You can't sign up for Today's Homeowner. Here's how to get in anyway.

A plumber in Richmond called us last spring wanting to know how much it costs to get on Today's Homeowner. He'd found the "10 Best Plumbers in Richmond, VA" page, seen four competitors on it, and assumed there was a rep somewhere with a rate card. There isn't. There's no signup form, no claim button, no profile to fill in, no upgrade tier. A writer built that list from public information and never asked anyone's permission.

The short answer: Today's Homeowner is an editorial publisher, not a directory — you cannot create a listing, and their own methodology says it is not possible for a company to pay for preferential treatment. You get on the list by making your public record so clean and so visible that the researcher building the city page can't leave you off.

Here is the short version, if you would rather watch it than read it:

Or the 60-second version in text: Today's Homeowner took 1,108 of the 9,293 citations we logged across roughly 14,000 AI searches — 653 from ChatGPT, 446 from Perplexity, 9 from Google AI — which makes it the third most-quoted source in the study. The catch is that there is nothing to sign up for. No claim button, no profile, no rate card. It is a magazine, and a staff writer builds the "10 Best Plumbers in [city]" page from public information without asking anyone's permission. Ten slots per metro, in a city with a couple hundred licensed outfits. So the work is not filling in a form, it is being impossible to skip when someone spends an afternoon checking: an active license that matches your legal name, real review volume on Google, a clean BBB record, and a service area that names actual cities instead of saying "and surrounding areas." The one email address they publish, FindAPro@TodaysHomeowner.com, is for correcting a page you are already on — not for asking to be added.

That distinction is the whole game, and almost every article about this site gets it wrong. Search for advice on this and you'll find agencies telling plumbers to "create your Today's Homeowner listing." There is nothing to create. It's earned, not claimed, and once you accept that, the work becomes obvious.

What they actually say they look at

Every city plumbing page carries a block titled "Today's Homeowner Ranking Methodology." The wording is short enough to quote in full: they look at "dozens of datapoints on plumbers to come up with our data-driven rankings," and "It's not possible for a company to pay for preferential treatment in our rankings."

Then they list the six factors that decide who tops the list:

1. Company Experience
2. Real User Reviews
3. Company Reputation
4. Accreditations and Licenses
5. Service Area
6. Customer Service

Notice what's not there. Not your website design. Not your blog. Not how much you spend on ads. Every one of those six is something a researcher can verify in about four minutes with Google, a state license lookup, and the BBB — which is exactly what makes them worth fixing, and exactly why most plumbers ignore them.

The output is a page with ten companies on it. Ten. Each gets an editorial rating, a user rating, an address, a phone number, a website, three or four strengths, and a services list. Ten slots per metro, in a city with two hundred licensed plumbing outfits. You are not trying to be good. You are trying to be one of the ten most obviously legitimate plumbing companies in your city when someone spends an afternoon looking.

Earned, not claimed: the difference that matters

A claimed listing is a form. You fill it in, you control what it says, and the platform takes your word for most of it. Angi, Yelp, Google Business Profile — those are claimed. Your inputs become the record.

An earned listing is a conclusion someone else reached about you. The researcher pulls Google reviews, checks the state license board, glances at the BBB, reads your service area page, and decides. You never touch the record. You only influence the inputs they happen to read.

This is why the usual playbook fails here. There's no NAP form to submit, no photo to upload, no description to optimize. The lever is your public record, and the public record is a slower, heavier thing than a listing form. It's also considerably more durable — nobody can outbid you for it next quarter.

It's the same reason these pages get cited by AI in the first place. Assistants trust the page precisely because it reads as an independent editorial judgment rather than a paid placement. We covered the full citation landscape in the sites AI reads before recommending a plumber; Today's Homeowner sits at number three with 1,108 citations out of 9,293 across roughly 14,000 searches, and it earns that position by not being for sale.

The public record, in priority order

Here's the fix list, ranked by how much it moves a researcher's decision relative to how long it takes you.

Three notes on that table, because the details are where plumbers lose this.

Your legal name has to match itself

We audit this constantly and it's broken more often than not. The state license says "Halbrook Mechanical Services LLC." Google says "Halbrook Plumbing." The BBB has both, as separate records, one of them abandoned since 2019. A researcher cross-checking your license against your Google profile hits that mismatch and moves to the next company, because verifying you takes longer than skipping you. Pick the name, fix the records, and put the license number where a human can see it.

"And surrounding areas" is not a service area

Their methodology names service area as a ranking factor, and their own homeowner advice tells readers to check whether a plumber actually covers their neighborhood. If your site says you serve "Richmond and surrounding areas," you have given the researcher nothing to work with. Name the cities. Name the counties. Put them on a page that loads fast and reads like it was written for a person — which is most of what we do on plumber websites anyway.

Reviews are the only factor you can't shortcut

"Real User Reviews" and "Customer Service" are two of the six factors, and both come down to the same public artifact. There's no clever way to fake volume that survives a look. A plumbing company doing 12 calls a day and asking properly should be adding 25 to 40 Google reviews a month. If you're adding four, that's your project for the next two quarters, and it pays off in far more places than this one list.

While you're in there: an unverified or suspended profile is invisible to a researcher checking your reviews. If you've never confirmed yours is in good standing, start with how to verify your Google Business Profile before anything else on this page.

What the email is actually for

There is exactly one contact route: FindAPro@TodaysHomeowner.com. Their city pages introduce it with "Have questions about our methodology or company ratings?"

Read that carefully. It's a correction channel for companies already on a list. If you're ranked eighth in Tulsa and the page has your old address, your pre-porting phone number, or says you don't do trenchless when you've done it for six years — that's the email, and a short factual message with a link to the page fixing one specific error is reasonable.

Emailing that address to ask to be added is not a strategy. It's a cold pitch to an editorial team that didn't ask for one, and the honest answer is that it almost never works. Fix the record first. If a writer refreshes the Tulsa page next quarter and you now have 300 reviews at 4.8 with a clean license and a clear service area, you don't need to ask.

The trade-off, stated plainly

You should know two things before you spend a quarter on this.

First, these pages do carry an advertiser disclosure: the site receives compensation from some companies featured in the listings, and the "Get Quote" buttons connect homeowners with partners. Ranking isn't for sale, but the page is monetized. Don't picture a monastery.

Second, this is slow. There's no launch date. You fix the record, you keep asking for reviews, and one day a writer refreshing a city page finds you and you're in — or a language model reads the six signals directly and reaches the same conclusion without the article. Either outcome is fine, which is the actual point. Everything on that checklist makes you more citable, more findable, and more likely to win the phone call when a homeowner is comparing three names. Nothing on the list is wasted if the article never runs. That's rare in marketing, and it's why we push it ahead of flashier work in plumber SEO.

If you want to know where your public record actually stands — license, reviews, BBB, name consistency, service area, all of it side by side against the four competitors already on your city's page — book a call. We'll pull it up while you're on the phone and tell you exactly which of the eight rows above is costing you. Some plumbers hear they're two fixes away. Some hear it's a two-year review problem. We start by telling you the truth either way.