How to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google for a plumber

A growing share of "who should I call" questions never touch a search results page. Someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in the Heights, or asks Google and gets an AI-written answer with three business names in it. If your business is one of the three, you get the call. If not, you do not even know the question was asked.

How AI answers pick local businesses

AI assistants do not crawl your homepage and admire the design. They lean on structured, corroborated data: your Google Business Profile, the consistency of your name and address across directories, review volume and recency, and machine-readable markup on your site. When several independent sources agree about what you do and where you do it, you become a safe answer. Ambiguity, staleness, and contradictions make you an unsafe answer, and unsafe answers get skipped.

Google Business Profile is still the spine

Both Google’s AI results and third-party assistants weight the Business Profile heavily because it is verified and structured. Complete every field: services with descriptions, hours, service area, photos, and the exact categories that match what you sell. A profile updated weekly signals a business that exists; one untouched since 2023 signals a coin flip.

Schema is how your site talks to machines

LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQPage schema are small blocks of code that state, unambiguously, who you are, what you offer, and where you serve. Humans never see them. Every machine that decides whether to recommend you reads them first. Most small-business sites in Houston have none, which is the whole opportunity.

FAQ pages answer the questions assistants get asked

People ask assistants questions, so pages that answer questions in plain language get quoted. A real FAQ page, with the questions your customers actually ask and specific answers with numbers in them, gives an assistant something safe to lift. Marketing prose does not.

Reviews and citations are the corroboration

Reviews prove you are real and recently active; assistants favor volume plus recency over a perfect score. Citations, meaning your name, address, and phone listed identically on Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and the industry directories, are the cross-checking layer. One old phone number on a forgotten directory is exactly the contradiction that gets you skipped.

llms.txt, the new robots.txt

llms.txt is an emerging convention: a plain-text file on your site that tells AI crawlers what your business is and which pages matter. It costs ten minutes and puts you ahead of nearly every competitor, because almost nobody has one yet.

The 30-day checklist

• Week 1: complete every Google Business Profile field, add 10 photos, fix your categories.
• Week 1: put your exact name, address, and phone in the site footer and match it everywhere.
• Week 2: add LocalBusiness and Service schema to the site, validate it, request re-indexing.
• Week 2: submit or correct listings on Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and Facebook.
• Week 3: publish an FAQ page answering your ten most common customer questions with real numbers.
• Week 3: add llms.txt and make sure your services pages say the neighborhoods you serve, by name.
• Week 4: start automated review requests after every job and reply to every review, good or bad.

If you want it done for you

This checklist is exactly what our Local SEO + AI Search Sprint delivers: the audit, the full Business Profile setup, ten citations, the schema, the FAQ page, and llms.txt, done in ten days for $449. It also comes inside the Booked Solid bundle. Do it yourself with the list above, or hand it to us; either way, stop being the business the assistants cannot safely recommend.

You cannot win the answers you never knew were being asked. Structure is how you get invited.