Ask ChatGPT who the best plumber in your city is.
It already has an answer.

Directory listings are the fastest AI-visibility lever there is. ChatGPT never studied your homepage the way Google did — it learned about the plumbers in your market from Yelp, the BBB, trade directories, Chamber of Commerce pages, and local news. If you're not on those, you effectively don't exist to it. Cover three tiers: the big general directories, at least one plumbing-specific directory, and at least one hyper-local source.

This is boring work. That's the good news — your competitors won't do boring.

Press releases are the second heavy hitter, and almost everyone wrote them off a decade ago. Not "we're excited to announce" fluff — releases published on genuine media sites that connect your company name to the questions homeowners ask. A sentence like "how much does water heater replacement cost in Dallas? According to Smith Plumbing…" sitting on a high-authority news domain is exactly the kind of thing a language model absorbs and repeats back. Use real hooks: a new location, a new service line, a milestone, a hiring push.

Inconsistent listings make one company look like three. "Ave" on Yelp, "Avenue" on the BBB, an old tracking number on a directory from 2019 — trivial to you, but a machine assembling a picture of your business reads that as separate entities and splits your reputation between them. Pick one exact format, write it down, and use it character for character everywhere. This fix costs nothing, which is why it should come before you spend a dollar on anything else.

Homework: Google your business name plus your city and compare your top ten results against each other. Most owners find a mismatch in the first five.

Language models grab the first sentence of an answer, so the first sentence has to be the answer. "A water heater replacement in Portsmouth typically costs $1,400–$2,200 installed" gets quoted. "Great question! Here at ABC Plumbing, we've proudly served the area for 20 years…" does not — you just handed the citation to a competitor. One question per heading, answer first, details after, three to seven per service page, using the real questions people ask you on the phone. Then have your web person wrap them in FAQPage schema.

Schema markup is a form you fill out directly for machines — business type: Plumber, plus your name, address, phone, and hours. The field almost nobody uses is sameAs: a list of every other page on the internet that describes your business. Your Yelp profile, your BBB page, your Facebook, your YouTube channel, your press coverage. It ties the whole list together — the listings from #1, the press from #2, the consistent identity from #3, all cross-referenced in one place so Google and the models can verify you're real.

Send this one to your web person. It's about twenty minutes of work.