Google AI Mode: what every handyman and painter needs to know now

For AI Overviews, you want good content on your website. For AI Mode, you want a watertight Google Business Profile and genuine photos of your work. How to tackle that first side, read our article on AI Overviews and local SEO for tradespeople.

AI Mode checks your availability in real time. Your opening hours need to be exactly right and stay up to date, including around public holidays and holiday periods.

Specific categories perform better than broad ones. Think 'interior painter', 'roof renovation', 'garden landscaping' or 'emergency plumber' rather than just a general main category.

Google says that the number of reviews and the average score weigh into your local position, and recommends replying because it shows you take your customers seriously. Google says nothing about how quickly you respond, so replying is evidence, not a lever on the algorithm.

Add your services with a short description. 'Exterior painting including primer and finish' is more concrete than 'painting' and gives the AI more to work with when matching you to the right question.

If you work at people's homes and have no shop or showroom, your address should be hidden and your service area filled in. If you skip that, as far as the AI is concerned there is only one place you work, and that is your own street. Fill in the places you actually cover, not the whole province: a service area three times the size of your real working radius gets you conversations with people you then have to turn down, and that costs you more than it earns you.

In this channel, opening hours are not a shop-window sign but an answer to a question. Say you are open until eight in the evening because that looks reliable, and you get called at seven while you are sitting down to dinner. State when you genuinely pick up, use the special hours for holidays and the summer shutdown, and keep them current. A profile that is accurate produces fewer calls and more jobs, and that is the trade-off you want.

The price question comes up in almost every conversation, and most tradespeople leave it unanswered for fear of being pinned down. The result is that the customer gets the answer somewhere else. You do not need to publish rates to answer that question: a page explaining what the price depends on, what an average job in your trade involves, and how your quote is put together, gives the AI something to work with and the customer something to trust. No figures, and still an answer.

Just as important as your services is the boundary around them. A painter who only does interior work, a gardener who does not lay paving, a handyman who does not touch electrics: state that too. It seems to work against you and it does the opposite. Every enquiry you have to turn down costs you a phone call and the customer a disappointment, and a profile that knows its own limits gets matched to fewer but better questions.

A page that lists everything you can do answers no single question well. A page per service does. Exterior painting, interior painting, wood rot repair, wallpapering: each its own page, covering what the job involves, how long it takes, what the customer needs to arrange themselves, and what the price depends on. Those are exactly the follow-up questions from the previous chapter, and now the answers sit somewhere they can be read.

The part of your trade that appears nowhere else is your strongest asset. Why a south-facing window frame fails faster. What goes wrong when someone gets exterior painting done in November. Which question customers always ask too late. No competitor can copy pieces like that, because they come from your own hands and not from a text generator. They are also exactly what a language model picks up when it has to summarise something about your trade.

Your name, address, phone number, opening hours and service area should read identically on your site and on your profile. Not because some rule demands it, but because two versions of the same fact are a reason to trust neither. Check it once and put a reminder in your calendar to do it again every six months. What else comes into play on the technical side is in our guide on making your website easier to find.

Someone who reaches you through a conversation is standing in the street with their phone in hand. A phone number you can tap, a four-field form and a WhatsApp button do more there than an elegant contact form with twelve required fields. Test it yourself on your own phone and count how many steps it takes before someone can actually reach you.

Write down three to five sentences the way a customer would say them. Not painter plus place name, but for example: who near me can do the exterior painting on my window frames next week. Ask each question in a window where you are not logged in, so your own search history does not colour the answer. Note down for each question which businesses get named, in what order, and what is said about them.

If you do not appear at all, the first suspect is your category or your service area, not your reviews. If you do appear but something is wrong, you immediately know which field to update. If a competitor gets something concrete and you get something vague, look at where that concreteness comes from: nine times out of ten it is simply sitting on their profile or on a service page of their site, and you could have put it there too.

A language model does not give the same answer every time, and the data it draws on changes too. One test is therefore a snapshot, not a verdict. Do it once a quarter, with the same questions, and keep the outcome in the same file. What you are looking for is not today's answer but the direction over a year. If you also want a fixed baseline reading of your local visibility, use the free local visibility check NL.