Search for "water heater leaking who do I call" in your town and you may not see ten blue links. You may see a paragraph, written by Google, that names two or three companies and explains what to do while you wait. Ask ChatGPT the same thing and it will name companies too, sometimes the same ones, sometimes not.
Owners are starting to hear pitches for "answer engine optimization" and "generative engine optimization" as a result. Some of those pitches are honest. Most are the local search work you already needed, with a new label and a higher retainer. This guide is about what actually feeds those answers for a contractor, and which parts are worth your money.
Where the answers come from
The systems differ, but for local questions they lean on the same small set of sources.
Google's AI Overviews are built on Google's own index and its local data. For a "near me" question that means the Business Profile data: categories, services, hours, service areas, and above all reviews. Google's own documentation on AI features in Search says the same thing it has said about ordinary search for years: there is no special markup, and the guidance is to make helpful, well-structured pages.
ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity and the others fetch live results, read the top pages, and summarise. Which means they mostly see what already ranks, plus whatever is easy to parse: a clear business name, a clear list of services, a clear service area, and reviews they can quote.
Directories and review sites get cited more than most owners expect. Yelp, the BBB, Angi, Nextdoor and the local newspaper's "best of" list are all pages the models can read and attribute. If your profile on those is thin or wrong, the answer inherits that.
The pattern across all of them: the answer engine does not discover you. It repeats what the web already says about you, from the sources it trusts most.
What feeds the answer for a contractor
In rough order of weight, from watching how these answers are assembled for trade queries:
Your Google Business Profile. Categories that match the service (a plumber who also does water heaters should have both), the services list filled in with plain names, service areas set to the towns you actually drive to, hours that are true, and photos of real jobs. This is the single richest structured source about your business that exists, and it is free.
Reviews that say something. "Great service" tells a model nothing. "Fixed our tankless water heater in Framingham the same day, explained the warranty" tells it the service, the town, the speed and a reason to trust you. You cannot write the reviews, but you can ask right after the job, when the detail is fresh, and make it easy to leave one. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, because the replies get read too.
Service pages that answer the question. One page per service, one per area, that state in the first lines what the service is, where you do it, roughly what it costs and what happens on the visit. A page that says "Water heater repair in Natick: same-day service, typical repairs run between X and Y, here is what we check" is quotable. A page that opens with your founding story is not.
Consistency everywhere else. Same name, same address, same phone number on your site, your profile, the directories and the review sites. Models resolve entities by matching those. A mismatch does not just cost you a citation, it can split you into two half-businesses.
Speed and structure. Pages that load fast and use ordinary headings get read. Schema markup for your business, services and reviews helps the parsing, and is already part of a properly built contractor site.
Notice what is on that list: everything a good local SEO engagement already does. That is the point.
The two expensive things you can skip
Paying for an "AEO strategy" separate from local search. For a national software company there is a real specialism here. For a roofer in one county, the answer sources are local, and the work is the local work. Ask anyone selling it what they will do in month one. If the answer is your Business Profile, reviews and service pages, that is local SEO, and you should pay local SEO prices for it.
Writing long articles about your trade. "The complete guide to heat pumps" was already a hard way for a local contractor to win traffic. AI answers now absorb most of the informational clicks that page might have earned. Publishing to feed the models is a losing trade. Publish the pages that answer "who can do this here, how fast and for roughly how much", because those still send a person to a phone number.
The part that decides whether any of this pays
An AI answer that names your company sends a call. If that call rings out at 6:40pm, the answer engine has just handed the job to the next name on the list. Everything above is upstream of the phone, and the phone is where most contractors lose the lead they worked to earn.
So the order of operations is the same as for ordinary search. Make sure the calls get answered, or at least texted back within seconds. Make sure the form on the site creates a follow-up, not a message in an inbox nobody checks. Then improve how you show up. Doing it the other way round pays for more calls to miss.
Thirty minutes this week
- Search your trade and town in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Write down who gets named and what pages they cite.
- Open your Business Profile. Fix categories, services and service areas. Add ten photos of real jobs.
- Check the date of your last review. If it is older than a month, set up a review request that goes out after every completed job.
- Read your top service page as if you were the homeowner. Does the first screen say what, where, how fast and roughly how much? If not, rewrite that screen.
- Call your own business number after hours and see what happens.
Number five is the one that usually changes the plan. The rest of this site is about what to do when it does.