Someone in your town just asked ChatGPT who to call about a furnace that keeps shutting off. It gave them three names.
This is about whether one of them was yours, and what decides it — which is not what most people selling “AI SEO” will tell you.
Do this before you read the rest
- Open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
- Ask it: “Who is the best HVAC company in [your town] for a same-day repair?”
- Read the names it gives you.
If you are not in the list, that is the whole problem and you did not need an agency to tell you. If you are, ask it why — the answer will be a paraphrase of your reviews, and it will tell you exactly what your reputation currently says about you to a machine that thousands of homeowners are now asking.
That test is free, takes two minutes, and is a more honest measure of where you stand than most reports you will be sent.
What actually changed
People used to type three words into a box. A growing number now type a whole sentence into an assistant:
- “my furnace keeps shutting off after a few minutes, who should i call in [town]”
- “is it worth repairing a 15 year old ac unit or replacing it”
- “who does emergency heating repair at night near me”
Notice what that does to your odds. The map pack gives you three slots and a “more places” link underneath, so fourth place still gets some scraps. An assistant gives three names and no link at all. Being fourth used to mean less work. Now it means none.
How it picks the names
There is no database you can submit to. Anybody offering to add you to ChatGPT is selling you nothing. What these systems do instead is check whether you look like a real, currently-operating business. Five things decide it.
1. It reads Bing, not just Google
When ChatGPT looks up a local business it runs a live web search, and that search goes through Bing rather than Google. Business recommendation questions almost always trigger it, because the model’s training data cannot know who is trading in your town this week.
Almost no contractor has ever claimed a Bing Places listing. Which makes this the cheapest thing on the list: twenty minutes, free, and in most markets nobody has done it.
Fix: claim and complete Bing Places.
2. It cross-checks you against yourself
The assistants pull your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook and the trade directories, then compare them against each other. When the hours disagree, or an old phone number is still floating around on a directory you forgot about, they lose confidence in the whole listing and quietly stop recommending you.
This is the most common reason a genuinely good company is invisible, and it is entirely fixable in an afternoon.
Fix: one set of details, identical everywhere. Same spelling, same suite number, same phone.
3. It wants proof you still exist
Assistants have been observed using permit history as a proof-of-life check — an active permit trail read as evidence that a company is genuinely still working rather than a dead listing nobody took down.
For a contractor that is a real structural advantage. You pull permits as a matter of course. A marketing agency cannot manufacture one, and neither can the outfit two towns over that exists mostly as a website.
Fix: make sure your licence and permit records carry your current business name and address.
4. It quotes your reviews back, not your slogans
Ask an assistant why it recommended somebody and it will paraphrase review text. “Customers mention he came out the same night” is the kind of sentence that gets a company recommended.
Nothing you write about yourself competes with that. You can call yourself the most trusted name in heating and cooling on every page of your site and it will count for nothing next to twenty people saying you turned up when you said you would. This is why volume and recency of reviews matter more here than they do on Google.
Fix: ask at the end of every job, and answer every review — including the bad one.
5. It trusts places you have never posted
Long-running trade forums and industry directories sit inside the trusted source pool these systems draw on, precisely because they have been around for years with real moderation. Being referenced across a spread of third-party sites raises the odds of being surfaced considerably — more than adding another page to your own website does.
Fix: get listed and mentioned where your trade actually gets discussed, not just where agencies sell citations.
The good news nobody selling this will tell you
Almost all of that is the same work that wins you the three slots in the map pack. Consistent details, a complete Google listing, real and recent reviews, and pages that answer questions in plain sentences.
The assistants did not invent a new game. They read the same evidence and are stricter about contradictions.
So when somebody quotes you a separate “AI SEO package” on top of your existing local SEO, ask them which specific tasks are in it that are not already in the first one. It is a fair question and the answer is usually revealing. In our Tune-Up it is not a line item you pay extra for, because it is the same job done properly.
The genuinely new work is small and cheap: claim Bing, kill the contradictions between your platforms, and get quoted somewhere other than your own website.
How you would know it is working
There is no rank tracker for this yet, and anyone showing you an “AI visibility score” is showing you something they made up.
The honest measure is the test at the top of this page, run monthly and written down: were you named, on which assistants, and what did they say about you when asked why. It is crude. It is also the only thing that actually reflects what a homeowner sees — and it is what we report.
Two related pieces: what a shared Angi lead really costs per booked job, and what SEO for HVAC contractors involves with the prices on the page. Or run the free website scorecard — two minutes, no email needed to see your score.