AI search optimization for a handyman business
Homeowners now ask an assistant who can fix a rotted door frame in their town and get two or three names back. There is no second page. The named businesses share three traits: plain answers to plain questions on the site, a Google profile whose categories match those answers, and reviews that mention specific jobs.
This favors you in an odd way. Of the 41,754 handyman listings in this dataset, 48.4% link no website at all, so there is almost no text for an engine to read about most of your competitors. A page saying what a drywall patch costs in your city, in sentences rather than marketing lines, is often the only source available.
The mistake is stuffing keywords. These engines summarize, so they reward pages that answer directly and cite a number. Two weeks in, working means your business appears by name in a few assistant answers for your town and your job types, on a site built so it keeps happening.