Somebody Just Asked ChatGPT for a Roofer in London, Kentucky. Were You Named?

That's not a hypothetical. People are typing "best HVAC company near Somerset KY" into ChatGPT the same way they used to type it into Google. They're asking Google's AI Overviews to compare three local dentists. They're using Perplexity to shortlist wedding photographers before they ever click a website.

And here's the uncomfortable part: the AI gives them three names. Not ten blue links. Three.

If you're not one of those three, you don't exist in that conversation. There's no page two to scroll to. There's no "well, we're ranked #7, we still get some traffic." The answer is the answer.

The good news? Most small businesses in Kentucky have done almost nothing to prepare for this. Which means the bar to clear is low, and the window to clear it is open right now.

Here's how to make your business legible to AI models — practically, in the order that matters.

First, Understand What These Models Are Actually Doing

Stop thinking about "ranking." Start thinking about citation.

When someone asks an AI assistant for a local recommendation, the model isn't running your website through a mysterious algorithm and assigning it a score. It's doing something closer to what a research assistant does: pulling from what it has learned, running live searches, reading the top sources it finds, and then synthesizing an answer it can defend.

That means it favors information that is:

Explicit. Stated in plain language, not implied by your beautiful hero image.

Consistent. The same across your website, your Google Business Profile, and every directory that mentions you.

Corroborated. Confirmed by sources that aren't you.

Structured. Organized in a way that's easy to extract a single fact from.

Every tactic below is just a different way of satisfying those four conditions.

Step 1: Fix Your Google Business Profile Before You Touch Anything Else

Your Google Business Profile is still the single most important local data source on the internet, and AI Overviews lean on it heavily for local queries. It's also the thing most Kentucky business owners set up once in 2019 and never opened again.

Go look at yours right now. Then fix these, in this order:

Primary category. This is the highest-leverage field in the whole profile. Be precise. "Roofing contractor" is not "General contractor." If you mostly do metal roofing, your category should reflect the work you actually want to be called about.

Every single service, listed individually. Don't write "we do it all." Add each service as its own line item with its own description. This is exactly the kind of explicit, extractable text a model can lift and cite.

Service areas. List the towns and counties you actually serve, by name. If you cover London, Corbin, and Somerset, say all three. Vague radius language does you no favors.

Business description. Write it for a machine that has never heard of you. Who you are, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for. No slogans.

Hours, including holiday hours. Inconsistent hours across platforms is a trust signal problem.

Photos with real filenames. Not IMG_4471.jpg. Something descriptive.

Q&A section. You can ask and answer your own questions here. Most owners don't know this. Do it — put the five questions you get on every phone call, with straight answers.

This is maybe two hours of work. It's the highest return two hours available to you.

Step 2: Say Where You Are, Everywhere, in Plain English

AI models handle geography badly when you make them guess.

If your site says "serving the tri-county area," a model has no idea what that means and will not risk recommending you for a Corbin query. If your site says "We serve London, Corbin, Barbourville, Williamsburg, and Somerset, Kentucky," you've handed it a clean fact.

Practical version:

Put your city and state in your homepage title tag and H1. Yes, really.

Create a real page for each meaningful service area — not thin doorway pages, but actual pages with local specifics: neighborhoods, landmarks, local considerations, projects you do in that area.

Include your full address and phone number in the footer of every page as text, not baked into an image.

Use the phrase your customers use. People in Kentucky search "London KY," not "London, Kentucky, United States."

If you serve multiple markets, treat each one as its own front door. Our own location pages work this way for a reason — a Somerset customer should land on Somerset content, not a generic "areas we serve" list.

Step 3: Write Content in Question-and-Answer Form

This is the biggest structural shift, and it's where most businesses get it wrong.

Traditional SEO content was built to hold attention: long intros, storytelling, keyword density, a slow build to the point. AI models do the opposite of holding attention. They extract the answer and leave.

So write content that gives up the answer immediately.

The format that works

Take a real question a customer asks. Make it an H2 or H3, phrased the way a human would say it. Then answer it in the first two sentences underneath. Then add the nuance, the caveats, and the detail below that.

Bad: "Understanding Roof Replacement Timelines in Southeastern Kentucky"

Good: "How long does a roof replacement take on an average Kentucky home?"

Then: "Most residential asphalt shingle replacements take one to two days. Metal roofing and steep-pitch homes typically run three to four."

That's it. That's the whole trick. You've written something a model can quote, attribute, and cite — and something a skimming human actually appreciates.

Where to find your questions

You don't need keyword tools for this. You need to pay attention.

Every question in your last 50 sales calls

Every question in your email inbox

Your Google Business Profile Q&A

The objections that kill deals

The things customers get wrong about your industry

Write one solid page per question cluster. Ten of these beats one 4,000-word "ultimate guide" nobody finishes.

Step 4: Add Schema Markup (Or Have Someone Add It)

Schema is structured data in your site's code that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what things are. It's the difference between a model inferring your phone number and being told your phone number.

At minimum, you want:

LocalBusiness schema — name, address, phone, hours, service areas, geo coordinates

Service schema for each core offering

FAQPage schema on your question-and-answer content

Review or AggregateRating schema where you're legitimately eligible

If you're on WordPress, a decent SEO plugin handles most of this once it's configured properly. If you're on a custom site, this is a developer task. Either way, it's a one-time setup with a long tail of benefit.

Don't skip it because it sounds technical. It's the closest thing to a direct line into the machine.

Step 5: Get Mentioned by Sources That Aren't You

Here's the part nobody wants to hear: your website's claims about your business carry limited weight on their own.

Models weigh corroboration. If your site says you're the top-rated electrician in Richmond and nothing else on the internet agrees, that claim gets discounted. If a local news outlet, a chamber directory, an industry association, and 80 Google reviews all point the same direction, the model has something to stand on.

So build third-party presence deliberately:

Local chambers of commerce and business associations in every market you serve

Industry-specific directories — the ones that actually matter in your trade, not link farms

Local news and community publications. Sponsor something. Comment on a local development. Be a quotable expert.

Podcast appearances, even small local ones. Transcripts get indexed.

Consistent reviews on multiple platforms, not just Google. Facebook, industry-specific sites, BBB if it's relevant to your field.

And check your NAP consistency — Name, Address, Phone. If three directories list an old phone number, you're actively creating confusion in the data these models learn from.

Step 6: Make Sure Your Site Is Actually Readable

A few technical things quietly disqualify businesses from AI citation:

Content locked inside JavaScript that doesn't render for crawlers

Text embedded in images — including your service list, your hours, and your prices

Slow load times that cause crawlers to give up

Blocked crawlers. Check your robots.txt. Some AI crawlers are separate user agents from Googlebot, and some site setups block them by default. Decide intentionally whether you want to be visible.

No clear page hierarchy. One H1, logical H2s beneath it, actual paragraph tags.

Run your key pages through a text-only view. If you can't read your service list and location as plain text, neither can the model.

What to Do This Month, In Order

If you do nothing else:

Week one: Complete your Google Business Profile — categories, individual services, service areas, Q&A section.

Week two: Add explicit city and service language to your homepage and create or improve one service-area page.

Week three: Write five question-and-answer pages from real customer questions, answers first.

Week four: Add LocalBusiness and FAQ schema. Audit your NAP consistency across the top ten directories that list you.

Then keep going. This isn't a project with an end date — it's a maintenance habit. The businesses that win here are the ones still publishing clear answers in month eighteen.

The Real Advantage Is Timing

Most local businesses are not doing this. They're still arguing about whether AI search matters while their competitors quietly become the default answer for their category and their county.

That gap won't stay open. The cost of entry is low right now because attention is low. In two years, this will be table stakes, and the businesses that started early will have years of citations, consistency, and corroboration built up.

Being the answer is a much better position than being a link.

Want help getting your business into AI-generated recommendations? We handle the technical setup, the content structure, and the ongoing publishing that makes small businesses visible to both search engines and AI assistants — and we tie it into the rest of your marketing so it isn't a one-off project. Take a look at our AI automation and social media management services, or book a strategy call and we'll audit where you currently stand.

How to Get Your Kentucky Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews