This is the newest kind of customer I've ever met, and there are more of her every month: she wants a fence, and instead of typing "fence company Fort Worth" into a search box, she asks her phone — in plain words — who she should call.
An engine reads everything it can find about every fence company in town, and it recommends one. Not ten blue links to comparison-shop. One name.
That's a different game, and the rules of it are still being written.
The Engine Test
Here's what I've learned running this test on real businesses: engines don't rank you. They recommend you — or they don't. And what they read is everything that already exists about you: your reviews, your site, your answers to real questions, the directories that list you.
You can't ask an engine for a recommendation. You earn it — the same way you earned every customer you've ever had: by being the business worth recommending, everywhere a stranger might look.
What We Saw This Week
We ran the engine test on a real DFW roofing company this month — asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions their customers actually ask. Then we made sure the honest answers existed in the places engines read: the owner's own words on the site, the review counts real, the business listed where it should be.
Not tricks. Just making sure the true story is the one the machines find.
The Challenge
Ask ChatGPT or Gemini the way a customer would: "Who's a good [your trade] in [your city]?" Then look at where you stand in the answer. Reply and tell me what you got.
— Shane Bigham, Founder, 1K Web Designs