There are four engines that matter for a US contractor in 2026: Google's AI Overviews, Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity. They work differently, and the differences decide what a contractor should spend time on.
Google pulls from the Business Profile
When AI Mode answers "who repairs heat pumps in Plano," it shows a short list of businesses with the star rating, review count and hours taken from Google Maps. That is the same data the map pack uses. A profile with 40 reviews, photos from this year, correct hours and every service listed gets picked over a profile with 12 reviews and a stock photo, for the same reason it would in the map pack.
So the first thing to do for AI search is the thing you should have done for Maps: fill the profile completely, keep hours current (including holiday hours), list each service as its own item, and post a photo from a job every week.
ChatGPT and Perplexity read your website
ChatGPT search has been available to everyone since December 2024. It runs on Bing's index plus OpenAI's own crawler, and it cites the pages it used. Perplexity does the same with its own crawler. Neither one has a Business Profile to lean on, so they lean on the web pages they can read.
Both engines like a page that answers one question directly, in the first paragraph, with a number in it. "A furnace repair visit in Plano runs $89 for the diagnostic, and most repairs land between $150 and $600" is the kind of sentence that gets quoted. "We offer comprehensive furnace solutions for every need" is not, because it says nothing an engine can repeat.
Two checks on your own site:
- Open
robots.txt. If someone blockedGPTBotorPerplexityBotto "protect content," you have opted out of being cited. Unblock them. - Read your service pages as if you had to answer "how much and how fast" from them alone. If you cannot, neither can the engine.
Things that do not help
There is a small industry selling "AI SEO" to contractors. Most of it is repackaged basics. A few items are worth skipping outright:
- An
llms.txtfile. Google has said it does not use one. The other engines have not said they do. - A page for every metro suburb with the city name swapped in. Google has penalized this for a decade, and AI engines quote a single strong page over twenty thin ones.
- Rewriting your site "for AI." The engines quote clear sentences. Write those.
How to tell whether it is working
Search Console does not separate clicks from AI Overviews. What you can see is referral traffic in Google Analytics from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai, and in the call log, the customer who says "ChatGPT told me to call you." We tag those calls. Across our clients they are still a small share of inbound, in the low single digits, and the share has grown every month since we started tagging them. The dollars are still in Local Services and Maps, and the work for AI search is the same work.