How to Get AI Mentions for Tradies

Ask an AI whether a hot water system needs replacing and you get advice with source links underneath. Those are citations. Ask who to call in Bayswater and you get names. That is a mention, and it puts you in front of somebody who has already decided to hire.

They are earned differently. A citation is won on your own website, by ranking for the smaller questions behind the big one. A mention is won almost entirely off it.

Before touching a listing, decide what your business is in one sentence and never reword it. Most trade businesses describe themselves five different ways in five places, which gives a machine five weak signals instead of one strong one.

[Business] is a [trade] in [area] for [customer type], especially good at [the specific job], because [the reason that is actually true].

Fill it in honestly and it does most of the work. 'A family-run electrical business in the eastern suburbs for older homes, especially rewires and switchboard upgrades, because we specialise in pre-1980s wiring.' That tells an AI who to recommend you to and who not to.

You appear in more places than you think and several are wrong: old listings from a previous owner, a directory profile a supplier created, an ABN record with a trading name nobody uses. Work through them and make them agree.

• Your website home page and about page, in that sentence's own words
• Google Business Profile: description, categories, services and service area
• Facebook and Instagram bios, including the ones you stopped using
• Trade directories: hipages, Oneflare, Airtasker, ServiceSeeking, Yellow Pages
• Manufacturer and supplier installer listings, which are usually the most trusted and the least claimed
• Licence and association records: your state licensing register, Master Plumbers, Master Builders, NECA
• Sponsorship and community pages that list you, right down to the junior footy club

Unglamorous admin, and the highest-leverage afternoon most tradies can spend on this. The same business name, the same suburbs, the same specialisation, written the same way everywhere.

Almost nobody does this deliberately. A five-star rating with no text tells a machine only that somebody was happy. A review saying the hot water went at eleven on a Sunday night and someone was there in forty minutes tells it what you are good at, where, and under what conditions.

Ask better. Instead of 'please leave us a review', ask if they would mind mentioning what the problem was and how quickly it got sorted. Most people are happy to, they just do not know what to write. Never write it for them, never offer anything in exchange, and never buy one: fake reviews breach Australian Consumer Law.

Then stop putting them all in one place. Every review you have on Google is invisible to hipages when hipages decides who goes in its top ten, and the same is true of Word of Mouth, Yelp and ProductReview. Those platforms rank you on their own reviews, and their pages are what an AI reads when somebody asks who is best. Ask different customers for different platforms rather than asking one customer for five.

Some of what an AI knows about who to call comes from ordinary people answering that question in public: community Facebook groups, local subreddits, neighbourhood pages. Those threads rank, and what ranks gets read.

You cannot manufacture this and should not try. Astroturfing a local group is obvious and it is the fastest way to become the tradie people warn each other about. Be genuinely present instead: answer the occasional question without pitching, and make it easy for a happy customer to name you.

This is the most direct route to being named and the one tradies most often ignore. An AI asked for the best electrician in a suburb does not hold an opinion of its own. It reads the pages that already answer that question, and those pages are almost always lists: the Yelp top ten, the Word of Mouth top ten, the hipages and Oneflare rankings, ThreeBestRated, and the roundups local blogs and community sites publish. If your name is on several of those, you are the obvious answer. If it is on none, you are not in the conversation.

1. 1Claim and complete the profile on each platform — you cannot be ranked on one you are not on
2. 2Feed each platform its own reviews, because that is what its ranking is built from
3. 3Fill in the things their ranking actually uses: licence and insurance details, service areas, response time, job history
4. 4Answer enquiries on those platforms quickly; several rank partly on responsiveness
5. 5Pitch the independent roundups directly, with a reason you belong on the list rather than a request to be added

Link building taught everyone to value a mention only if it carried a link. For AI recommendation that is no longer the test: your name in a local paper, a supplier case study or an industry article counts even where nothing is clickable.

The realistic sources are close to home: the community newsletter, the club you sponsor, a supplier who will write up an unusual job, the association that will publish a member profile. None of it is glamorous and all of it beats a directory link package.