How Do I Get My Contracting Business Recommended by ChatGPT?

ChatGPT recommends a business the way a good librarian recommends a book: it can only name what it can find and understand. The work of making your contracting business findable and understandable to an assistant is called answer engine optimization. It is not a trick. It is plumbing, most of it boring, and I ran it on my own site first.

AEO stands for answer engine optimization. In practice it means making your business easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to find, understand, and cite.

I am Matt Shepard, a licensed general contractor in Colorado and the owner of Shepard Consulting. My clients are trades and construction first, then any small business owner drowning in admin. If you want this work done for you, here is the service. What follows is what I did to my own site, because every system I sell is one I run in my own businesses.

The audit I ran on my own site

In September 2026 I ran the same audit I sell on this site. It found a canonical tag pointing at a redirect, FAQ markup that did not match the visible answers, and a form button full of broken characters. All of it was fixed the same day.

None of that is exotic. A canonical tag pointing at a redirect tells a crawler the wrong home for a page. FAQ markup that disagrees with the answers on the screen teaches an assistant the wrong thing about you. Broken characters in a form button are just broken.

Answers first, on every page that matters

Every key page gets a direct 40 to 60 word answer at the top, then the detail. That is the part assistants lift. People skim the same way, so the rewrite pays twice.

Think about what somebody actually asks an assistant at nine at night: who repairs foundations in Arvada, whether this company is licensed, what a panel upgrade costs. If your site answers those plainly, you are readable. If the answer is buried under a paragraph about your values, you are not.

Markup that says what the page says

Structured data is the part machines read. When the FAQ markup disagrees with the answers a person can see, the assistant has to pick which one to believe. On my site that exact mismatch was one of the three findings, and it was fixed the same day as the rest.

What I will not promise you

Ranking depends on your category, how close the searcher is, and your reviews, so nobody can honestly promise a position. Nobody honest can promise a citation either. What I can show you is what the plumbing looked like before and after on my own site.

A plain checklist

1. A direct answer at the top of each page that matters, 40 to 60 words, then the detail
2. Markup that matches the answers a person can actually see on the page
3. Canonical tags that point at real pages, not redirects
4. A site an assistant can find and read in the first place

None of it is clever. All of it is checkable, which is the point.