AI search visibility
Finding out what AI tools currently say about your trade
You cannot fix what you have never looked at, and looking at this costs an afternoon and nothing else. It just takes a willingness to read a few answers that do not mention you.
There is no tracking tool for this worth paying for yet. The ones that exist check a handful of questions and guess at the rest. So the honest method is to do it by hand and repeat it every few months.
Which is fine, because you do not need thousands of questions. You need the thirty or forty a customer in your town actually asks.
Building the list of questions
Start with your own phone. Whatever your office answers all day is the list, and it beats any keyword tool because it is real people using real words.
Then add the three things everybody looks up before they are ready to ring anyone: what does this cost, how long does it take, and do I need a permit. Those three carry most of the searching that happens before a customer will talk to a human.
- Questions your office answers on the phone every week
- Cost, timing and permit questions for your main services
- Comparisons between two things you install
- Emergency questions, worded the way a panicking customer would word them
- Questions naming your town, not just your trade
Running it, and reading the results honestly
Ask each question in ChatGPT and in Google, signed out, and write down three things: did it name any company, was it you, and what did the answer get wrong.
That last column is the valuable one and everybody skips it. If an answer confidently states the wrong permit cost for your county, that is a page you should write, because correcting something is one of the more reliable ways to become the thing that gets quoted next time.
Then do it again in three months. The answers move around a lot, and one snapshot tells you almost nothing about which way you are heading.
The rest of the cluster
| 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. |
| 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. |
Back to AI search visibility, or see what publishing primary data looks like in practice on our contractor website research.