A man in Nepean has a water heater leaking onto his basement floor on a Sunday morning. He does not open a browser and compare six plumbers. He picks up his phone and asks it, out loud, in a sentence, who can come out today.
Three names come back. He calls the first one.
You may well be the best plumber in Nepean. But your page has to say so. That you cover Nepean. That you replace water heaters. That you take emergency calls on weekends. If none of that is written down, you were never in the running, because there was nothing to read.
This is the part of getting found that has changed most in the last two years, and it changed quietly. People still search. A growing number now ask instead, and take the answer. Google says the AI answers in its own search have passed one billion users a month. That is a worldwide number. Google does not break it down by country. So it tells you the change is real, and it tells you nothing about how many people on your street are doing it. Treat it as a direction, not a number.
The good news is that there is no trick to this. Either the answer is written on your page, or it is not.
What Google and ChatGPT are actually doing
It is not a chart you climb. As far as anybody outside can tell, it builds a short answer out of pages it can read. Then it names whoever it can name with some confidence.
So the question is not how do I rank. The question is simpler. If somebody had to answer using only your page, could they?
Read your own page as though you were the one who had to answer. Somebody asks what a colour costs, or whether you do emergency call-outs, or if you are open on a Sunday. Go to your page and try to find the sentence that answers it. Not the impression, the sentence. That is the whole test, and most owners fail it on their own site inside a minute.
The five things your page has to say
Five things, and each one needs to exist as words on a page you control.
What you do, named the way a customer would name it. Not “hair services”. Balayage, root touch-up, keratin smoothing, men’s cut. Not “plumbing solutions”. Water heater replacement, drain clearing, sump pumps, frozen pipes. The name a person would say out loud is the name that has to be on the page.
What it costs, or what moves the cost. A number is best. Where you genuinely cannot print one, print the range, and the two or three things that move you inside it. Say something like this. “Most water heater replacements run between this and that, depending on the size of the tank.” Only you know what the two numbers are. “Competitive rates” is not a sentence about anything.
Where you go. Name the neighbourhoods. Barrhaven, Kanata, Orleans, Westboro, Hintonburg. “Ottawa and surrounding areas” is a phrase people write when they do not want to commit, and it answers no question anybody asks.
When you are open. Written out, including the awkward parts: the late night, the closed Monday, the Saturday that ends at two.
What you do not do. This is the section almost nobody writes, and it does more work than the other four.
Saying what you do not do wins you more work
Printing what you refuse feels like turning away money. It is closer to the opposite.
Anything answering a specific question has to choose somebody. Say on your page that you do not do commercial jobs. You stop coming up for commercial work, which you were losing anyway. And you become a much safer answer for the houses. The same is true of a person reading. Being ruled out of the wrong job is how you end up named for the right one.
It also saves you the calls. Every business has the one it gets every week and never wants. The job you do not take, the brand you will not service, the area you stopped driving to. Two sentences on your page end most of those calls, and you never had to be rude to anybody on the phone.
Write them plainly. We do not do X. We do not travel past Y. We do not take Z on weekends. Nobody has ever been annoyed by a business that told them early.
If your price list is a photo, nothing can read it
Here is the most common way a good business makes itself unreadable.
Somebody typed the price list up nicely, saved it as an image, and put it on the page. It looks smart. To anything trying to read the page, it is a blank rectangle.
The same goes for a menu saved as a picture. Or a service list that lives only inside a PDF. Or hours that exist in your Instagram bio and nowhere else. Or everything you do, summed up in a caption on a post from March.
None of that is laziness. Whoever made the graphic was thinking about how it looks, which is a reasonable thing to think about. But an answer cannot be lifted out of a picture. If it matters, it has to exist as words on the page too. The handsome version can stay right beside it.
Write the way people ask
The other change is the shape of the question.
People used to type three words. Now they ask in a full sentence, and the sentence carries the situation with it. My water heater is leaking and I need somebody today. Is there anywhere in Westboro that does keratin on a Saturday? How much is a first visit for a new patient with insurance?
So put the situation in your own words on your own page. A short section of real questions with real answers underneath them does more than any amount of rewriting your homepage headline. Use the questions you already get asked on the phone twenty times a month. You know them by heart. They are the most useful sentences on your site, and right now they are living in your head.
Three places your hours disagree
Before you write anything new, look at the three places your business already describes itself. Your Google listing, your own site, and whichever social account you actually use.
Most businesses find at least one disagreement in ten minutes. Hours that changed last winter and were updated in one place. A service you stopped offering. An old phone number. A holiday closure from two years ago still sitting on the profile.
Fix the disagreement before you do anything clever. Anything that goes looking and finds two different answers about you will usually just use somebody else. This is the cheapest problem on the whole list to solve.
What nobody can promise you
Nobody can promise you a ranking, and nobody can promise you will be named in an answer. Anybody who tells you they can is selling the one thing they do not control. That has been true of search for twenty years. It is more true now, because the answer is built fresh every time, and nobody outside the company that makes it can see how.
What you can control is whether there is anything to find. That part is entirely yours, and it costs nothing but an evening. It works just as well on a person reading the page.
What to do tonight
Open your own site on your phone, the way a customer would.
Try to answer the five questions above using only what is on the page. Copy the actual sentences into a note as you go. Where you cannot find a sentence, write the missing one in the note instead. Do not polish it. Write it the way you would say it to somebody standing in front of you.
By the end you will have somewhere between five and fifteen plain sentences. That is the page. Getting them onto your site is an afternoon of work. And if your site is the kind you cannot edit yourself, that is worth knowing too. It is a separate problem, and a bigger one.
You do not need to hire anybody to do the writing. You are the only person who knows what you refuse, what moves your prices, and which street you stop driving past.
Want to see the same rules on a page that is trying to sell you something? Our own services page is written this way on purpose. Every service named. A number or a real range beside each one. And two places where we tell you plainly not to buy the bigger thing.
And if you would rather somebody looked at your site from the outside first, that is what the free website sample is. You send your business name. We build two sections of your real website, using your own words and pictures, and send you the link. It is yours to look at whether or not you ever hire us.