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What an AI Actually Reads When Someone Asks It to Find a Contractor

2026-06-08·10 min read read

Someone in Calgary types “find me a plumber” into ChatGPT, and what comes back looks a lot like a Google search result. A map with star ratings, three companies listed with phone numbers, everything a person needs to make a call. Except it’s not Google, and the way those three companies got there has almost nothing to do with the strategy most contractors are running.

ChatGPT answering "find me a plumber in Calgary" with a map and three local plumbing companies listed.
ChatGPT's answer to "find me a plumber in Calgary."

Your company might have 200 Google reviews, a Google Business Profile you update every month, and $4K/month in Google Ads. And most of that barely factored into ChatGPT’s answer, because ChatGPT reads different inputs than the ones your strategy is built around. If that sounds like the kind of shift that only matters “someday,” consider that 15 years ago, a lot of businesses said the same thing about Google itself, right up until the Yellow Pages stopped ringing.

How ChatGPT actually answers a local query

ChatGPT has described its own process roughly like this: it runs a Bing search (not Google) for whatever the person typed, scans the top 20 to 30 results that Bing returns, including business websites, review aggregators, local blogs, and directories, and then narrows that down to 5 to 8 sources that look promising before selecting 3 to 5 for the final answer. It favours sources that clearly show a star rating, aren’t behind a paywall, and are verifiable. Then it writes a summary in its own words, citing those sources.

That sequence comes from a Search Engine Land investigation where ChatGPT narrated its own steps, not from OpenAI’s official documentation, so we should treat the specific numbers as approximate rather than exact. What OpenAI has confirmed is that ChatGPT shares search queries with Bing and uses it as a search provider.

What’s also worth knowing is that this is already changing. OpenAI is building its own search index through a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, which tripled its web crawl activity after GPT-5’s launch in August 2025 according to an analysis of over 7 billion server log entries. There’s evidence the company is transitioning away from Bing as its primary index entirely. The mechanics are shifting, but the inputs (your website, your web presence, the things you actually control) remain what the system reads regardless of which index it uses.

The thing that stays consistent across every version of this process is what’s not in the sequence: Google.

What it reads

BrightLocal ran 800 local business searches through ChatGPT in late 2024 and tracked every source it cited. The breakdown was 58% business websites, 27% third-party mentions like “best of” lists and local guides, and 15% directories. What I mean by that is: when ChatGPT answered a question about a local business, more than half the time it was pulling directly from that business’s own website. Their service pages, their about page, their contact info. The third-party mentions were things like curated “best of” lists, niche blogs, and local guides where someone else had written about the business. And the directories that showed up weren’t the ones most people would expect: Three Best Rated was the top directory source, while Google Maps didn’t appear at all. Wikipedia, notably, made up 39% of all third-party mention sources.

BrightLocal’s October 2025 follow-up confirmed the 58% website figure has held steady, and a larger study backs it up from a different angle. Yext analyzed 6.8 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity in mid-2025 and found that 86% of citations came from the brand’s own website or its listings (roughly 44% websites, 42% listings). Two independent studies, different methodologies, same conclusion: your website is the single biggest input into whether an AI recommends you. Not your ads, not your profile on someone else’s platform.

What it can’t see, and what it can

This is the part that matters if your strategy is built around Google, because the relationship between ChatGPT and Google is more complicated than most people assume.

ChatGPT doesn’t log into your Google Business Profile dashboard and read what’s there. It doesn’t have a direct API connection to GBP the way it does with Bing’s web index. As of late 2024, OpenAI added a map and local-listings feature to ChatGPT’s local results, which is why you see a map with businesses like the Calgary plumber result. What hasn’t been publicly confirmed is where that map layer’s underlying data actually comes from. So be skeptical of anyone who tells you ChatGPT is piping your Google Business Profile straight into its answers: that path isn’t established. What still gets cited is your website.

What that means is: don’t assume ChatGPT is reading and ranking your Google Business Profile the way Google does, because we can’t confirm that it is. When it cites a source in its answer, that citation still overwhelmingly points to your website (58% of the time) rather than to your Google listing. Keep your GBP accurate, it can’t hurt, but here your website is the thing that gets cited.

The other platforms each tell a slightly different story. Bing Places doesn’t get read directly by ChatGPT either, but because ChatGPT runs Bing web searches, your Bing Places listing influences what shows up in those results. A complete Bing Places profile can indirectly shape what ChatGPT surfaces. Yelp didn’t appear as a directory source in BrightLocal’s 2024 study, but that’s shifting: Yelp has reached an agreement with OpenAI around getting its reviews in front of ChatGPT, and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has signaled it’s the first of more deals to come. The exact terms aren’t something we can confirm, so hold the specifics loosely, but the direction is clear enough: a directory ChatGPT largely ignored two years ago is starting to wire into its answers. Facebook was also absent from BrightLocal’s directory results, but many businesses keep their Facebook page more current than their website, which makes it a useful secondary source for hours, events, and contact info.

The through-line across all of this is that your website still carries the most weight in what gets cited, but the ecosystem around it matters more than it did even a year ago. GBP, Bing Places, Yelp, and Facebook all feed the system in different ways. The contractors who are most invisible aren’t the ones missing one of these; they’re the ones whose website gives the agent nothing to work with, and who haven’t thought about any of these secondary inputs at all.

What we saw when we tested it

We ran five queries through ChatGPT in June 2026, all for Canadian home service businesses. Five queries on a non-deterministic system illustrate patterns rather than prove rules, but the variation itself turned out to be the most interesting finding.

When we searched “find me a plumber in Calgary,” ChatGPT showed a map with star ratings and listed three companies with phone numbers, with source tags pointing to business websites. That one was straightforward: it found companies with a strong web presence and surfaced them directly.

“Top rated roofing contractor in Ottawa” brought up another map with five companies pinned, and the text referenced BBB Torch Awards, Consumer Choice Awards, and years in business. What was interesting there is that it wasn’t just reading websites. It was pulling credibility signals from third-party mentions and industry awards, which maps directly to that 27% third-party mention layer from the BrightLocal data.

“Best HVAC in Toronto” produced something completely different. No map, no company recommendations at all. Instead, ChatGPT gave general buying advice: check warranties, ask about load calculations, don’t choose based on equipment brand alone. It cited Reddit. If you’re an HVAC company in Toronto, you weren’t competing for a ranking here, because the agent decided not to recommend anyone in the first place.

“Landscaping company near me in Vancouver” listed four companies, each with a source tag linking to their business website, and then it did something we didn’t expect: it asked clarifying questions. What kind of landscaping? Full redesign? Patio? Maintenance? It wanted to narrow the scope before committing to a recommendation. A prompt also appeared asking the user to share their precise location for better results.

“Who should I call for furnace repair in Winnipeg” was perhaps the most revealing. Only two companies were named, and before recommending either of them, ChatGPT gave troubleshooting steps: check the thermostat, check the breaker, check the air filter. It cited Reddit for the advice. Then it asked three clarifying questions. The agent tried to solve the problem before sending a lead to anyone.

Three things this tells you

1. The agent decides whether to recommend anyone at all.

You’re not just competing for position in a list. You’re competing for the list to exist in the first place. In Toronto, ChatGPT decided general advice was more useful than naming specific companies. In Winnipeg, it tried to troubleshoot the problem before recommending a contractor. A business that isn’t visible in these moments doesn’t just lose a ranking; they lose the opportunity entirely, because the agent never surfaced a consideration set. Before, if someone searched “best HVAC in Toronto” on Google, every HVAC company with an ad or a listing had a shot at being seen. Now, the agent might decide the person doesn’t need a company yet.

2. How someone asks changes everything.

“Find me a plumber” got a map and phone numbers. “Best HVAC” got buying advice. “Who should I call for repair” got troubleshooting first. These are the same category of business, but three completely different response types based on how the question was phrased. There’s no single “local search result” to optimize for anymore. The agent reshapes its entire answer based on what it thinks the person actually needs.

3. Your website carries most of the weight.

58% of what ChatGPT sources is your website, a figure corroborated by Yext’s larger study showing 86% of AI citations come from brand-managed sources. What that means in practice is that your site needs to do more than look good. It needs to be readable by a system that’s scanning it for structured information about what your business does, where you are, and what services you offer. Schema markup like LocalBusiness makes that information machine-readable. One vendor analysis reports that around 71% of pages cited by ChatGPT include structured data; treat the exact figure loosely, since it’s a single source with an interest in the answer, but the direction squares with what we’d expect. That’s not a vague best practice anymore. A site with clear service pages, location info, and structured data is measurably easier for these systems to parse and cite than a wall of unstructured text. The businesses that showed up in our tests all had one thing in common: their websites gave the agent something concrete to work with.

What makes you invisible

If you recognize yourself in a few of these, that’s the diagnostic, and it’s worth being specific about why each one matters.

When your entire local strategy is built around Google (GBP, Google Ads, Google reviews), most of that investment doesn’t transfer to ChatGPT the way you’d expect. Your Google Ads spend is invisible to ChatGPT entirely. Your GBP might help at the margins, but the thing that actually gets cited is your website. What I mean by that is: the money and effort are real, and they still work for Google search, but they give you much less coverage in this second channel than you’d assume.

When your website is thin (one page, a phone number, maybe a stock photo), there’s nothing for the agent to extract. It needs service descriptions, location info, and enough content to understand what you actually do. A single-page site is a blank to a system that’s scanning for structured information.

When your site doesn’t use schema markup to describe your business in a format machines can parse cleanly, you’re relying on the agent to figure out what you do from paragraph text. It can sometimes manage that, but you’re making it harder than it needs to be, and the businesses that make it easy are the ones that get cited.

When nobody’s written about you, whether that’s “best of” lists, local blog mentions, or curated directories, you don’t exist in that 27% third-party mention layer. The Ottawa roofing results pulled from BBB awards and industry recognition. If there’s nothing like that out there for your business, that entire source category is empty for you.

When you’ve never touched Bing Places, you’re missing an indirect lever. ChatGPT doesn’t read Bing Places profiles directly, but it does run Bing web searches, and your Bing Places listing influences what shows up in those results. Before, Bing felt like an afterthought because almost all search traffic came through Google. Now there’s a second system that leans on Bing’s index (though that’s shifting too, as OpenAI builds its own), and leaving your Bing presence empty means you’re not feeding the pipeline that ChatGPT draws from.

What makes you visible

The fix mirrors the diagnosis, and most of it comes down to things you already control.

Your website needs to do the talking. That means clear service pages, each one describing what you do, where you do it, and for whom, with contact info on every page. Not a brochure, but a source an agent can read and cite. Before, a website mostly needed to look professional and load when someone clicked an ad. Now it also needs to be the kind of page a system can scan and pull structured facts from.

Structured data on your site, specifically LocalBusiness schema markup, makes your name, address, phone, hours, services, and service area machine-readable. One vendor analysis reports that around 71% of pages ChatGPT cites include structured data. Treat the figure as directional rather than gospel, but structured data is one of the clearest levers you have, even if it’s no guarantee of inclusion.

Third-party mentions matter more than most contractors realize. Getting on curated “best of” lists, getting written about by a local blog or industry publication: these feed the 27% of sources that aren’t your own website. Three Best Rated was the #1 directory source in the BrightLocal study, not Yelp, not the Yellow Pages.

Claiming and completing your Bing Places profile is worth the effort, even though ChatGPT doesn’t read it directly. Your Bing Places listing influences Bing’s web results, and those web results are what ChatGPT scans when someone asks a local question. Most of your competitors haven’t touched their Bing presence at all, which means this is a low-effort way to show up in a pipeline they’re ignoring.

Allowing OAI-SearchBot matters too. OpenAI’s own crawler is what feeds ChatGPT’s search index, and if your robots.txt file blocks it, you’re invisible regardless of everything else you’ve done. OpenAI’s publisher FAQ specifically names allowing this crawler as a requirement to be eligible for citation at all.

And consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across every site, every directory, every mention. Inconsistency across listings is one of the simplest ways to get skipped by a system that’s cross-referencing sources.

This isn’t about replacing Google

Your Google strategy still matters for Google search, and a little of it may carry over to ChatGPT through the map feature, though that path isn’t something we can confirm. But the weight distribution is different. In Google search, your GBP and your ads carry most of the load. In ChatGPT, your website carries most of the load, and everything else (GBP, Bing Places, directories, third-party mentions) plays a supporting role. Before, being well-positioned on Google was effectively the whole game for local search. Now there’s a parallel system that reads overlapping but different inputs, weights them differently, and makes its own decisions about whether to recommend you at all.

The plumber in Calgary who got recommended had a website that gave ChatGPT something concrete to cite. The HVAC company in Toronto that didn’t get recommended? We don’t know who they are, and neither does the person who asked. That gap between being visible and being invisible to this system is going to matter more over time, not less, in the same way that the gap between businesses who figured out Google early and those who didn’t ended up compounding for years.

Sources

Studies and data

OpenAI documentation

Analysis and reporting

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