By Jon Almas, AM Creative
A customer told you they asked ChatGPT for a plumber in your town and got three names back. Yours was not one of them. One of the names was the outfit you have been beating on price and quality for six years.
That stings, and it is worth understanding, because more homeowners are starting their search this way. They open ChatGPT, ask who they should call, and take the answer at face value the way people used to take the first page of Google.
Here is what is actually going on and what you can check yourself this week.
Why does ChatGPT name some contractors and not others?
ChatGPT is not ranking businesses the way Google does. It is assembling an answer out of what it can find written about you, and what it can find written about you comes mostly from other people’s websites.
That is the part most contractors miss. Your own site saying you are the best roofer in Essex County carries almost no weight. A local news piece, a chamber listing, a “best contractors in Newburyport” roundup someone else published, a well filled out Google Business Profile, a stack of reviews that mention the specific work you do, all of that carries weight, because it is somebody other than you saying it.
When a contractor is invisible in AI answers, it is usually one of three things. Nobody outside their own site has written about them. Their business details do not match across the places that did. Or the information exists but sits inside a website an AI system cannot read cleanly, which happens more than you would think with sites built on page builders that hide the text inside layers of code.
How do you check whether it is recommending you?
Test it, but test it properly, because one check tells you nothing.
Ask the same question five to ten times across a week or two, in fresh chats each time. Something plain, like “who should I call for a furnace replacement in Amesbury.” The answers move around. You can ask the identical question twice in one afternoon and get two different lists, so a single bad result is not proof of anything and a single good result is not proof either.
Write down what comes back each time. Which businesses got named, how often yours showed up, and where in the list. After ten runs you have something real. Two things worth doing while you are at it:
Change the wording between runs. Try “best,” try “most reliable,” try “emergency,” try naming a neighboring town. Different phrasings pull from different sources, and you may find you show up for one and vanish for another.
Ask it a follow up. Something like “why did you recommend those three.” The answer often names what it drew on, which tells you exactly which pages are feeding the recommendation. Sometimes it is a directory you forgot you were listed in.
What if you never show up at all?
Showing up sometimes and not others is normal and means the pieces are mostly there. Never showing up across ten runs is a different signal. That usually means there is not enough about you out on the web for the system to work with, or what is out there contradicts itself.
Contradictions are the quiet killer. An old suite number on one directory, a disconnected phone number on another, a business name with LLC on some listings and not on others. Every mismatch makes it harder for any system, AI or search engine, to be confident it is looking at one business rather than two.
Does this replace Google?
Not yet, and be skeptical of anyone who tells you it has.
Most of your calls still come from regular search and the map pack. What has changed is that a slice of homeowners now form their shortlist before they ever open Google, and that slice keeps getting bigger. If you are on their list you get a call. If you are not, you never find out you were considered.
The useful part is that the work overlaps heavily. Accurate listings, a site with clear text about what you do and where you do it, reviews that mention actual services, and pages other people wrote about you all feed both. You are not choosing between showing up in Google and showing up in ChatGPT. Most of the same groundwork does both jobs.
What can you fix this month?
Four things, roughly in order of how much they move.
Pull up your Google Business Profile and fill in every field, including the service list and the description. Half the profiles we look at are missing services the business actually sells.
Check your name, address, and phone across the ten or so places you are listed. Make them match exactly, down to whether you write Street or St. Character level consistency sounds fussy and it matters.
Ask a few customers to mention the specific job in their review. “Great work” tells a machine nothing. “Replaced our water heater in Newburyport the same day we called” tells it what you do and where.
Look at whether your website says plainly, in text, what services you offer and what towns you cover. If that information only exists inside an image, a slider, or a graphic, it is not doing anything for you.
Where this fits
We work month to month. You own the website, the profile, the content, all of it, whether you stay with us or not.
If you have run the test and you are not showing up, call the shop in Amesbury at (978) 464-8895 and we will look at what is actually out there about your business.
