Guides

How an AI assistant picks a plumber (and what it reads on your site)

When a homeowner asks an assistant for help with a leak, it pieces together an answer from what it can read. Here's what that is, in plain terms.

Picture a homeowner at 9 p.m. with water under the kitchen sink. More and more people skip the search results and just ask an assistant: "Who can fix a leaking pipe near me tonight?" The assistant doesn't call around. It reads what's published about local plumbers and answers with whatever it can confirm.

What it's trying to confirm

1. That you're a plumber. Obvious to a person, not always to a machine. A line of structured data that says "@type": "Plumber" removes the guesswork.
2. Where you work. A street address, or if you work out of your truck, a list of the towns you serve.
3. When you work. Regular hours, and whether you take emergency calls after hours. If this isn't written down, the assistant can't safely say you're available tonight.
4. How to reach you. A phone number it can read, and ideally a simple way to request a quote.
5. What you do. Drain cleaning, water heaters, repiping, leak detection: named plainly, one per line or section.

Where it reads it

Assistants and their crawlers look at the same public places a search engine does, plus a few newer ones:

• Your home page and service pages, including the hidden schema.org JSON-LD block (a machine-readable business card).
• robots.txt, which says which crawlers may read the site. Some site templates and security plug-ins block AI crawlers by default, and owners never know.
• llms.txt, a short plain-text summary written for AI systems. It's a young convention, not a standard every assistant follows, but it's cheap to add and easy to keep accurate.
• A plain /for-ai page that states the facts with no marketing fluff.
• Your business listings (Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp). If the hours there don't match your site, the assistant has to pick one.

What it can't do

No one can promise an assistant will recommend a particular business. What you can control is whether it's able to read your information correctly. Think of it like a clear sign on your truck: it doesn't guarantee calls, but a muddy one guarantees confusion.

A 20-minute checklist

• Add Plumber structured data with your real name, phone, hours and service area.
• Make your phone number a tap-to-call link.
• Check robots.txt isn't blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended unless you mean it to.
• Write a five-line llms.txt and a short /for-ai page.
• Make the hours on your site and your Google Business Profile match exactly.