By Brandon Aubey
A year ago, someone in El Paso with a leaking water heater typed “water heater repair near me” into Google and called one of the three businesses in the map. Today a growing share of those people open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or the AI box at the top of Google and ask a full question instead: “Who’s a good plumber on the Eastside that can come out today?”
They get one answer. Not ten blue links. One or two business names, with a sentence about why.
If your business is one of those names, you just got a lead without paying for a click. If it isn’t, you didn’t lose a ranking position. You were never in the conversation at all.
What the AI actually reads before it recommends you
AI engines don’t have opinions. They assemble an answer from what they can find and verify about your business. In practice that means a handful of sources, checked against each other:
Your Google Business Profile. Categories, services, hours, service area, photos, and above all reviews. An AI model treats a profile with 80 recent reviews that mention “same day” and “water heater” very differently from one with 6 reviews from 2021.
Your website, read as text. Not the design. The words. If your homepage says “Welcome to our website” and your services page is a list of icons with no sentences, there is nothing for the model to quote. If it says “We repair and replace water heaters across El Paso and Horizon City, usually the same day, starting at $X,” that sentence can become the answer.
Structured data. A block of code on your pages (JSON-LD schema) that spells out, in a format machines read directly, what your business is, where it is, what it does, and what it costs. Most local business sites don’t have it. The ones that do are far easier to recommend with confidence.
Everything else that mentions you. Directories, the Chamber of Commerce, Yelp, Nextdoor, Facebook, news mentions. The model cross-checks. If your phone number is different on three of them, trust drops.
Why “before your competitors do” is not a sales line
Search rankings are a slow fight. Everyone in your trade has been working on Google for a decade, and moving from position 7 to position 3 takes months. Showing up when people ask who to call is the same job as having clear pages and a live listing. Search Growth is the plan for two new or better pages a month.
AI recommendations are different right now because almost nobody local is doing the work. When we check the trades we serve in El Paso, most businesses have a thin profile, a brochure website, and no structured data. The model has very little to go on, so it recommends whoever it can verify. That is a wide open door, and it will not stay open. In two years this will be table stakes. If the brochure website is the part you need to fix first, here is what a small business website should actually cost.
What showing up actually takes
Here is the short version of what we do on a client’s site, in the order it matters:
- Rewrite service pages into direct answers. Every page should answer the question a customer would ask, in the first paragraph, in plain words. Trade, area, speed, price range, what happens next.
- Add schema. LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Review markup, kept accurate.
- Fix the profile. Right categories, every service listed, service areas filled in, a post every month, every review answered.
- Make the facts match everywhere. Same name, address, phone, and hours on every listing that exists.
- Keep the reviews coming. A one-tap review request after every job. Recency matters as much as volume. This is how to get more Google reviews without breaking the rules.
- Publish answers, not announcements. A short article a month that answers a real customer question (“how much does a water heater replacement cost in El Paso?”) gives the model something specific to cite.
None of this is complicated. It’s just work most owners don’t have time for, which is why it’s part of our Local Visibility and Dead River Complete plans.
The one thing to do this week
Open ChatGPT and ask it for a recommendation in your trade, in your part of town, the way a customer would. See who it names. If it isn’t you, you now know exactly what you’re competing for.
If you’d rather we handle it, see our plans or call or text (915) 228-3054. No sales call.
Prices and plans mentioned in older articles may have changed. See current pricing.