How AI assistants pick which plumber to recommend
Someone in your town types “who's the best plumber near me” into an AI assistant instead of Google. The assistant names three businesses. Yours isn't one of them. Why?
Let's be upfront: nobody outside the AI companies knows the exact recipe. Anyone who tells you they've cracked it is guessing or selling. But the ingredients are public, and most local businesses are missing half of them.
What the assistant is working with
An AI assistant answering that question draws on a few sources:
- Its training data: a snapshot of the web, months old. If your business wasn't clearly described on the web then, you're starting behind.
- Live search results: most assistants now search the web in real time. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your website all feed in here.
- Your website, read by a crawler. This is where most trades lose. The crawler doesn't admire your homepage design. It extracts facts: services, prices, service area, phone number, booking link.
Where businesses actually lose
In our audits of southern Minnesota trades, the same gaps show up again and again:
- No prices anywhere. When the homeowner asks “how much does a water heater install cost,” the assistant can only recommend businesses it can quote. Silence isn't neutral. It's disqualifying.
- The trade isn't labeled. Your site says “Johnson & Sons” in big letters and buries “plumbing” in a paragraph. The machine has to guess what you do, and guessing means getting skipped.
- Contact info only a human could find. Phone number baked into an image. Booking hidden behind three clicks of JavaScript. The crawler sees none of it.
- Accidentally blocking the crawlers. Copy-pasted website settings that tell every AI crawler to stay out. We've seen it more than once.
What you can't control (and shouldn't pay anyone to promise)
You can't control which businesses the assistant prefers, how it weighs reviews, or whether it mentions you on any given day. Those are the platform's decisions. Any company promising you “#1 in ChatGPT” is selling you the same fantasy SEO agencies sold about Google in 2010.
What you can control
The fix is unglamorous and mostly invisible. It lives in the code and settings behind your pages, not in anything your visitors see. It's the entire difference between being recommendable and being invisible, and it's the whole business we're in.
That's what our free audit checks: the controllable half, scored out of 100, in plain English.