack under it, and no second page after it. You are either in the list or the customer never learns you exist.

That is a harder channel to lose quietly, because nothing in your analytics shows a missed citation. You do not get an impression. You get nothing at all.

What The Assistant Is Reading

AI assistants do not have a directory of contractors. They assemble an answer from whatever they can find and read about you, and for trades that means a specific and fairly short list of sources.

Your Google Business Profile, because it holds your category, hours, service area and reviews in a structured form. Your own website, if the pages are readable and say plainly what you do and where. Directory listings like Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp and the BBB. Local news or community mentions if you have any. And review text, which matters more than most contractors expect.

Notice what is missing. Your truck wrap, your years in business printed on a homepage banner image, and your Facebook page do almost nothing here. If a fact about your business only exists as text inside an image, it does not exist.

Your Service Area Has To Be Legible

The single most common reason a contractor gets skipped is that the assistant cannot tell whether you cover the town in the question. "Serving the greater metro area" is not an answer. "Serving Raleigh, Cary, Apex, Holly Springs and Morrisville" is.

Put the actual town names in text on the site. Put them in your Google Business Profile service areas. Keep the list honest, because listing forty towns you do not serve is the fastest way to collect leads you have to turn down, and turned-down leads become bad reviews.

If you do cover a wide area, say so with a radius and a base. "Within 45 minutes of downtown Durham" is something a model can reason about. A vague gesture at a region is not.

Emergency Work Is A Different Query

Trades have a split that most industries do not. Half the demand is planned, like a bathroom remodel someone researches for three weeks. The other half is a person standing in two inches of water at 11pm.

Those produce completely different questions, and the second kind rewards specific facts. Do you answer the phone after hours, or does it go to voicemail. Is there a callout fee. What is the realistic arrival window. How do you handle weekends and holidays.

Most contractor websites answer none of these in text. A page that states your after-hours policy in plain sentences will get pulled into emergency answers, because almost nobody else has made that information available to be pulled.

Reviews Do More Work Here Than Anywhere

For trades specifically, review text carries unusual weight, and it is the content of the reviews rather than the star average that gets used. A model reading "showed up when they said they would" and "quoted the price before starting" has something to summarize. Five stars with no text gives it nothing.

This is one of the few areas where you can influence the input directly without touching your website. When you ask for a review, ask the customer to mention what the job was and what town they are in. Keep it a nudge rather than a script. "If you have a second, mentioning the water heater and that you are in Apex really helps other people find us" is enough.

Over a year that produces a body of text that describes your actual service area and your actual work, written by other people. That is the most credible input available to you.

What To Fix First

In order, because contractors do not have unlimited evenings for this.

First, get your town list in text on the site and in your Google Business Profile. Second, write one plain page per core service that answers what it costs, how long it takes, and what happens on the visit. Third, put your after-hours and emergency policy in writing. Fourth, fix any place where your name, address and phone number disagree across directories, because inconsistency makes a model less confident about naming you.

That is a weekend of work. It is also most of the available gain.

Checking Whether You Show Up

Ask the assistants directly. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and type the question a customer would type. "Best HVAC company in Garner NC." "Who should I call for a roof leak in Chapel Hill." Do it monthly and write down what comes back.

You are looking for two things. Whether you get named at all, and whether what it says about you is accurate. Both are fixable, but they have different fixes. Not being named is usually a coverage or content problem. Being described wrong is usually a stale directory listing.

If you would rather not run this check by hand every month, it is part of what askotter does from $99 a month, alongside the search work itself.