AI search is changing how homeowners find HVAC, plumbing, and home service companies.
John Wilson sits down with Julie Phan of Big Reputation to break down how ChatGPT and other AI platforms decide which contractors to recommend and what home service owners can do to show up more often.
They cover why your Google Business Profile, reviews, website, service pages, local listings, and overall digital footprint are becoming increasingly important as search moves beyond Google.
John and Julie also walk through how AI evaluates things like location, service type, reputation, availability, and customer feedback, plus how operators can test their own AI visibility and start building an advantage before the space gets more competitive.
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In This Episode
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• How AI search is changing home services
• How ChatGPT chooses which contractors to recommend
• Why reviews matter for AI visibility
• Google Business Profile and AI search
• Building a stronger digital footprint
• Service and location pages that give AI more context
• How to track your visibility in AI search
• Why smaller contractors may have an advantage
• How to start optimizing for AI search today
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Sponsors
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Profit & Grit
Running a $3M–$15M home service business? Profit & Grit helps contractors improve cash flow, pricing, forecasting, and profitability with guidance from an operator who's built and sold a $25M service business. Book your free 20-minute strategy call: https://www.profitandgrit.com
Catalyst | May 3–5 | Akron, Ohio
100+ home service owners and operators. Three days of tactical sessions, real conversations, and learning from great operators.
Grab your seat: https://www.ownedandoperated.com/catalyst
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Connect
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John Wilson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbwilson1/
Julie Phan/Big Reputation
https://www.bigreputation.ai/
More Ways To Connect with OAO
John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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So how to appear more in AI search.
Anywhere that you have a digital footprint, that's what an AI is going to pull from.
Like, how are you feeding it enough context on you that it will always think of you first? That's the way to win that I don't think anybody has yet.
It's good to get ahead of it while you still can versus like entering in the rap race when everybody's already in it.
Yeah, the people that got ahead earlier are the ones that stayed ahead. This is a game and someone's gonna find a way to win. How do you think you actually track it?
You would want to start at like welcome
back.
Hey Julie, welcome back. Thanks. Yeah, welcome back. Welcome back to Own and Operated, a top 150 business and entrepreneurship podcast. I'm your host, John Wilson. Uh for fun, we talk about home service businesses, how to build them, how to buy them, how to add technology to them, pretty much whatever else. Uh and for my actual day job, I run a very large home service company out of the Midwest. Julie Fan, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me. This will be good. I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. Um you are with uh big reputation.
Yep.
So we're gonna talk about that a little bit. But the topic of today, what are we talking about?
We're talking about AI and practically what you can do to improve to show up in AI search. So more of the AEO or GEO, depending on what acronym you prefer.
Got it. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, cool. Uh and then before we dive too deep, what does big reputation do?
So, what we do is we help home service contractors automate a lot of their daily functions so that they show up on Google more. So, more of SEO, so search engine optimization. Um, and we automate a lot of those features, such as your reviews, your content posting. Um, yeah.
All right, awesome, cool. How to show up in AI search as a service uh company. I have not seen any data. Have you seen any data on like the prevalence of Google search over chat? We looked a I want to say it was a year ago, and it was like 4% of search was AI search, but that has to be substantially changed today, right?
Yeah, um, I believe Google still owns in the high 80% of like market share, but I think as people move over to AI search more, I know that the numbers change, but for contractors, it's it's still Google owns a lot of the market share.
All right, so uh as more and more searchers are moving over to chat, yeah, yeah. So now it's like 80 or 20% AI, and I'm sure that that's only gonna grow more. It'll be interesting to see what happens because I think Google's about to introduce their like chat-like feature to search that will change how search looks and works.
Um they kind of have something like that already. Um, it's just not very good.
Yeah, it's not like I try to use it, and um I mean I'm the problem is I am I'm part of the issue. I am now used to like you are the problem. Yeah, I'm the problem. I'm used to like searching with a conversation, yeah. Uh, which is like that's what Chat GPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever is. It's like, well, here's a query, and then like I'm gonna add some more stuff to it. All right, 28 to 45 percent of homeowners are using that's a lot. That's okay, that's crazy. Yeah, that is crazy. Okay, okay.
So, how to appear more in AI search?
Um, okay, yeah. So basically what you want to do is just a few a checklist worth of items is going to be making sure you're optimizing your website, making sure your Google Business profile, yeah, and checking in on your Google search results, maps locals, listings. Um, I have a list here with local directories, news stories, industry websites, social media platforms. Anywhere that you have a digital footprint, that's where you're gonna, that's what uh uh an AI is gonna pull from. Yeah.
Okay. All right. So yeah, like indeed, Yelp. Yep. You know, there was uh Review Buzz was a website like 15 years ago. I don't know if there's still a thing. Um, but that was like sort of aggregated reviews. Um yeah, that is interesting. Because I feel like it's it'll be interesting to move on from the legacy, is like Google reviews is what mattered. I mean, I still think like Google Reviews is sort of like 90% of what matters. But the other stuff starts to matter too now in just a different way.
Yes. Yeah, so it's gonna be like, for example, your Google reviews are gonna matter because that's what ultimately is going to decide like how trustworthy you are, um, what your clients are saying about you. So let's say a lot of your clients for you as a plumbing company, um, you guys are mentioned a lot in terms of emergency repair or you know, AC install, then you're gonna get more of those calls. You're gonna show up more. AI is gonna suggest you more for that, even though let's say you're in all three verticals, right? Wilson's in plumbing, electrical, and AC. But a lot of your reviews say that you guys are great at AC installation. You'll actually show up more for AC versus being recommended for plumbing or electrical. So I think reviews is kind of like that customer um satisfaction, and it's kind of like their what's the word that I'm looking for? Um just validation that you you do a good job at X, Y, and Z.
We started talking about adding, I think responses to reviews is sort of a part of the same conversation.
Yes.
Like, hey, thanks for having us out to fix your water heater. Um, because I think it yeah, it shows up more.
Yes, yeah. Just year, obviously, all of that data is getting fed into Google.
Okay. Yeah. From everywhere.
From everywhere. Yep. From multiple review platforms, from all of your social media, it could be news stories, just anywhere you are mentioned, it's considered a digital footprint. So AI just aggregates all of that information and builds a profile as to what your overarching message is.
That's interesting.
So, like, for example, I know the stigma is a lot of people hate Yelp.
Yeah.
But for everybody like East Coast, it seems like everybody in the East Coast and the Midwest don't really like Yelp. Um, but it's good to get ahead of that right now, just because AI is gonna pull from those sources. And you know, what's interesting is that Yelp has partnered with ChatGPT, so they're gonna show up a lot more on Chat GPT. It's gonna be heavily considered. Now, the specific statistic, I don't know. Um, but yeah, it's it's good to get ahead of it while you still can versus like entering in the rat race when everybody's already in it.
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I totally agree with that. I feel like that's LSA and GBP's. Um, yeah, the people that got ahead earlier are the ones that stayed ahead.
Yeah.
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All right, so AI search checklist, like what should we be thinking through?
Um, just like your GPP accuracy, your website information, your entity, your phone numbers, stuff like that. So um, yeah, so like for example, right, if if I were to use if somebody were to use chat GPT, and I'm just gonna say chat because a lot of people use chat. Um other ones are Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Grok. Um, but let's just use chat. So if somebody were to look up best plumber or best plumber near me, right? So I kind of did a backwards analysis as to what chat GPT is gonna ask you and how it's gonna get to get the results and what it's gonna present to the customer. So this will be helpful for all the listeners. So basically when I did the analysis, I just asked ChatGPT who is the best plumber near me. Then it followed up with certain questions like, what city are you in? What zip code? And then, you know, for this example, let's just say Frisco, Texas, right? Then chat would ask, what type of plumbing service do you need? And I would say water heater, and then they would ask if it's urgent. So the water heater is leaking, and then what AI is analyzing, what metrics is the location, so proximity to where you are, the type of service, the urgency, the company's reputation, so whether they have a strong and consistent customer feedback, reliability, which is the responsiveness, legitimacy of the business, and availability. So then the search starts as best permanent or me, but as AI is asking all these clarifying questions, then technically the prompt becomes what is the most reputable water heater repair company serving Frisco that appears capable of responding today? So then after that, chat presents chat presented three options. So A would be the best match for urgent same day, B would be the best established, and then C would be the strongest water heater specialist. So when you're talking about ranking, you want to talk about multiple different things. Like, for example, with option A, best match for urgent same day repair. That cust that that company got recommended because they had a lot of repeated customer mention of emergency and same day repair. For the second one, it was best established, so that's a larger, consistent review history across multiple sources with feedback about their workmanship. And then the last company for strong water heater repair specialists, they have fewer reviews, but a lot more mentions about water heater repair and replacement. Yeah, so it's it's multiple angles that the AI is going to use to list. That is interesting.
That is interesting. And I think we've talked about this before, but I think it'd be interesting. Um as you're thinking about like that's like publicly available information, it will be really interesting when people start feeding chat or whatever the like internal information, like, hey, here's our capacity. Yeah. Uh, because I think the urgently available is kind of a fun one because we could upload every day, hey, here's Wilson's availability today or for the next week or whatever. Like, we are available urgently. And I think you could just like feed that into chat every day. And I think it would start like responding with that to queries.
I think that's a good way to test it, yeah, for sure.
Because like, I mean just like run it out of two different chat accounts. Like, hey, here's the upload. Like, hey, Wilson's available. Um, send us customers is the upload. I don't know. And then like have somebody else in a different account be like sort of run a test against it.
Yeah, that'd be interesting for you to test it like every two weeks. Have a manager just be like, I work at Wilson, this is what we specialize. Yeah. Every day, I mean for like two weeks and results. But again, that would also be hard to track because I guess where you're gonna run into the issue is when they provide a phone number. What where is it? Yeah, where's the phone number coming from?
Yeah, that's that is gonna be so tricky because there's like zero way to attribute that right now.
Yeah.
That's gonna be really tricky. I um I yeah, I kind of want to test it. Cause I what I wonder when I think about how to appear in AI search is like this is a game. Yeah and someone's gonna find a way to win it. And I think the way to win it is both external like reviews, like operating well, all that stuff. Yeah, which I don't think we talked about the operations part yet. Uh, but also like how are you not manipulating AI, but like how are you feeding it enough context on you that it will always think of you first? And I think that that's like that's the way to win that I don't think anybody has yet.
Yeah, it's it's interesting because like even if you take a like big reputation, you know, we're not huge, we're not anything like other companies that have been around for decades or even years. And a few clients that I've talked to, they'll be like, Well, we found you through AI because they're looking at the review company. So even though we haven't been around long, we're still getting mentioned. And it's not like I'm going into Chat GPT and being like, We're the best. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. What I I don't know how it presents us or stuff like that, or how it even gets to recommending us, but I'd love to know the inner workings of that.
Yeah, yeah, that that would be pretty interesting. The other thing I saw when I was on uh I was you I don't even remember what I was looking for. I was looking for some like service uh for my house. And it pulled up like these little boxes underneath Google, and it was it was the it was on the GBP itself. Yeah. And it said uh typically responds or typically answers the phone with a live human and like within the first few rings. Um and then what was the other thing it said? Maybe it was like same day service or something like that. But it was in like purple font and it was clearly like here's an AI, you know, thingy. Um, but it was it was interesting because I thought uh the way to, and I think we talked about this on the last episode we did, but the way to like drive more isn't just like, hey, what's your online presence? But it's also like how are you actually really operating the business? Like it was interesting that it said you picked up quickly with a live human.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, I don't know. That like that's an interesting thing. Uh and it one of them said, like, no phone menus, like, hey, there's no phone menus, which is a consumer, like that matters a lot to me. Like, I'm I'm the you know, angry press zero, give me to an operator, not like uh let me press one, two, three to like work my way through a menu.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah, that is pretty interesting. All right. So as you're thinking about reviews, how are you how do should we be thinking about reviews outside of Google? We talked about Yelp a little bit. Like any others that you think are like big highlight ones that we need to be focusing on?
Um, so there's not really one that they all pull. I think they pull from multiple. Obviously, Yelp has a partnership with ChatGPT. Yeah. Now the statistic on how much that affects, I have I don't have enough research. Um but it can pull from other sources like Meta, Facebook.
I'm assuming it probably pulls a lot. Yeah. Kind of like Reddit in chat. I feel like all I got served for a while using chat was Reddit. Really? Like every search was like, hey, here's my source, Reddit. Yeah. I'm like, well, I'll just fucking go to Reddit then, you know. It's got all the answers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um, it doesn't for me, like across all different models, I haven't found that it pulls from one or multiple. Because like, let's say, even if I ran that same search, best plumber, in the same, you know, in chat GPT, it's gonna come up with a different answer every time.
Yeah, I think that's really annoying. I think and that I I would I'm surprised by how many people use it to find a service provider because like the context is different every time, the the the output is different. Whereas I feel like in Map Pack, if we're trying to give a good customer experience, good customer experience is consistent. Right. And Google is currently giving a consistent customer experience. Right. Um, for better or worse, obviously like chat is easier to use, but if it gives a totally different result every time, how can you trust the answer it's giving?
Yeah, exactly. I think it's also like it's it's super nuanced, right? So like when people were before AI, people would just look up best plumber, but now, or you know, best AC repair company. Um, now it's like I have a 15-year-old train system and it's making this type of noise, and who would be the best? Yeah, so it's it's more in-depth. So what the way that search, with the way that consumers will even search is different. Totally. And their wording affects everything that will be recommended. So even something as like, let's say the search curry was train, but then the next customer searched well, or the next question after that was like, what about a carrier system?
Yeah.
Then even though your company, like let's say you guys service both train and carrier, um you might not show up for both. So for example, you might show up for train and another company might show up for carrier. Yeah. It's interesting how AI will recommend things. And I don't truthfully know like the full inner workings of what it'll base it on, but it's interesting.
But you I mean, I think context, like, are you a dealer? I think how many of your web pages hit it, like maybe social um reviews has to be because when I think about context, reviews is context. And I think that's why Reddit worked worked so well. Like something I've thought about doing is uploading our entire Slack to like an AI and just like trying to get context, and like that's a lot of context. Yeah, uh, because it's real user submitted, like just humans being humans. Yeah, and I think that's Reddit, and I think that's Google reviews, and I think um so I all that to say, I think reviews are probably a big part of the context because you know, for us, we have like seven or eight thousand or whatever like human input comments, yeah, basically. Yeah, that's a lot to filter through. And yeah, so yeah.
Yeah, the the testimony of a customer is obviously gonna have a lot of weight. And then I think it also compounds with other signals on your website. Like if you do you have a dedicated page to that you service carrier systems in Akron, Ohio, in Cleveland, stuff like that. So I think there's just it's just a wide website.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How
do you think you actually track it? Because we can't change phone numbers. I think it's probably just like testing it.
It's it is testing it. You would want to start at like, let's say you do a search curry of best plumber in Akron, Ohio. But you could do different ones, best plumber, best uh contractor for water heater repair, and you see if you show up, if at all you show up, and then when you do, is the information about your company correct? Um, it'll also probably say what your clients are saying about you. So that's where you can start to build that list, whether the information's correct, what your clients are saying about you overall, and even if you're showing up.
Yeah, if you're listening to this and you're actively working on this, you should comment below. I'm pretty curious. Um because I we, you know, like AH refs and like the other like SEO monitors do track this a little bit, but I don't really know where they get that information because I don't think that um I mean, I don't think chat is like saying, hey, Wilson showed up 50 times. Right. So I'm not may I think they're just like crawling your website and saying, like, hey, AI would like your website. Yeah, but it's not telling you how many times you're showing up. And honestly, maybe the best thing to do is just ask chat, hey, how many times did Wilson plumbing show up in results in the past month?
I'm curious if it would Yeah, how many times did you recommend our company? So that'd be interesting to see.
Yeah.
If it answers he's looking up his Magic the Gathering stats, everybody.
Yeah. Search was who's the most recommended plumbing company by ChatGPT in Akron, Ohio in the last month. And hey, I'm on this list twice. Interesting.
Buddies and Wilson.
Buddies and Wilson. Interesting.
Which for the listeners that don't know, um Wilson actually uses big reputation. But in Akron, Ohio, if you follow his heat map, he's actually listed as first and second in Akron.
So you own top two. They call that uh boss mode. Okay. Uh so apparently there's a site called Most Recommended Plumbers, and it benchmarked chat GPT recommendations in August of 2026. And it did for it did it for 26 different U.S. metros. Akron was not one of them, which is really interesting. But Buddy, Buddies, Buddies Plumbing Excellence is the most recommended. That is wild.
And Buddies is has a strong online presence.
God, they do. That's crazy. All right, so Buddies is first, which uh we own them. And then one, two, three, four, five. Wilson is fifth. Ooh. That's actually that is kind of a woof. Because Buddies is like a million and a half of revenue, and Wilson's, you know, like 30 in Akron or something. So that that is that's interesting. So like I think that's an interesting point, um, which it's an advantage for smaller companies. Like Buddies is a million-dollar business. Yeah. And it is like right up there with a Mr. Rooter and like other companies that have been around for a long time. Can you does it tell you? Interestingly, not a single private equity backed business is on this list.
Yeah.
Not a single one. These are all owner led businesses.
Does it tell you what the test like the customer testament or what does it say about that?
It just said it was the most recommended through Chat GPT. Okay. So apparently you can just do this. You can literally search exactly this, and it will roughly give you the recommendations that they handed out. That's hilarious.
That's a new marketing position that you're gonna have to hire for.
Yeah. Jesse. Fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating. Also, on this search, Angie's list is advertising, which I mean, if Yelp is like partnered with them, I think that's interesting. But anyways, so apparently you can search and you can just test and maybe um I I actually with that I really do feel like feeding it more context would help. Would be helpful. Like, hey, here's Wilson's availability today. I think this would work. I mean, you will like we literally lose nothing. So I think we're just gonna, I think we're gonna do it. That's fascinating. Well, I'm glad to see we show up twice. Twice of the top six, I own one third of it.
Wilson's biggest company in Akron, but they get recommended lesser than.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you love to see it. You love to see it. Okay, cool. All right, so as far as like big reputation, uh, how do you guys fit into this? You how do you guys help with support this? One of the best things that you can do as a home service operator is get in the right room with other great entrepreneurs. And that's what we are building with Catalyst. Over the past few years, we've hosted six awesome events where we bring home service entrepreneurs from all over the country to our shop in Akron, Ohio. We're taking everything that we've learned from those six events and we are putting it into something awesome. From May 3rd to the 5th, 100 plus home service entrepreneurs are coming to our shop in Akron, Ohio for three days where we're gonna be having tactical sessions, breakout conversations, and learning from some of the greatest operators in the industry. You're also just gonna be building relationships with people facing the exact same problems that you are every single day. This is going to be our strongest room of operators yet. Grab your seat for Catalyst below.
Uh, so we just we focus more or less on your Google Business profile, the SEO of that. So obviously, if you have strong presence, if your G VP has a strong ranking presence, then you know you're more likely to get recommended on ChatGPT.
Yeah. Um, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And I really do think reviews has to be a big part of it. Um, I mean, after this, I'm gonna spend a little bit of time like uh because I I think the the cool thing when you're testing this is you can just ask. So, like, hey, thanks for the six most recommended. Uh from context, I know Wilson is larger than Buddies. So why was Buddies recommended? I think you could just ask your way through it and figure out exactly where it's drawing data from. Um I think that would be cool kind of cool as shit.
You should also do it alongside another person, have them ask the same original question and see what else it presents, if it's the same or if it's recommending a different source.
That would be interesting.
Because then you get multiple avenues of where you should be adding data, your digital footprint, stuff like that. And then reviews, of course, like reviews are important because it's reputation evidence, it's location evidence, it's satisfaction evidence. So it just ties all of those
features together.
If someone's starting from zero tomorrow on their AI presence, what do you think they would do?
So I would start with having a strong G VP, having a strong website, um, just to go on the website a little bit more, um, strong service pages, um, individual location pages, and just things that customers will find helpful, like replacement versus repair, different systems that you may work on, troubleshooting article articles, yeah, um financing, permit codes. If you're if you're in an area where there's a lot of seasonality, what you should expect, um maintenance, case studies, or even like I know that you mentioned having entering in Slack to just kind of figure out problems or solve resolutions, but let's say you downloaded all of your calls from the call center and what are your call and you uploaded that and you found that 33% of your customers who are inbound calling keep asking this question. I would just put that on your website.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's some that's a good idea. Awesome. Well, I feel like I know what my homework is gonna be. I'm gonna start like, I'm gonna search this, I'm gonna search this parallel, and then I'm gonna start like working backwards on like what where did you get it? And then maybe even most importantly, what could I feed you, chat, to like make me show up even more? Because I think that is really like I think that's a game that can be exploited, at least in the short term.
Is this in between your magic the gathering?
Yeah, this is the before, during, after, yes.
Brandon, if you're listening, run.
Yeah, run. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for coming on today. This was awesome.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, people want to hear more about Big Reputation. Where can they find you?
Um, our website is www.bigreputation.ai. And then from there you can schedule a meeting, talk to me, or just I mean, John is a great resource to reach out to you if you're interested as well.
Awesome. All right, thanks everybody. Make sure you like and sub.
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