Industries · How roofers get recommended by ChatGPT and AI search
After the storm, homeowners ask AI who to trust with the roof.
Roofing is a big, infrequent purchase with a lot of storm-chaser noise. People ask assistants how to spot a good roofer and who to call locally. Here's how to be the name that comes back.
Free, no account. We only read public files.
What people ask AI assistants
- “Reputable roofer in [city] for hail damage insurance claims”
- “How much does a roof replacement cost in [city]?”
- “GAF certified roofing contractor near me”
- “Metal roof vs shingles for [climate]”
Why does AI search matter for roofers?
Trust is the whole sale in roofing. Assistants tend to name companies with a visible track record: years in business, licences, manufacturer certifications and reviews they can read.
Insurance-claim and cost questions are where assistants do most of their explaining. A roofer with plain-language pages on the claims process and typical costs earns citations for those questions.
A great deal of roofing content is thin landing pages for dozens of towns. One genuinely useful page per service, with real project photos and captions, will outlast that.
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 roofing contractor checklist
Things to do this week, roughly in order.
- Put your contractor licence number and manufacturer certifications on the site as text.
- Write a plain-language page on how insurance claims for storm damage work with your company.
- Caption each project photo with the town, material and job type.
- Explain what drives replacement cost (roof size, pitch, tear-off layers, material) without promising a number you can't hold.
- Add RoofingContractor schema with areaServed and sameAs links to your BBB and certification listings.
- State how long you've been in business and where your office is. It's what separates you from storm chasers.
What are the common mistakes, and the fixes?
- 01
Certifications as logos only
Manufacturer and licence badges are usually images. Add the certification name and licence number as text.
- 02
Missing business schema
About a third of the local-trade homepages we could read had no business schema. RoofingContractor with areaServed is the right type.
Free tool: Schema / JSON-LD Generator → - 03
Project galleries without words
Photos with no captions tell an assistant nothing. One line per project (town, material, job type) makes the gallery citable.
- 04
No llms.txt
Most trades sites we scanned have none. List your services, materials, service area and how to get an estimate.
Free tool: llms.txt Generator & Validator →
Which schema should roofers use?
RoofingContractor is a HomeAndConstructionBusiness subtype. Add areaServed and link your manufacturer certifications and reviews with sameAs.
Generate it for your roofing contractor →Recommended type
"@type": "RoofingContractor"
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 roofing contractor: 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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