Be the contractor the assistant names.

As a capped test, usually yes. The reach is real and the intent is strong, but honesty matters here: tracked ChatGPT referrals were 0.08% of home services conversions in June 2026, even while AI-referred leads grew 135% across the first half of the year. It is a fast-growing small channel, so we size the test accordingly rather than moving your Google budget into it.

Our paid search team runs both. Google Ads answer a keyword; ChatGPT Ads sit beside an answer to a described problem, often much earlier in the project. The homeowner is frequently still deciding scope and budget rather than choosing a company, so the creative and the landing experience need to educate rather than push for an immediate booking.

By being genuinely easy to verify. Publish real project pages with costs, locations and photographs, state your licence, bond and insurance, keep service areas explicit, and make sure reviews and directory listings agree with each other. Assistants assemble recommendations from sources they can read, so thin brochure sites are simply invisible to them.

Increasingly, the ones with the biggest budgets. 28% of homeowners starting a $50,000-plus remodel in 2025 used an AI assistant during contractor research, and 33% of recent hirers used ChatGPT or Perplexity in selection. Higher-ticket, higher-anxiety projects attract the most research.

Partly, and we are precise about the limits. Direct clicks from ads and cited links can be tracked with proper tagging and a conversion pixel. The harder case is a homeowner who asks the assistant, then searches your name later — we use call tracking and ask on the enquiry form to catch it, and we label estimates as estimates.

Home improvement is a straightforward category, so yes. OpenAI's policy is stricter in sensitive areas — some health and finance categories are handled case-by-case, and ads are not served alongside sensitive conversations — but contractor advertising sits well inside the rules. We check compliance before anything goes live.

Small enough that a null result does not hurt, large enough to learn something. We agree a monthly cap up front, keep it separate from your proven channels, and set the result it has to beat to earn more. If it does not clear that bar, we say so and stop.

Paid tests produce data within a few weeks. Organic recommendation is slower and moves as the models and their sources update, so we re-test the answer set monthly and expect meaningful movement over a quarter rather than a fortnight.

Yes, and the two feed each other. Ordinary local SEO still does much of the heavy lifting. Assistants lean heavily on sources that conventional search also rewards, so content, reviews and technical health do double duty. Our GEO and AEO work sits alongside ordinary local SEO rather than replacing it.

They still produce work, and they still sell the same enquiry to your competitors. The advantage of being recommended directly is that the homeowner arrives having already chosen to contact you specifically. Most contractors we work with keep the marketplaces running while building direct demand that costs less over time.

Substantial. The US home improvement and maintenance market runs to more than $600 billion annually per Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, and NAHB counts 128,000 remodeling firms and expects remodeling activity to rise 3% in 2026. Plenty of demand, and plenty of competitors chasing it.

The opposite — reviews become more important, because they are one of the main things an assistant reads when deciding who to name. A steady flow of recent, detailed reviews across the platforms that matter in your area is now an AI visibility asset as much as a persuasion one.

By making the quote easy to defend, and by landing enquiries on pages built to convert — see landing pages. 52% of homeowners have used AI to double-check a contractor's estimate, and 58% say they are more likely to hire a contractor who uses AI. Itemised scope, stated assumptions and a clear explanation of why you cost what you cost win those conversations.

A named senior strategist who is in the monthly session and who wrote your plan. Because this channel is young, you also get the unvarnished version of what we are learning across accounts rather than a polished story about a solved problem.

The answer baseline, the content and credibility fixes with the fastest payoff, tracking set up, and the paid test scoped and capped. You finish month one knowing exactly where you stand in AI answers, which is more than most of your competitors can say.