AI Search Visibility for Home Service Businesses
When a homeowner asks ChatGPT for the best plumber in your city, it names three or four companies. If you're not one of them, you never find out — there's no impression count, no missed-call log, nothing. We measure whether you're in that answer, then get you into it. Fixed prices, starting at $997, no sales call.
The short version
- AI assistants answer "best contractor in [city]" from a handful of sources they trust — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Angi, local listicles. Most trades are in none of them.
- We audit where you stand today, fix the technical and citation gaps, and track the result monthly.
- $997 audit → $4,997 fix sprint → $1,997/mo retainer. Audit credited toward the sprint within 60 days.
- Agencies built around AI visibility usually charge $3,000–$10,000/mo on annual contracts. This is month to month.
- Retainer is capped at 8 clients because it's real work, not a dashboard login.
Pricing
Three fixed-scope packages. Every one has a defined deliverable and a date — no hourly billing, no scope conversations, no discovery call before you're allowed to see a price.
Start here
AI Visibility Audit
One-time · 7 business days
- Your real buying prompts run through ChatGPT — "best [trade] in [your city]", emergency variants, service-specific queries
- Exactly which companies get named instead of you
- The source sites ChatGPT cites in your market — review sites, local listicles, Reddit threads — and which ones you're missing from
- Technical audit: schema, llms.txt, robots.txt, canonicals, crawlability
- A prioritized fix list, ordered by effort against likely impact
Most impact
AEO Fix Sprint
One-time · 3–4 weeks
- Everything in the audit, implemented for you
- LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQ schema across your site
- llms.txt, robots.txt, and canonical cleanup so AI crawlers can actually read you
- Answer-first rewrites of your top 20 pages
- 8–10 new pages targeting the city and service questions you currently lose
- Citation placement target list with contact details
- Before-and-after visibility report
Ongoing · 8 slots
AI Visibility Retainer
Monthly · cancel anytime
- 4 new answer pages every month
- 2 citation-source placements every month
- Continuous ChatGPT visibility tracking
- Monthly score report, same day each month
- Schema and freshness maintenance across the site
- Async only — no standing calls
Buy the audit and decide later — if you move to the sprint within 60 days, the $997 comes off the price.
Why this matters now for trades specifically
Home services has always been a search-first category. Someone's water heater fails, they search, they call one of the first names they see. That behavior didn't change — the surface did. A growing share of those searches now happen inside an assistant that returns one written answer naming a few companies, instead of ten blue links.
The difference matters more for trades than for most industries, because of how the answers get built. Ask an assistant about software and it can read the vendor's own website. Ask it for a plumber in Tulsa and it has no way to evaluate you directly, so it leans on third-party sources: your Google Business Profile, Yelp and Angi, local news, and the "best plumbers in Tulsa" roundup some blog published two years ago. Those sources are the entire game, and most contractors have never audited whether they're in them.
There's no page two here, and that's the part people underestimate. In traditional search, ranking eleventh still gets you some traffic. In an AI answer that names four companies, being fifth is identical to not existing. There's also no reporting: you'll never see a line in any dashboard that says a homeowner asked for a plumber and got told about someone else.
What we actually do
- Measure what the assistant says today. We take the prompts your customers would really type — not vanity keywords, but "my AC died and it's 100 degrees, who do I call in Mesa" — and record what ChatGPT answers. This is your baseline, and it's the number we report against every month afterward.
- Find the sources behind those answers. Every AI answer is assembled from somewhere. We pull the specific domains cited for your trade in your city and check each one for your business. This is usually where the problem is: not that your website is bad, but that you're absent from the six sites the model trusts.
- Fix your own site so it can be read. Schema that describes your business, services and service area in a form a machine can parse. An llms.txt that points AI crawlers at your important pages. A robots.txt that doesn't accidentally block them — which we find more often than you'd expect. Answer-first rewrites so the first 60 words of a page actually answer the question it's about.
- Get you into the sources. Directory and review-site profiles filled out properly, and outreach targets for the local roundups and listicles that already rank in your market.
- Re-measure and report. Same prompts, same method, monthly. The number goes up or it doesn't, and either way you see it.
How this compares to what else you could buy
| Option | Typical cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| AI visibility agencies | $3,000–$10,000/mo, often 6–12 month contracts | Enterprise-grade GEO work, built for SaaS and ecommerce. Rarely take single-location trades, and the contract length is the real barrier. |
| Traditional local SEO retainer | ~$2,000–$2,500/mo for a single-location service business | Google Business Profile, citations, on-page work. Valuable, but mostly aimed at blue-link rankings — schema depth and llms.txt usually aren't in scope. |
| Self-serve AI tracking tools | $29–$99/mo | They tell you your score. They don't fix anything. Good if you have someone in-house to act on it. |
| This | $997 once, or $1,997/mo month-to-month | Measurement plus implementation, scoped for one trade business in one metro, no contract. |
Pricing for the first three rows reflects publicly advertised rates at the time of writing and moves around — check any vendor's own pricing page before treating it as current.
What we haven't done yet
This is a new service line, and we don't have a wall of contractor case studies. Pretending otherwise would be the first lie in a relationship that runs on trust, so here it is plainly.
What we do have: we built Spotlit, the ChatGPT visibility tracker this work is measured with, and we run a 400-page site through the same AEO methodology we'd apply to yours. The audit is priced at $997 partly because it's an honest amount of work and partly because it's a sensible amount to risk on a shop that's proving itself.
The other thing we won't do is guarantee an outcome. Nobody controls what a language model says about anybody. We control the inputs it reads, and we measure the output honestly. If the number doesn't move, you'll be the first to know, because we're the ones sending the report.
Who this is for
This is built for established home service operators — typically three or more trucks, already spending real money on Yelp, Angi, or Local Services Ads, in a metro where you have named competitors. Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, garage door, drain and septic, appliance repair, restoration.
It's a poor fit if you're a solo operator whose calendar is already full, if you're brand new with no reviews anywhere yet (fix that first — it's cheaper and it feeds this), or if you're looking for someone to run your Google Ads. We don't do ads.
How it fits with the rest of what we build
Getting named in the answer is the front of a chain, and the rest of it leaks money in ways that are easier to measure. If the phone rings and nobody picks up, visibility bought you nothing — that's what NeverMissAI handles. If your Yelp leads sit unanswered for two hours, the ad spend was wasted — that's Yelp Lead AI. If you do the work and never get paid, none of it counted — that's PaidUp.
They're sold separately and none of them require the others. If you want to see which gap costs you most before spending anything, the revenue leak calculator adds up all four in your own numbers in about a minute.