How do plumbers, electricians and builders get recommended by AI assistants?

People ask an assistant for a tradesperson the way they would ask a neighbour. These invented examples have the usual shape: “emergency plumber near Llandudno who does Saturdays”, “electrician to replace a fuse box in Conwy”, “roofer in Colwyn Bay for slipped slates”. Each names a trade, a job and a place, and often a time.

OpenAI says ChatGPT turns a question into narrower web searches, and that when someone asks for something near them it can work out their general area and put the town’s name into the search. Either way, the words of the question become the words of a search. A page saying “emergency call-outs across Llandudno, Saturdays included” contains them; “no job too small” does not.

An assistant cannot ring you to ask whether you work weekends, or ask the neighbour who recommended you. It can only repeat what is written somewhere it can read, and the place you fully control is your own website.

Many trade websites are a logo, a mobile number in large type and a gallery of jobs. That works for a customer who already knows you. For an assistant answering a stranger, it holds almost no facts: a phone number tells someone how to ask a question, and answers none.

Photos carry less than they seem to. Google says it uses an image’s alt text, along with computer vision and the content of the page around it, to work out what the image shows. Even a perfectly understood photo of a new bathroom says “bathroom”. It does not say which town the house was in, or that the job came with a two-year guarantee.

Keep the gallery and give every photo a line of words: the job, the place and the month. An invented example: “Slipped slates replaced on a terraced house, Colwyn Bay, March”. Ten captions like that say more about where you work than a page of logos.

Where you work, town by town. Name the towns and villages you cover in a sentence, not on a map or as a radius: “We cover Llandudno, Conwy, Llandudno Junction and Colwyn Bay.” Where a town has a different Welsh name, give that too, because a customer asking in Welsh will use it: Cyffordd Llandudno, Bae Colwyn. Our Welsh place names guide says where each one goes.

The jobs you do, named the way customers name them. You may fit a consumer unit; your customer wants their fuse box replaced, so write both. A landlord asks for an electrical safety certificate, which you might call an EICR. Name each common job in your customers’ words, with a sentence on what it involves.

Emergency and out-of-hours cover, exactly. “24/7” on a van leaves every question open. Say which days and hours you answer, what you treat as an emergency (no heating, a burst pipe, no power), whether the call-out area is smaller than your usual one, and whether there is a call-out charge. If you do not take emergencies, say so.

Insurance and guarantees, in plain terms. Say what cover you hold, such as public liability insurance, and to what level. Say what your own guarantee covers and for how long, and keep it apart from a manufacturer’s warranty on a boiler or heat pump, which is the maker’s promise, not yours.

A logo in a footer is a picture of a claim, not the claim written down, and it proves little to a person either: NICEIC warns that rogue traders have been known to use its logo without being certified. Write each accreditation in words, give the name and number the scheme holds for you, and point to the scheme’s own search page.

Gas Safe Register. Gas Safe says the back of each engineer’s ID card lists the gas work they are qualified to do, so say which work you take on: boilers, cookers, gas fires, LPG. It also says each new card, issued yearly, carries a new licence number, so that number belongs on the card. On the site, give the business’s Gas Safe registration number beside its registered trading name, as Gas Safe’s policy requires.

NICEIC. NICEIC certifies businesses rather than individual electricians, unless the electrician is a sole trader, and its online search finds a business by name, so your website should use the name you are certified under. NICEIC says the name a customer was given may not match the one it holds, and that some businesses choose not to appear in its search; either way, its advice is to phone.

TrustMark. TrustMark describes itself as the Government Endorsed Quality Scheme for work in and around the home, and tells homeowners to make sure a tradesperson is registered with it for the specific trade they need. So say which trades you are registered for, and link to your entry.

Structured data repeats those facts in a vocabulary machines share. schema.org’s HomeAndConstructionBusiness is a local business providing services around homes and buildings, and its more specific types include Plumber, Electrician, RoofingContractor, HVACBusiness (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), GeneralContractor, HousePainter and Locksmith. There is no type for joiners or landscapers, so for them HomeAndConstructionBusiness itself is the honest choice.

Our guide to LocalBusiness structured data goes through it field by field. For a trade, as for any business, the markup should state nothing the page does not already say in words.

Reviews and your Google Business Profile matter too, but are subjects of their own. Once the words on your site are right, the free assessment here reads one address as a machine does and lists what it could not find.