How a waterproofing company gets named by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI answers
Homeowners now ask an AI assistant who to call for a wet basement. What those systems read and the changes that get a waterproofing company named.
A homeowner types "is crawl space encapsulation worth it and who does it in Raleigh" into ChatGPT and gets a paragraph and two company names. No map pack, no ads, no page of links. If you are not one of the two, you did not lose a click. You were never considered. This is a small share of inspection requests today, a few percent in most markets, and it grows every quarter. The work to get into those answers overlaps almost entirely with good local SEO, so none of it is wasted if the share stays small.
What the assistants actually read
The AI answer engines do not have a secret index. They read the same public material Google reads and summarize it. For a local waterproofing company, in rough order of weight:
- Your Google Business Profile: category, services, hours, and the text of your reviews.
- Your website, specifically pages that state a service, a place and a price in plain sentences.
- Directory and association listings where your name, address and phone match exactly.
- Anywhere a human wrote about you: a local news piece, a chamber page, a supplier's dealer locator, a home inspector's blog.
The assistants reward a different format than search did. They quote sentences that state a fact. They cannot quote a hero image that says "Keeping Basements Dry Since 1994," and they will not name a company whose only text is "contact us for a quote."
Consistency is the first lever
If your site says "Suite 200," your Google profile says nothing, and a directory from 2017 has an old phone number, a machine deciding whether you are one real business gets less sure. The median waterproofing company has 10 reviews and 18.8% have no website at all, so a company with matched listings, a real site and 60 reviews already looks established by comparison.
Check the twenty directories that matter in your state once a quarter. Fix the name, the address format and the phone number so they match the Google profile character for character.
Write pages a machine can quote
Open every service page with a sentence that answers the question directly. Not "Your dry basement is our mission." Instead: "We install interior drainage systems with a sump pump in Akron, Canton and Stark County, usually in one to two days, for $4,500 to $11,000 depending on linear feet, with a transferable lifetime warranty."
That sentence has the service, the towns, the timeline, the price range and the warranty. An assistant can lift it whole and attribute it. The other version has nothing to lift.
Then write five answer pages, each titled as the question a homeowner asks:
- Interior or exterior waterproofing, which is right for my house?
- What does a sump pump installation cost?
- What does crawl space encapsulation cost and is it worth it?
- Can a foundation crack be repaired from inside?
- What happens during a free waterproofing inspection?
Each page is 500 to 800 words, opens with a two-sentence direct answer, gives the price range and the variables, and names your towns. These pages do double duty: they rank in regular search for the long questions, and they are exactly what the assistants cite.
Schema and the llms.txt file
Structured data tells a machine what the page is without guessing. Every page should carry LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, service area and hours, Service schema for each line of work, and FAQ schema on the answer pages. This is a one-time job for whoever maintains the site and it takes an afternoon.
Add an llms.txt file at the root of the site. It is a plain text file, like robots.txt, that lists what the site is, who runs it, what services and towns it covers, and links to the important pages. Not every assistant reads it yet, but it costs nothing and the ones that do read it get a clean summary instead of a guess.
Reviews that mention the work
The assistants read review text, not just the star count. A review that says "they put in an interior drain and sump in one day and the basement has been dry through two spring storms" teaches the machine what you do and where. A review that says "great guys" teaches it nothing. When the crew lead asks for a review, suggest mentioning the job: "If you can say what we did and which town, it helps people find us." The reviews guide has the full script.
Measure it
Before changing anything, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI mode the same five questions a homeowner in your towns would ask, and save the answers with the date. "Who should I call for a wet basement in [town]?" "Best crawl space encapsulation company near [town]?" "How much does basement waterproofing cost in [town]?" Repeat it monthly. That log is the only honest measure of whether this is working, and it is the baseline you compare the day-14 result against.
What not to do
Do not stuff "best basement waterproofing in [town]" into every paragraph. Do not publish forty thin town pages that say the same thing with the name swapped; the assistants treat those as noise and Google has been removing them from results. Do not fake reviews or buy listings on directories you have never heard of. Everything here is about being clear and consistent, not about volume.
Frequently asked
Does this replace Google SEO? No. It is the same work with a different emphasis on plain sentences and matched listings. A company that does this well ranks better in regular search too, so there is no trade-off.
Do the assistants just recommend the national franchise dealers? Often, because they have hundreds of pages and perfectly consistent listings. In a metro that is hard to beat. In a town of 40,000 with three waterproofing companies, the one with clear cost pages and matched listings gets named.
How long before an assistant names my company? Weeks to months. The assistants refresh their view of the web on their own schedule. Set the baseline, make the changes, and check monthly. The benchmark report is a useful reminder of how thin the competition's profiles are.
AI search optimization is one of the services in the free 14-day trial, no card, text or call. See the free trial page.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, waterproofing companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor