The new front door

Your customers are asking ChatGPT who to hire. Does it say your name?

SAM COGGIN · SYDEX · 30 AUG 2026

Ask ChatGPT for a good plumber in your town. It will name two or three businesses, confidently, with reasons. Somebody is getting that work. The uncomfortable question is why those names and not yours, and the answer has nothing to do with how good you are at the job.

People have changed how they choose

The old route was Google, three tabs open, compare, ring one. The new route is a single question to an assistant: "who is a good roofer near Chorley?", and a single answer with names in it. Google now does the same thing on its own results page with AI Overviews. Perplexity cites its sources by name. The shortlist is being written before anyone sees your website, and if you are not in it, the phone simply gets quieter with no explanation.

How the assistants actually choose

No AI assistant has ever used a plumber. They cannot know who is good. What they can do is read websites, and they recommend the businesses whose sites explain the work best in a structure machines understand:

• Services described in plain, specific text. "Fuse board upgrades from £450" beats "quality electrical solutions" every time.
• Published prices. Assistants love a number because the person asking wants a number.
• Structured data. Schema markup is a machine-readable label on your business: what you do, where, for how much, rated what. Most small business sites have none.
• Answers to the questions buyers ask. A page that answers "how much does a rewire cost?" gets quoted when someone asks exactly that.
• Consistency and reviews. Same name and details everywhere, real reviews that corroborate the story.

Why your current site is probably invisible to them

Most small business websites were built to be looked at, not read by machines: text baked into images, no prices, vague pages, no structured data, nothing updated since it went up. To an AI assistant that site is a closed door, so it recommends the competitor whose site answers questions, even when that competitor is worse at the actual work. Being invisible to assistants usually means being weak on Google too, because the same signals drive both.

The test that takes one minute

Ask ChatGPT: "who is a good [your trade] in [your town]?" Then ask Google the same and look at the AI Overview. If you are named, well done, protect it. If not, you now know exactly where the quiet phone comes from. Every review I write starts with this test, recorded word for word, so you can see precisely what the machines say about you before and after.

The fix is the same work, done properly

Getting named by assistants is not a trick and there is no fee to Google or OpenAI. It is a website rebuilt so machines can read it: answer-first pages, published prices, structured data, consistent details, real reviews, kept alive month after month. That is precisely what a Sydex rebuild is: £2,950, and £295 a month to keep it pulling. The proof is a performance page showing which assistants recommend you, updated as they change their minds.