How to show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity for 'best contractor near me'

Why this matters now

More homeowners now ask an AI tool who to hire instead of scrolling Google. They type things like 'best plumber near me in Royal Oak' or 'who is a good roofer in Kendall' and get back three to five names. If you are not one of them, you are not on the list.

Right now very few local businesses make that list. One 2026 study of about 350,000 business locations found ChatGPT recommended only around 1 percent of them. That is bad news for most contractors and good news for the ones who act first.

How ChatGPT and Perplexity pick names

Both tools run a live web search before they answer a local question. ChatGPT leans heavily on Bing's index and on the sites it trusts. Perplexity searches the open web and shows its sources right in the answer. Neither one reads your mind or your ads. They read what the internet says about you.

A study of 6.8 million AI citations found that most come from sources the business itself controls or can claim. Roughly 4 in 10 came from business websites, roughly 4 in 10 from listings like Google Business Profile, Bing Places and directories, and the rest from reviews, social posts, news and forums.

Reviews also line up with recommendations. A study of 10,000 local businesses found that companies named by both ChatGPT and Perplexity averaged about 133 Google reviews, while companies the AI ignored averaged about 11. That is a link, not proof that reviews alone cause it, but the pattern is hard to ignore.

Step 1: Make your business easy to confirm

AI tools skip businesses they are not sure about. If your name, address, phone and service area are different on your website, Google, Bing, Yelp and Facebook, the AI cannot tell if they are the same company.

Pick one exact business name, one phone number and one address or service area. Use them the same way everywhere. Then claim and complete Bing Places for Business, which many contractors have never touched even though ChatGPT relies on Bing. Fill in Google Business Profile completely: categories, every service, service area towns, hours and real job photos.

Step 2: Get listed where AI looks

For home services, the platforms AI tools cite most include Yelp, BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor and Nextdoor, along with your Google and Bing listings. Yelp was reported in 2026 to be licensing its data to OpenAI, so a complete, accurate Yelp page matters more than it used to.

Local 'best of' lists matter too. When we ran this week's check on contractor and agency questions in Detroit and Miami, the answers kept citing city roundup articles and directories, not the businesses' own sites. Ask your supplier, trade association, chamber of commerce or a local news site about being included in their lists. One honest mention on a trusted local site can count for more than ten pages you wrote yourself.

Step 3: Build pages that answer the question

AI tools pull short, direct answers. A page that starts with 'We replace roofs in Sterling Heights, most jobs take one to two days, and here is the price range for a typical home' is easy to quote. A page that starts with 'Welcome to our family owned company' is not.

Build one page per main service and one per main town you work in. On each page, answer the first question first, then give the details: what the job includes, how long it takes, a fair price range, your license and insurance, and photos from real local jobs. Add a short FAQ with the questions customers actually ask on the phone.

Add schema markup, the code that tells search engines and AI tools your business name, services, area and reviews in a format they can read. And check that your website does not block AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in its robots.txt file.

Step 4: Turn reviews into proof

Ask every happy customer for a Google review, and ask some for a Yelp or BBB review too. A steady flow beats a big burst. Ask them to mention the service and the town, like 'water heater replaced in Novi' or 'new roof in Hialeah'. Those words help an AI match you to a question.

Reply to every review, good or bad, in plain words. In Miami, reply in the language the review was written in. AI tools read your replies, and so do customers.

Step 5: Test it every month

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI the same questions your customers ask, in your town, every month. Write down whether you are named, who is named instead and which sites they cite. Then go get listed on those sites.

Answers change from one day to the next, and no one can guarantee a spot. Anyone who promises you 'number one in ChatGPT' is guessing. What you can control is how easy you are to find, confirm and quote. Our free AI Visibility Check asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude these questions for you and shows who they recommend instead.

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