The Question Contractors Are Asking

A growing number of contractors are noticing something: competitors are showing up when they ask ChatGPT "who's a good plumber in [city]" or "can you recommend an HVAC company near me?" And they're not. What's different about those businesses? How does ChatGPT decide who to recommend?

The answer is more nuanced than most people realize - and understanding it is the first step to doing something about it.

ChatGPT Operates in Two Distinct Modes

Before explaining how ChatGPT finds local businesses, it's important to understand that ChatGPT operates in two different modes depending on the context:

Mode 1: Training Data Only (No Search)

ChatGPT was trained on a massive dataset of internet content up to a certain cutoff date. When asked questions without using its search capability, it answers from this training data. For local business recommendations, this means it can only cite businesses that were well-represented in the web data it was trained on - businesses with strong online presence, review coverage, and consistent web mentions up to its training cutoff.

This mode is less useful for local business queries because training data goes stale. A business that built strong web signals in 2022-2024 might still be cited from training data, but the data won't reflect recent changes.

Mode 2: Live Web Search via Bing

When ChatGPT is given access to the internet (as it is in the default ChatGPT app for Plus users and increasingly for free users), it uses Bing's search index to retrieve current results before generating its answer. For a question like "find me a licensed plumber in Denver," ChatGPT performs a Bing search, reads the results, and synthesizes an answer.

This means your Bing presence - Bing Places for Business, your website's Bing ranking, and the quality of your online presence as Bing indexes it - directly feeds into what ChatGPT recommends when it searches for local contractors.

What ChatGPT Looks For When It Searches for Contractors

When ChatGPT uses Bing to find local contractors, it evaluates the results it finds using several implicit criteria:

1. Business Legitimacy and Consistency

ChatGPT parses multiple sources before generating its answer. A contractor whose name, address, phone, and website appear consistently across Google, Bing Places, Yelp, Angi, BBB, and other directories looks like a real, established business. A contractor who only has a Facebook page and an outdated website looks like an unknown quantity.

Consistency across platforms is one of the most reliable signals of business legitimacy that AI models can detect. It's the same reason local citation building is valuable for traditional SEO - but it matters even more for AI search.

2. Review Volume and Rating

AI tools use review data as a quality proxy. A contractor with 200 Google reviews at 4.8 stars has demonstrated, through the independent assessments of hundreds of real customers, that they deliver quality service. ChatGPT - like any intelligent system trying to recommend businesses - will favor highly-reviewed companies over little-known ones.

Both the quantity and recency of reviews matter. A business with 200 reviews but none in the past year is less convincing than one with 80 reviews earned consistently over the past 12 months.

3. Website Content Quality

When ChatGPT reads your website (via Bing's index), it evaluates whether the content is specific, credible, and organized. A contractor with detailed service pages, an informative About page, licensing information, and a clear service area description is easier for ChatGPT to understand and recommend accurately.

Websites with thin content, no service descriptions, or that read like they were written by someone who doesn't actually know the trade are less likely to be cited - because ChatGPT can't extract enough credible, specific information from them.

4. Structured FAQ and Q&A Content

ChatGPT is a question-answering machine. It naturally gravitates toward content formatted as direct questions and answers. Contractor websites with FAQ sections - answering real questions homeowners ask about the trade, pricing, process, and service - give ChatGPT easy-to-parse content it can reference in its response.

5. Third-Party Citations and Mentions

Beyond your own website, ChatGPT draws on mentions of your business across the web - Yelp reviews, Angi listings, local news articles, community forums, contractor association pages, and more. A business that appears in multiple credible third-party sources is more verifiable and more likely to be cited than one that only exists on its own website.

The Role of Bing Places for Business

Because ChatGPT uses Bing for search, your Bing Places for Business profile is significantly more important for AI search visibility than it is for traditional search (where most contractors focus entirely on Google). Bing Places is Google Business Profile's equivalent on Microsoft's platform.

Claiming and optimizing your Bing Places profile - complete with categories, services, photos, and a description - directly improves the data ChatGPT has access to when searching for contractors in your area. Most contractor businesses have never touched their Bing Places profile. This is a meaningful competitive opportunity.

How Perplexity Finds Contractors (a Quick Note)

Perplexity is the other major AI search tool worth understanding. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity always searches the web before answering and always cites its sources directly in the response. When a homeowner asks Perplexity for a contractor recommendation, Perplexity searches, reads multiple sources, and displays the contractors it found with links to where it found them.

This means Perplexity visibility is heavily dependent on: your website appearing in search results for relevant queries, review platform listings (Yelp, Angi), and any third-party content that mentions your business. Perplexity also rewards content that's structured for direct reading - it will often quote directly from your FAQ or About page.

Practical Steps to Get Cited by ChatGPT

  1. Claim and complete your Bing Places for Business profile. Match it exactly to your Google Business Profile - same name, address, phone, and services.
  2. Build Google review velocity. Target 10+ new Google reviews per month. ChatGPT's Bing search picks up this social proof.
  3. Complete all major directory listings. Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, BBB, and any trade-specific directories. Consistency across these is critical.
  4. Add FAQ content to your website. Answer the real questions homeowners ask about your trade. Use FAQ schema markup so the content is machine-readable.
  5. Include licensing and credentials on your website. License numbers, certifications, insurance information - these legitimacy signals matter to AI tools.
  6. Build local entity signals. Chamber of commerce membership, trade association pages, local news mentions, and cross-referral links from other local businesses all strengthen your entity profile.
  7. Make your website content specific and substantive. Generic "we offer plumbing services" content is invisible to AI. Specific, detailed content about what you do, where you do it, and who you serve is what gets cited.

Test it yourself: Open ChatGPT and ask "Who are the best [your trade] companies in [your city]?" Then look at what comes up. If you don't appear, look at what the businesses that do appear have in common - review count, website quality, directory presence - and use that as your optimization roadmap.