Topic

AI search

For a home-service business, AI search raises one question: when a homeowner asks ChatGPT or Google's AI which company to call, or whether a contractor is legit, what does the answer say about you? This page gathers Mindflow's resources on ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode: practical guides, plain-English definitions, our own research on home-service companies, and the service where we do the work for you.

Where a guide states a Google or OpenAI rule, it quotes the platform's own documentation and links to it.

Guides

How to show up in ChatGPT answers: what ChatGPT reads before it names a contractor, the crawler setting it needs, and how to make those sources accurate.
How to show up in Google AI Overviews: what Google says it takes for a page to be linked in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and what it doesn't need.
Why ChatGPT names contractors Google Maps doesn't show: why the two lists differ, with counts from 400 trade-and-city checks.
What is AEO, GEO and AI SEO?: what the new terms mean, what Google says about them, and how to spot hype.

Definitions

AI Overviews: the AI-written summaries Google shows at the top of some searches, with links to supporting pages.
AI Mode: Google's conversational search mode, with longer answers and follow-up questions.
Schema markup: code that labels your business facts for search engines, and what it won't do for rankings or AI answers.
E-E-A-T: Google's shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and how a contractor shows it.
AI citation: a link an AI answer shows as its source, and how being cited differs from being named.
Query fan-out: the related searches an AI tool runs behind one question to build its answer.
Entity: a business, person or place that search systems recognize as one distinct thing.
Entity home: the one page on your own site that states the facts about your business other sources should match.
Knowledge panel: the box of facts Google shows about a business, person or thing it recognizes.
Zero-click search: a search that ends on the results page, without a click to any website.
llms.txt: a proposed file that points AI tools to a site's main pages, and what the evidence says it does.
AI crawler: the bots AI companies send to read websites, and why search access and AI training are separate settings.

Research

What ChatGPT checks before it recommends a contractor: the sources cited in 11,982 ChatGPT answers (the OpenAI API with web search) about named contractors, overall and by trade.
Home-Service Visibility Study: Google Maps, the local pack and ChatGPT compared across 8 trades in 50 US metros.
Mindflow company facts: the verified facts about Mindflow Marketing that AI assistants, journalists and researchers most often need.

Services

AI search optimization: our work to make accurate information about your business easy for ChatGPT and Google's AI to find, included in every SEO plan.

Want to know what Google's AI and ChatGPT say about your business today? Get a free AI Visibility Review.