Pipelineos

Here's a maintenance tip I'd run today if I owned a service business: open your Google Business Profile and look at your service area.

I see owners list 25 cities. Sacramento. Roseville. Rocklin. Lincoln. Loomis. Auburn. Folsom. Granite Bay. Citrus Heights. Orangevale. Fair Oaks. Carmichael. Elk Grove. Galt. Wilton. And on it goes. The thinking is reasonable. More cities, more leads.

What actually happens is the opposite. Google looks at that list and tries to figure out where you really operate. If your reviews mention three cities, your photos are tagged in two, and your website talks about all 25 with the same paragraph and the city name swapped in, Google does not know what to trust. So it trusts none of it.

Here is what I would do instead. Pick the three cities where you do the most revenue. Not the most jobs. The most revenue. Build a real page for each one. Mention the neighborhoods you actually work in. The HOAs you have permits with. The soil conditions, the building codes, the permit office, the drive time from your shop. Add photos from jobs in that city. Ask the customers in those cities for reviews that mention the city by name.

Then drop the other 22 from your service area. I know that feels like leaving money on the table. It isn't. You were not ranking in those cities anyway. You were diluting the three that could actually pay your mortgage.

Depth beats breadth in local. It always has. The March core update just made it more expensive to ignore.

Here is the AEO metric I keep coming back to when owners ask what to track: citation sources.

Not how often you appear in AI answers. Where the AI pulled the information from when it mentioned you.

I had a contractor ask me last month why ChatGPT described his service area wrong. I asked him to run the prompt and look at the sources cited under the answer. Three of the five were old directory listings with his previous address. One was a Yelp page he hadn't touched in four years. The fifth was his actual website, which had the correct info.

The AI wasn't lying. It was averaging.

If you want to know what AI systems will say about you, look at what they're already reading about you. That means your GBP, your top three or four directory listings, your Yelp, your BBB page, your chamber profile, and any local news mention. Open each one. Check the address, the phone, the service list, the hours, the service areas. Fix the ones that contradict your website.

This is boring work. It's also the work that changes what AI says about you in the next 60 days. Nothing else you do matters as much if the underlying evidence is wrong.

Prompt engineering is not the job. Evidence hygiene is.

Here is the part of AI search nobody wants to talk about: most of the work is invisible to you until a customer mentions it.

A homeowner asks ChatGPT for a roofer in Rocklin. Your name comes up. She doesn't tell you that. She just calls. You log it as a phone lead. Maybe she found you on Google. Maybe a neighbor mentioned you. Maybe ChatGPT did. You'll never know unless you ask.

This is why "how do I track AI search" is the wrong first question. The right first question is: are you asking every new lead how they found you, and writing the answer down?

Not a dropdown on the form. A real question on the call. "Quick one before we schedule, how did you hear about us?" Then a field in your CRM that doesn't get skipped.

Do that for 90 days and you'll learn more about your actual marketing mix than any dashboard will tell you. You'll hear ChatGPT. You'll hear Google. You'll hear "my sister-in-law." You'll hear the Nextdoor post you forgot about.

The boring tracking work always pays. Always. The owners who know where their leads come from spend smarter than the ones who guess.