Will ChatGPT recommend your plumbing company? Check what it can find

Ask ChatGPT “who can fix a leaking water heater near me?” and you will get names. The question is whether one of them is yours.

This is already happening. In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey, 45% of people said they had used AI tools to find local business recommendations. A year earlier, that number was 6%. ChatGPT was the most used tool, at 31%, with Google’s AI Mode at 23%.

Nobody can promise an AI tool will name your company. What you can do is make sure the facts it finds about you are clear, true and the same everywhere.

Where AI answers get their facts

AI tools build answers from what is published on the web. Two companies explain how their tools find pages:

• Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The same basics apply as for search: pages Google can crawl, text it can read, and accurate business profile information. Google also says you don’t need special AI files or special markup for these features.
• OpenAI says its crawler named OAI-SearchBot is used to show websites in ChatGPT’s search results. Sites that block it in their robots.txt file won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers.

So the work is mostly the work of good local SEO, done carefully.

Step 1: Ask the questions yourself

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google. Ask the questions your customers ask, with your town in them:

• “Emergency plumber open now in [your town]”
• “Who replaces water heaters in [your town]?”
• “Best plumber for a sewer line in [your town]”

Write down who gets named and what is said about them, with the date. Do it again next month. This is your before-and-after record. New Reward’s monthly Visibility report does this same check for its clients.

Step 2: Make sure the robots can read your site

Ask whoever runs your website to check your robots.txt file. It should not block Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot. A single line in that file can hide your whole site from ChatGPT search.

Step 3: Give every big job its own page

A page called “Services” with ten bullet points is hard to quote. One page per job is easy. Each page should answer, in plain words:

• What the job is: water heater replacement, drain cleaning, repiping.
• Where you do it: the towns, by name.
• When you do it: regular hours, and whether you take emergency calls.
• Why trust you: license number, years in business, photos of real jobs, reviews.

Step 4: Keep your facts the same everywhere

Your business name, phone number, hours and service area should match on your website, your Google profile, Facebook, Yelp and any other listing. When facts conflict, people and machines both have to guess.

Step 5: Let reviews tell the story, honestly

Reviews that mention the job (“they fixed our water heater the same day”) help people understand what you do. Ask every customer for a review. Don’t tell them what to write, and never offer a discount or gift for it. Google’s rules ban incentives for reviews, and they ban asking only your happy customers.

Watch out for these

• Keyword stuffing. “Best plumber plumbing plumbers near me” on every page reads badly to people and helps no one.
• Fake reviews. They break Google’s rules, and the FTC’s 2024 rule bans them too.
• Anyone who guarantees AI will name you. No one controls what these tools say.

The short version

• You checked what three AI tools say about your company, and wrote it down with the date
• Your robots.txt lets Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot in
• Each big job has its own page with what, where, when and proof
• Name, phone, hours and service area match on every listing
• A review request goes to every customer, with no strings attached