How electricians show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI answers
What AI assistants read when a homeowner asks for an electrician, the pages and profile fields that get quoted, and a checklist for a local electrical shop.
A homeowner in a suburb types "who should I call to upgrade my panel for an EV charger" into ChatGPT instead of Google. The assistant names three local electrical companies, describes what each specializes in, and mentions that one of them publishes upgrade pricing. That homeowner calls one of those three. The other electricians in that town were never in the conversation.
This is happening now, at a scale nobody publishes reliable numbers for. Anyone quoting you a precise percentage of searches lost to AI assistants is guessing. What is verifiable is how these systems choose which businesses to name, and the answer is boring in a useful way: mostly the same signals Google has always used, plus text clear enough to quote.
What the assistants actually read
Four sources, in rough order of weight for a local trade business:
- Your Google Business Profile. Category, services, hours, review count and review text. Every major assistant either uses Google data directly or uses an index heavily influenced by it.
- Your website text. Specifically the plain sentences. An assistant can quote "We install Level 2 EV chargers in Boulder County and a typical install on an existing 200 amp panel runs $900 to $1,700." It cannot quote a slideshow, a hero image with the words baked into a picture, or a page that says "Quality. Integrity. Excellence."
- Third party mentions. Local news, chamber listings, supplier dealer pages, a Generac or Tesla certified installer directory, the county permit record if it is public, a neighborhood forum thread.
- Reviews with specifics. A review that says "replaced our Federal Pacific panel in Maplewood in one day" is a fact the assistant can use. "Great service" is not.
Write the sentences that get quoted
The single highest-value change on an electrician's website is converting vague marketing lines into declarative, checkable statements. Go through the site and make sure each of these exists as an ordinary sentence in ordinary text:
- What you install, named specifically. "We install and service 200 amp residential services, sub panels, Level 2 EV chargers, standby generators from 11kW to 26kW, and whole house surge protection."
- Where you work, listed by town. "We serve Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Saline, Dexter, Chelsea and Pittsfield Township."
- Prices, in ranges. "A 200 amp service upgrade in our area runs $3,200 to $5,400 including the permit and utility coordination."
- Credentials. "Licensed electrical contractor, license number 00-000000, insured to $2 million, background-checked technicians."
- Hours and emergency policy. "Office hours 7 to 5 Monday through Friday. After-hours emergency service available with a $180 dispatch fee."
Bury none of this in a PDF or an image. Put it in text, on pages an assistant can reach without a login.
Answer the questions people actually ask an assistant
AI assistants are asked questions, not keywords. A page structured as questions with short, direct answers gets quoted far more than the same information written as brochure copy. Build an FAQ page and put a question-and-answer block on each service page:
- How much does it cost to upgrade to a 200 amp service?
- Do I need a panel upgrade to install an EV charger?
- How long does a service change take, and will my power be off?
- What is a Federal Pacific panel and why does my insurer care?
- How big a generator do I need for a 2,400 square foot house?
- Do you pull the permit, and how long does inspection take?
Answer each in two to four sentences, with a number. Then repeat the structure in your Google profile Q and A section, which is described in the profile guide.
Consistency, the unglamorous half
Assistants cross-check. If your business name is "Miller Electric LLC" on Google, "Miller Electric Co" on Yelp and "Miller Electrical Services" on your website, some systems will treat those as different entities and name none of them confidently.
Pick one exact name, one exact address format, one phone number, and make them identical everywhere: Google Business Profile, your website footer, Yelp, Facebook, Better Business Bureau, Angi, your state license lookup if the name is editable, supplier dealer locators, and your invoices. This is tedious and it is the highest-return two hours in the whole exercise.
Add structured data and an llms.txt
Two technical items your web person can do in an afternoon.
Add LocalBusiness schema in JSON-LD to the site: name, address, phone, geo coordinates, opening hours, service area, and an areaServed list of your towns. Add FAQPage schema to the FAQ. Add Service schema to each service page with a price range. This does not guarantee anything, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what makes an assistant skip you for a competitor.
Then add a plain text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt listing your main pages with one-line descriptions. It is a young convention with uneven adoption and it costs nothing. Treat it as cheap insurance, not a strategy.
Make sure the crawlers are allowed in
Check your robots.txt for blanket blocks on GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot. Plenty of website builders and security plugins block these by default, and some agencies block them on purpose. For a local electrician there is no upside to blocking them. You are not protecting proprietary content, you are hiding your phone number from a recommendation engine.
The part most people get backwards
None of this replaces the fundamentals. The businesses AI assistants name are, overwhelmingly, the ones that were already visible: complete profile, real review volume, an actual website. Across 65,890 electrical listings, 34.6% have no website at all and the median listing carries 7 reviews. An assistant cannot recommend a business it has nothing to read about.
So the order is: profile complete, reviews flowing, website with real sentences, then the schema and the llms.txt. Doing step four first is a common and expensive mistake. The benchmark report shows where the field actually stands.
Frequently asked
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT results? Not for local business recommendations, as of now. There is no ad product for it. Anyone selling guaranteed AI placement is selling you the ordinary work described above at a markup.
How do I check whether I show up? Ask the assistants directly. Type "best electrician in [your town]" and "who installs EV chargers in [your town]" into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI overview, from a signed-out browser. Write down who gets named. Repeat monthly. That is the whole measurement method available today, and it is enough.
Is this different from SEO? Mostly it is SEO with better writing. The genuinely new part is that clarity now beats keyword density, because a machine has to be able to lift your sentence and stand behind it.
AI search optimization is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, and two weeks is enough to get the profile, schema and page text in place. Text or call (385) 832-6175.