AI search visibility
Spelling out your business facts so software cannot misread them
Your website shows your phone number. A person reads it and knows what it is. Software reading the same page has to guess, unless somebody labelled it.
There is a shared standard for that labelling. The industry calls it schema markup, which is a terrible name for something simple: a hidden set of labels in your page code saying "this bit is the phone number, this bit is the opening hours, this is a service we offer, this is a customer review."
You never see it. Google, Bing and ChatGPT do. When it is right, they can state your details confidently. When it is missing, they guess. When it is wrong, they state something false about your business, and it is your name on the answer.
What a contractor site needs labelled
The business itself: real address, real phone number, the towns you cover, your hours. Labelled once and referred back to on every page, so the software sees one company rather than forty slightly different ones.
Then your services on your service pages, so a plumbing page is understood as plumbing. The trail showing where a page sits in the site. Genuine questions and answers, if you show them to visitors. That is most of it, and a small accurate set beats a big pile.
- One set of business details, reused everywhere, never retyped per page
- Each service labelled on its own page
- Phone, address and hours in the labels matching what a visitor sees
- Questions and answers labelled only when they are visible on the page
- Nothing labelled that is not actually on the page
The review labelling mistake that gets sites flagged
This is the one worth knowing about, because website plugins do it automatically and it can get your listing penalised.
Star ratings and reviews may only be labelled on a page that visibly shows those reviews to a visitor. A site quietly labelling itself with a five-star rating on every page, with no reviews anywhere in sight, is breaking Google guidelines. It is a common plugin default and a common reason a site picks up a warning in Google.
The test is simple enough to run yourself: if a label claims something a visitor cannot see on that page, it should not be there.
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. |
| 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. |
Back to AI search visibility, or see what publishing primary data looks like in practice on our contractor website research.