Your customers have started asking a chatbot before they ask anybody else. They type something like "who is the best furnace company in Barrie" into ChatGPT, or they search on Google and get a written answer at the top instead of the usual list of links. Either way they get two or three company names, and whoever is not in that handful never gets considered.

A fair amount of what gets sold as AI optimization is ordinary website work with a new acronym on the invoice. Some of it is genuinely different. So rather than pitch it, these pages explain each piece in plain terms and tell you which parts you can go and do yourself this week. A couple of them take an afternoon. Checking whether your site is even letting these tools read it takes about ten minutes.

What we do on a build is the same list, done properly and in one pass: get the real facts about your business onto the page in words software can read, label your phone number and hours and services so nothing gets misread, lay pages out so an answer can be pulled straight out of them, and make sure nothing is quietly blocking the tools at the door.

The seven pieces

Topic	What it covers
Getting named in the answer	A search gives ten names. An AI answer gives two. What decides which two.
What GEO really means	Some of what gets sold under this name is real. Some is old work with a new invoice.
Labelling your facts	A standard way to label your phone, hours and services so software reads them right.
Laying out a page	Answer first, proof in the same section, and nothing important hidden until you click.
Checking what AI says about you	An afternoon of asking the questions your customers ask, and writing down what comes back.
Letting AI read your site	Your site may already be blocking them without you knowing. How to check, and why it matters.
Checking your existing labels	After a few plugins, most sites quietly claim things nobody meant. The four usual problems.

Where to start if you only do one thing

Find out whether your site is letting these tools in at all. Type your web address with /robots.txt on the end and read the plain text page that comes up. A surprising number of contractor sites are turning ChatGPT and the rest away by default, because a website platform or a plugin made that call and nobody mentioned it. Being invisible is a worse problem than being badly written, because badly written still gets read.

After that, check that your service areas and your key details are genuinely in the page rather than appearing after the site finishes loading its widgets. That one catches good-looking sites, and it takes a minute to test.

We checked 380 contractor websites for the things on this page and published what we found: the research.

Before hiring anybody for this, including us: how to vet a contractor marketing agency. And the scored read of your own site is the Site Inspection.