Industries · How plumbers get recommended by ChatGPT and AI search
"Emergency plumber near me" now gets one answer. Is it you?
A burst pipe at 11pm doesn't lead to careful research. People ask their phone, and the assistant names someone. These are the site details that decide who.
Free, no account. We only read public files.
What people ask AI assistants
- “24 hour emergency plumber in [city]”
- “Plumber near me who fixes tankless water heaters”
- “How much does it cost to unclog a main sewer line in [city]?”
- “Licensed plumber in [suburb] with good reviews”
Why does AI search matter for plumbers?
Plumbing is urgent, local and phone-driven. When an assistant answers an emergency question, it tends to name a business that clearly states its service area, hours and phone number.
Most of that information lives in your head and your Google Business Profile, not on your website in a form a machine can read. Service-area towns, emergency hours and license numbers are the facts that matter.
Lead-gen marketplaces are very good at being cited. A clear, fast site with the right facts is how an independent plumber competes with them.
What we found on 34 home-service sites
Full report and method →1 / 34
3%
block any AI crawler in robots.txt
robots.txt is rarely the problem
21 / 34
62%
have no llms.txt at all
11 / 32
34%
homepages with no Organization or LocalBusiness schema
of homepages we could read
2 / 34
6%
returned a firewall 403 to our automated request
From GeoLumen's own scan on 2026-10-19 of public files only (robots.txt, llms.txt, homepage). 13 of 32 readable homepages used an industry-specific schema type, and 2 of the 13 sites serving something at /llms.txt served a broken, empty or HTML file. Our home-services sample is 34 plumbing, heating & cooling, roofing, electrical and landscaping companies scanned together, so these numbers describe local trades as a group, not this trade alone. Small samples: treat these as a snapshot, not a census.
The plumbing company checklist
Things to do this week, roughly in order.
- List every town and neighbourhood you cover as plain text, not only on an embedded map.
- State your emergency hours and callout policy on the homepage, in words.
- Put your licence number on the site as text, in the footer or on the about page.
- Write short pages for the jobs you want more of (water heaters, sewer lines, repiping), with what affects the price.
- Add Plumber schema with telephone, areaServed and openingHoursSpecification.
- Ask customers to mention the job and the town in their reviews.
What are the common mistakes, and the fixes?
- 01
Service area hidden in an image map
List the towns and neighbourhoods you cover as text, and add them to schema as areaServed.
- 02
Missing or generic schema
About a third of the local-trade homepages we could read had no business schema. Use Plumber with phone, hours and areaServed.
Free tool: Schema / JSON-LD Generator → - 03
Emergency hours not stated
If you answer at night, say so on the page and in openingHoursSpecification. Assistants can't infer "24/7" from a red phone icon.
- 04
No llms.txt
Most trades sites we scanned have none. A short file listing services, service area and how to book is quick to add.
Free tool: llms.txt Generator & Validator →
Which schema should plumbers use?
Plumber is a HomeAndConstructionBusiness subtype. Add areaServed for the towns you cover and openingHoursSpecification, including any 24/7 emergency line.
Generate it for your plumbing company →Recommended type
"@type": "Plumber"
Start with the free check. If you'd rather hand it over, there's the Snapshot.
The free AI Crawler Checker shows in seconds whether AI crawlers can read your site. The $99 Snapshot audit goes further for one plumbing company: 10 customer questions × 4 AI engines, crawler, robots.txt & CDN review, llms.txt and schema written for you, prioritised fix list (PDF). Delivered in 5 working days.
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