Is Your Home Service Business Showing Up in ChatGPT and AI Search?
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC and roofing contractors are now named inside AI answers to "who should I call". An assistant names the contractor it can check. Run a free check and see what AI can read about your business.
What to do first
- Find out where you stand. The sites in the two cohorts below ranged widely in both trades. An average would tell you nothing about your own site.
- Put the license in text. Number, classification, state, and a link to the board's lookup, on the homepage or the about page.
- Make one service area true everywhere. Site, profile and directories naming the same towns.
- Cut the services list to what you do and are licensed for. Then write the specific jobs.
- Say what 24/7 means, or stop saying it.
- Then work on reviews, which is the slow part, never finishes, and is where the firms ahead of you usually are ahead.
A check is a baseline, not monitoring. The free evaluation reads what you publish on the day it runs and returns a score, the evidence behind it and the highest-priority issue. It does not watch what changes afterward, and re-running it on an unchanged site returns the same reading. If what you need is the record over time, and somebody completing the authorized work, that is ongoing AI visibility tracking from Digilu.
What we read on 41 electrician and HVAC websites
A homeowner with a tripped breaker that will not reset, or an air conditioner dead in August, is not comparing ten tabs. More of them now type the problem into an assistant and ask who to call. The assistant answers with a few names, and it can only name a contractor it can read and check.
We have evaluated two trade cohorts in our public signal research: sites we chose, scored on six pillars from what a visitor, a crawler or an answer engine can read from the public web. Nobody asked us to evaluate them and none are our clients. Every report is published with its own date and engine version.
- Electricians: 26 sites in Turlock, Lodi and Stockton, California.
- HVAC contractors: 15 sites in the Los Angeles area. Read the HVAC guide.
What separated them was not the license or the work. Within each cohort, some sites let a machine find and confirm the license, the service area, the trades and the hours, and some gave it almost nothing to check. The gap between those two kinds of site was wide in both trades.
These are two regions of one state, evaluated between June 25 and August 21, 2026. The reports were scored by different versions of our engine, so we do not average them into one number: each report carries its own score, date and engine version. They describe these sites, not electricians or HVAC contractors in general, and we have not evaluated plumbers or roofers as a cohort. Heating and air companies have their own page: AI visibility for HVAC companies.
Your license number is the fact an answer can check
In most trades the strongest evidence that a contractor is real does not live on the contractor's website. It lives in a state licensing database, and it is public. That makes it the easiest trust signal in home services to connect and one of the most often left disconnected.
How that looks depends on your state and your trade, because licensing is set trade by trade:
- California. The Contractors State License Board says every contractor advertisement, "whether it be an online ad, an ad in the phone book or newspaper, a flyer that shows up at your front door, or the company's name on the side of a truck", must carry the state license number (CSLB, finding the right contractor). Anyone can run a CSLB license check, which shows status, bond and workers' compensation information.
- Texas. The Department of Licensing and Regulation says anyone who performs or offers non-exempt electrical work "must be licensed and perform that work through a licensed electrical contractor" (TDLR electricians). TDLR also licenses air conditioning and refrigeration contractors, and both can be confirmed in the TDLR license search.
- Federal credentials on top. Technicians who service equipment that can release ozone depleting refrigerants must hold EPA Section 608 certification. Firms paid to disturb painted surfaces in homes built before 1978 need EPA lead-safe certification under the RRP rule, and EPA publishes a search for certified firms.
Some trades carry no state license at all in some states, and then there is no record to point to. Where one exists, publish it as text: the license number, the classification, the state, and a link to the board's lookup. A number printed only on a truck photo or inside a footer image is a number no crawler reads.
"Licensed, bonded and insured" is three claims
The phrase is so common in the trades that it reads as decoration. To a careful reader, human or machine, it is three separate statements, and each one points at a different record.
- Licensed in which trade, in which state, under which number. A general "fully licensed" says nothing a lookup can match.
- Bonded usually means a license bond. In California that bond is $25,000 and it sits on the license record (CSLB). It is not a warranty on your work and should not be written as one.
- Insured could mean general liability, workers' compensation, or both. California requires workers' compensation for contractors with employees, and requires it of every active C-20 HVAC and C-39 roofing contractor whether or not they have employees (CSLB workers' compensation requirements).
Platforms that verify contractors check these one at a time. Google's Local Services screening can include background, business registration, insurance and license checks, varying by category and location (Google Local Services screening). A site that says exactly which license and which coverage it holds gives every reader the same thing that screening looks for. A site that says "licensed, bonded and insured" in a banner gives them a slogan.
No storefront: how a service-area business gets placed
Most trade businesses work at the customer's address, not their own. That creates a problem that restaurants and dental offices do not have: the business's location and the place it serves are different things, and an assistant answering "electrician in a named town" has to work out whether you actually go there.
Google's rules for this are specific. A service-area business "should have one profile for the central office or location with a designated service area", should hide its business address if it does not serve customers there, and its service area "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based" (Google Business Profile guidelines).
The failure we see most is not breaking those rules. It is saying different things in different places: a profile that lists six towns, a footer that lists forty, and a set of near identical city pages that each claim the business is "local" everywhere. A machine comparing those has three answers to one question. Pick the real area, write it once in plain text on the site, and make the profile agree with it. If you only take emergency calls in a smaller radius, say so.
What you do versus what the site lists
Trade sites tend to list everything the owner has ever done or would take on: electrical, plumbing, HVAC, solar, roofing, handyman. The license usually covers one or two classifications. When the services page and the license record disagree, an assistant has a reason not to repeat either.
- Lead with what you are licensed for. The structured data vocabulary most sites use has separate types for Electrician, Plumber, HVACBusiness, RoofingContractor, GeneralContractor and others. Choose the one that matches your license, not the widest one.
- Use as few profile categories as describe the core business. That is Google's own wording, and the same guidelines prohibit service or product information in the business name, so "Emergency Plumbing and Drain" is not a name (Google Business Profile guidelines).
- Say who does the work you subcontract. If the roof on a remodel is done by another licensed firm, the page should not imply it is yours.
- Write the specific jobs. "Panel upgrades for EV chargers" and "tankless water heater replacement" are the questions people type. "Residential and commercial services" is not.
24/7 and emergency: the claim that gets tested at night
Emergency service is the most valuable claim a trade can make and the easiest to contradict. The site says 24/7. The profile shows 8 to 5. A directory still has the hours from three years ago. Somebody calls at 11 p.m. and reaches voicemail, then writes a review about it.
Google asks for "your regular customer-facing hours of operation" (Google Business Profile guidelines), which leaves you to decide what 24/7 honestly means. If it means an on-call technician with an after-hours rate, write that, with the rate or how it is set. If it means the phone is answered around the clock but trucks roll in the morning, write that instead. Do not publish a response time you cannot hold on a busy night, because a review that says "they said one hour, it was five" is the sentence a summary will keep.
Reviews live on more platforms than in most trades
A plumber's reputation is scattered: Google, Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, neighborhood apps, and the lead marketplaces that sell jobs to contractors. Some of those feed assistants directly. Yelp has announced that its reviews, ratings and business details appear inside ChatGPT (Yelp). No assistant publishes how it weighs any of them for a contractor, and we have not measured it.
What is settled is what you may not do. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews, announced August 14, 2024, bans fake reviews, paying for reviews conditioned on a positive or negative sentiment, undisclosed reviews by employees and managers, and suppressing negative reviews through threats or false accusations (FTC). Ask every customer, not only the happy ones. Reviews that name the job and the town are more useful to the next reader than five stars and "great service", and a short reply to a bad review that states what you did to fix it is part of the record too.
Where AI visibility work falls short for a trade business
- An emergency goes to whoever answers. A homeowner with water on the floor calls the first number that picks up. No amount of readable content replaces a phone that is answered.
- Paid placements are a separate system. Local Services ads and marketplace listings are bought and screened on their own terms. This work does not put you in them, and they do not fix an unreadable site.
- A clean record cannot outrun a bad one. If the reviews describe no-shows, a better services page will not change what a summary says about you.
- Some trades have nothing to link. Where a state does not license your trade, the strongest verification signal in this guide does not exist for you, and corroboration has to come from elsewhere.
- Marketplaces may describe you better than you do. Their profiles are theirs. You can correct facts on them. You cannot control how they rank you.
- Our evidence is narrow. Two regions of California, 41 sites, and no measured set of prompts for trade questions. We have not shown that any single change here moves an AI answer.
Nothing on this page is legal advice. Licensing, advertising and insurance rules are set by your state and sometimes your city, and they change.
Home Services and AI Search
Yes, when someone asks it who to call. Assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer local service questions with a short list of named businesses, drawn from what they can read in public: your site, your Business Profile, directories and reviews. None of them publishes how it chooses one contractor over another.
Yes, as text, with the classification, the state and a link to the board's public lookup. California's contractor board says every contractor advertisement, including online ads and the name on a truck, must carry the state license number. A number that appears only in an image cannot be read by a crawler.
From what you publish. Google asks service-area businesses to hide an address they do not serve customers at, keep one profile for the central office, and set a service area of no more than about two hours of driving time. Write the same towns on your site in plain text, so the site and the profile say the same thing.
Only if each word points at something checkable. Name the license number and state, the bond if your state requires one, and the insurance you carry. In California the license bond is $25,000 and appears on the public license record, and every active HVAC and roofing contractor must carry workers' compensation whether or not they have employees.
If it is true, and if you say what it means. Google asks for regular customer-facing hours, so a site that says 24/7 next to a profile that says 8 to 5 is a contradiction any reader can see. State whether nights are an on-call technician, an answering service, or an after-hours rate.
Google, Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, neighborhood apps and the lead marketplaces all carry trade reviews. Yelp has announced that its reviews appear inside ChatGPT. No assistant documents how it weighs reviews for contractors, and we have not measured it. The FTC's 2024 rule bans fake reviews, paying for positive ones and suppressing negative ones.
Yes. The AIOInsights check is free, needs no account, and returns a real, deterministic score with your single highest-impact fix. A deeper, human Full Evaluation is available through Digilu.
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