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AI Search Visibility for HVAC Companies: A 30-Day Plan
Your customers are starting to ask AI — “who’s the best HVAC company near me?” — instead of scrolling Google. If ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews don’t name your company, you’re losing jobs you never see. Here’s a 30-day plan to build AI search visibility for your HVAC business.
How to Track Whether AI Tools Mention Your Business
You can’t improve what you don’t measure — and AI visibility is no exception. If ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are quietly recommending competitors instead of you, you’d never know without checking. AI visibility tracking is how you monitor whether (and how) AI tools mention your business. Here’s how to do it.
FAQ and HowTo Schema: Formatting Content So AI Can Quote It
FAQ and HowTo schema mark up your questions-and-answers and step-by-step content so search engines — and AI assistants — can read, display, and quote them directly. It’s one of the most practical ways to format content so AI can pull it into an answer. Here’s how to use FAQ and HowTo schema.
How to Show Up on Siri and Alexa Near Me Requests
“Hey Siri, find a plumber near me.” Millions of people ask their phones this every day — and Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant name a business. Voice and assistant search is a real, growing channel, and showing up requires a slightly different playbook than typing into Google. Here’s how to appear on “near me” voice requests.
Should You Block AI Crawlers in robots.txt? A Small Business Decision Guide
You can block AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and others — from reading your site via robots.txt. Some businesses do it to protect content. But for most local businesses, blocking AI is shooting yourself in the foot. Here’s a decision guide to help you choose.
20 Prompts to Audit How AI Describes Your Business
The fastest way to find out what AI says about your business is to just ask it. But random questions give random insight — you want a consistent set of prompts you can run across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to audit your AI reputation. Here are 20 prompts to copy, run, and track.
The Third-Party Sources AI Trusts About Local Businesses (and How to Get In)
AI assistants don’t invent recommendations — they pull from sources they trust about local businesses. If you want ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to mention you, you need to show up on those sources. Here are the third-party places AI trusts about local businesses, and how to get into them.
What Is llms.txt and Should Your Business Add One?
You’ve heard of robots.txt. Now there’s llms.txt — a proposed standard file that gives AI models a clean, curated summary of your website. It’s early, adoption is uneven, and no AI vendor guarantees they read it. So should your business add one? Here’s a straight answer.
How to Get Cited by Perplexity: A Local Business Walkthrough
Perplexity is the AI answer engine that’s eating into Google for research and recommendations — and unlike some assistants, it cites its sources prominently. That makes “how do I get cited by Perplexity?” a very answerable question. Here’s a local business walkthrough.
Getting Recommended by Google Gemini: What It Pulls From
Google Gemini powers AI answers across Google’s ecosystem — the Gemini app, AI Overviews in Search, and increasingly Android and Google Assistant. Getting recommended by Gemini means tapping into Google’s own data about your business. Here’s what Gemini pulls from and how to show up.
LocalBusiness Schema Markup: Copy-Paste Code for Service Companies
LocalBusiness schema is structured data that spells out your business — name, address, phone, hours, rating — in a format search engines and AI assistants read directly. It’s one of the clearest signals you can send about who you are and where you operate, and it’s frequently missing. Here’s copy-paste-ready guidance for service companies.
Review Schema and AggregateRating: How to Show Stars in Search
Those gold review stars you see under some businesses in Google search results? They come from review schema — structured data that tells Google your rating and review count. Adding valid AggregateRating markup can earn you those stars, which lift click-through rate. Here’s how to do it right (and stay compliant).
Writing Content AI Actually Cites: 8 Formatting Rules
AI answer engines quote and cite sources — and if your content is the one they pull from, you get visibility and authority you never had to pay for. But AI doesn’t cite everything equally; it favors content structured a certain way. Here are 8 formatting rules for writing content AI actually cites.
Should You Put an AI Chatbot on Your Service Website?
An AI chatbot on your service website promises to answer questions and capture leads 24/7 while you sleep. But chatbots can also frustrate customers and leak leads if done poorly. Should you put an AI chatbot on your service website? Here’s an honest comparison of the upsides, downsides, and when it makes sense.
How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT
More and more customers skip Google entirely and ask ChatGPT: “What’s the best plumber in Austin?” The AI names a few businesses — and if you’re one of them, you win the customer before your competitors even show up. So how do you get ChatGPT to recommend your business? Here’s what actually influences it.
Do Reviews Influence What AI Recommends? Testing 100 Local Prompts
Do reviews influence what AI recommends? To find out, we looked at how assistants answer local “best of” questions across many prompts — and the pattern is clear: reviews are one of the strongest levers on whether an AI names your business. Here’s what the testing shows and why it makes sense.
Entity SEO for Small Business: Teaching Google Who You Are
Entity SEO is the practice of teaching Google (and AI) exactly who your business is — as a distinct, well-understood entity — rather than just optimizing pages for keywords. As search shifts to AI answers and knowledge graphs, being a clearly understood entity is what gets you recognized, trusted, and recommended. Here’s a plain-English guide for small businesses.
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? A Plain-English Guide
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing so that “answer engines” — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Siri — pick your business or content as the answer, not just a link on a results page. As search shifts from ten blue links to direct answers, AEO is becoming as important as SEO. Here’s a plain-English guide.
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