AIScan.site
Home & trade services

AI readiness for plumbers, electricians and home trades

A burst pipe at 7am. The assistant needs your area, your hours and a number.

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The moment

Dean, who runs a three-van plumbing firm

A homeowner with water coming through a ceiling asks an assistant for an emergency plumber covering their postcode right now.

What the agent needs: Do you cover this area, are you available out of hours, and what is the call-out charge.

What actually happens: The coverage area is a map image, the out-of-hours line is only mentioned on a contact form page, and the call-out price is 'call for a quote'. The assistant names two competitors who published all three as text.

Which dimensions decide it, and why

AIScan grades five dimensions. These are the ones that carry the outcome for this kind of business.

Content

Every question in an emergency trade query is a fact: area covered, hours, response time, call-out fee. Facts inside images, sliders or PDFs do not exist. LocalBusiness structured data with areaServed and openingHoursSpecification is the highest-value change a trade site can make.

Discoverability

Service-area pages are the pages that win these queries, and they are the ones most often missing from the sitemap or buried three clicks deep. If an assistant cannot reach the page for the town it was asked about, the page may as well not exist.

Bot access

Trade sites frequently inherit a blanket crawler block from a security plugin. That removes you from assistant answers entirely while doing nothing for security — the decision worth making deliberately is training use, not fetch access.

The checks that matter here

Fix guides: /docs/checks/content · /docs/checks/discoverability · /docs/platforms/wordpress

Most sites like this run on WordPress — read the WordPress playbook for where each fix lives.

Questions we get asked

Do people really book tradespeople through AI assistants?
For urgent work, increasingly yes — it is a single question with a single acceptable answer, which is the query shape assistants handle best rather than returning a page of links.
My coverage area is a map image. What should it be instead?
A text list of the towns or postcodes you serve, ideally in areaServed inside LocalBusiness structured data. Keep the map for humans; it just cannot be the only copy of the information.
Should I publish prices if every job is different?
Publish what is fixed: call-out fee, hourly rate, minimum charge, out-of-hours uplift. 'From £X' is a machine-readable answer; 'call for a quote' is not.
Is one page per town spam?
Only if the pages are identical. A page per town with genuinely local detail is legitimate; twenty pages differing by one word is the pattern that gets ignored.
My security plugin blocks bots. Is that hurting me?
Almost certainly. Check B2 will show which agents are blocked. Blocking assistant fetchers is how a well-reviewed firm becomes invisible in the answers its customers are reading.
What is the quickest thing to fix this week?
Hours, coverage and phone number as text on every service page, then run a free scan at aiscan.site to confirm the served HTML actually contains them.

Scan your site and see where you actually stand

Free, no account, about twenty seconds. The report names every failing check by ID, shows the evidence we found, and gives the fix for your platform — plus a hand-off prompt you can paste straight into Claude Code or Cursor.

Run a free scan npx aiscan-cli yoursite.com

Prefer to read first? Browse every check we run or the guide library.

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Also covers: plumber, emergency plumber, electrician, heating engineer, boiler repair, hvac, roofer, builder, handyman, locksmith, glazier, pest control, landscaper, gardener, cleaning company, carpet cleaning, removals, man and van, appliance repair, damp proofing, tradesman, local contractor.