How to Show Up When Someone Asks ChatGPT for a Contractor

A homeowner who would have typed "landscaper near me" into Google last year increasingly types the same thing into an assistant instead, and gets a short answer naming two or three companies.

That is a different competition from the one most contractors are used to. There is no map with ten pins under it and no second page. There is a paragraph, and either you are in it or you are not.

It is not really a new algorithm

The reassuring part is that an assistant is not running a secret ranking system it invented from scratch. It is assembling an answer out of what it can find about businesses in an area: your own website, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, and whatever else the wider web says about you.

Which means most of what earns a mention is the same work that earns a map pack place. A profile that is complete and active, details that agree with each other everywhere, real reviews from real customers, and pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it.

The businesses that get named tend to be the ones with a consistent, well-documented presence, because a consistent story is the one an assistant can state confidently. A business whose name, address and services differ across four sources is a business it has no clear way to describe.

Where it does differ

Two things are genuinely different from ranking in Google, and both are worth knowing.

The answer is short. Ten blue links reward being tenth a little. A three-name answer rewards being third and nothing beyond it. The gap between showing up and not is much sharper.

The sources are wider. Assistants pull from places Google's local results do not lean on as heavily, which means directory listings, trade association pages and local mentions matter more than they have for a few years. The old advice about citations, which had started to feel dated, has become useful again for a reason nobody predicted.

There is also a point worth raising carefully. Some assistants have leaned on Bing's index for their web results, and a common piece of advice is that a business missing from Bing Places is invisible to them. That is stated more confidently around the industry than the evidence really supports, and it changes as these products change. But claiming a Bing Places listing is free and takes about twenty minutes, so treat it as cheap insurance rather than a rule.

Is it worth doing anything about yet?

For most Louisville trades, honestly: not as a separate project.

The number of customers currently arriving this way is small compared with Google search and the map pack, and building a strategy around it on its own would be putting effort where the customers are not, yet.

What makes it worth mentioning is that it costs nothing extra. Everything above is already the work — profile, reviews, consistency, real pages about real services in real places. AI visibility is a by-product of doing local SEO properly, not a separate discipline with its own invoice. Be suspicious of anyone selling it as one.

How to check where you stand

Ask, the way a customer would. Open an assistant and ask for a landscaper in the town you serve, or an HVAC company near a specific suburb. Do not use your business name — you want to know whether you surface for the need, not whether it recognises you when prompted.

Try it a few different ways, and try it on more than one assistant, because they do not agree with each other. If you are named, note what it says about you and whether that description is the one you would have chosen. If you are not, the businesses it does name are your real competition in that channel.

We had one client end up first for both lawn care and landscaping across their service area, ahead of the other companies in town, and it was not the goal of the project. It came out of the same profile, review and page work that moved everything else. The full case study is published with the screenshots, including that one, and if you want somebody to do the underlying work, we will audit yours free first.