We checked, and said so
We bought AI search volume for our own target terms. Informational questions carry real volume; "electrician near me" carries none. Anyone selling you AI visibility as a replacement for the map pack has not looked.
They are not asking an AI to find a electrician nearby — our own keyword data shows "near me" phrasing carries effectively no AI search volume. They are asking whether a panel needs upgrading, what an EV charger install involves, and how to tell if wiring is unsafe. The electrical contractor the answer quotes is the one they trust by the time they do search.
We bought AI search volume for our own target terms. Informational questions carry real volume; "electrician near me" carries none. Anyone selling you AI visibility as a replacement for the map pack has not looked.
Across 400 result pages we bought, 85% carried an AI overview. It does not always bury the organic results — 96% still showed one in the top three — but it answers the question before anybody scrolls.
An AI quotes pages that answer a question plainly, in structured, attributable text. Most electrical contractor websites are brochures that describe services without answering anything, which is why they are never quoted.
Pages that answer the questions homeowners actually ask about electrical work — whether a panel needs upgrading, what an EV charger install involves, and how to tell if wiring is unsafe — in text a model can lift and attribute.
Schema that tells a machine what your business is, what it does and where, so the entity behind the answer is unambiguous.
The emerging standard for telling AI systems what your site contains. Our own research found 30% of contractor sites already have one — it is less of a differentiator than it is sold as, and we will say so.
Real figures, real jobs and real prices. Models quote specifics, and a page of adjectives gives them nothing to quote.
Name, address, phone and service area matching across your site, your profile and the directories, so the model has one consistent business to name.
We track whether you are actually being named rather than reporting activity. Where the answer is no, you will hear it.
These are research questions, not hiring searches. Being the electrical contractor quoted in the answer is what puts you on the shortlist before the search for a electrician ever happens.
We publish what we measure, including when it undercuts what we sell. Here is what we found about AI search and contractor websites.
49% had no LocalBusiness schema — the one format built for stating what a business does and where. A further quarter had structured data a plugin added for them, which describes the website and says nothing about the business.
16% carried not a single line of JSON-LD. To an AI answer engine deciding who to name for a trade in a city, those businesses are prose to be guessed at rather than a record to be read.
64% have no real service-and-location architecture, and half have not a single page aimed at a town. The search a homeowner actually types — the trade plus the place — has nothing on their site pointed at it.
37% of the sites we read reused one title across several pages. That asks Google to choose between pages all claiming to be the same thing. It usually picks the home page, and the service pages never surface.
34% had at least one page with no H1 at all. Small on its own, and a reliable sign that nobody has looked at the page the way a search engine does.
18% had no sitemap, and a third of the businesses we pulled from public listings served nothing we could read — parked, blocked, timed out or simply gone. Every citation pointing there is a dead end, and the owner almost certainly does not know.
Local Services Ads remain the fastest paid route into electrical work and sit above the map pack. AI visibility is a research-stage play — it does not replace the channels that catch somebody ready to hire.
Measured and written by Cameron, founder of Local Leader.
Study run October 2026 · page last reviewed
The same checks we ran across 500 US contractor websites, run against yours: whether Google can read your pages, whether your services and service areas each have one, and what your profile looks like beside the companies already ranking.
Schema, titles, headings, speed, the sitemap. None of it is glamorous and all of it is cheap compared with what it unlocks. There is no point building content on a site Google cannot read.
A page for each service and each town you can genuinely evidence — not one page per town with the name swapped, which is the thing Google has spent years learning to ignore.
Your Google Business Profile does more for map rankings than anything on your website. It needs photos, posts and a steady flow of reviews, every month, not once at setup.
Most agencies in this trade will not put a number on a page. We would rather you knew now than spent a call finding out. The website build is free in every plan — no setup fee, no build fee — and you own it from the day it goes live.
AI visibility runs inside a monthly package rather than as a separate retainer, because the work that makes a page citable is the same work that makes it rank.
The complete system, for companies that intend to lead the market rather than appear in it. $1,199/mo billed yearly.
Franchises and operations running five or more locations. From $4,799/mo billed yearly.
No long contracts and no setup fees. If you leave you keep the website, the domain, the Google Business Profile and the analytics — ask every agency you speak to for that in writing. See what is in each plan.
To research, yes. To find one nearby, not really — we bought the AI search volume and "near me" phrasing carries effectively none. The value is being the electrical contractor the answer names while somebody is still deciding what the work involves.
No, and we would not sell it as one. The map pack appeared on 98% of the local searches we measured and is where somebody ready to hire actually looks. AI visibility works earlier in the decision, not instead of it.
It is a file telling AI systems what your site contains. We will add one, but honestly: our research found 30% of contractor sites already have a genuine one, so it is table stakes rather than an advantage.
By asking the models the questions your customers ask and recording whether you are named, with what and against whom. Not by reporting that a file was uploaded.
Models retrain and re-crawl on their own schedules, so this is slower and less predictable than search. Treat it as compounding groundwork alongside the channels that produce calls now.
Not quite. Of the 400 result pages we measured, 85% carried an overview, but 96% of those still placed an organic result in the top three. It takes clicks rather than ending them.
Yes — it runs alongside the website, the rankings and the profile rather than as a separate line. See packages.
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