Carpenters and joiners
Oak shelves around a fireplace, a new staircase, a sash window that sticks. The question names the job before it names a maker.
A homeowner asks an AI assistant who makes solid-wood kitchens nearby, how long the wait is and what one costs. With web search on, the assistant reads a few pages and replies with a handful of names. For a reason beside your name to come from your pages, your pages have to state it.
Commission questions carry their conditions: the piece or the job, the wood and the finish, the lead time, a rough price, the town, and whether the client can see the workshop. The workshop sets every one of them. An answer can repeat them about yours only where a page says them in text, and a gallery of photographs says none of them.
How your customers ask
Typed before the first visit to the workshop
Six facts inside a commission question
Each question above names the work, then adds conditions. For a workshop they come down to six facts, and your own site is the one place that can state all six:
- The piece or the job, by its plain name: fitted kitchens, built-ins, staircases, doors and windows, furniture, repairs, timber framing.
- The wood and the finish, each by name.
- The lead time, as a dated range from your own recent jobs.
- A price range for each kind of work, and what moves it.
- The towns you fit in, and the town the workshop is in.
- Whether a client can visit the workshop or see samples, and when.
An answer written from fetched pages can say a workshop builds oak staircases, or quotes [n] to [n] weeks, when one of those pages says so.
If the workshop opens to visitors by appointment only, say so on the contact page. Google's Business Profile guidelines say a business operating only by appointment should not list hours on its profile, so the site is where that sentence goes.
Where each fact goes on a workshop's site
| The fact | Written as | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| The work | "We make [fitted kitchens], [built-ins] and [staircases] in [region]", each by its plain name | A page for each kind of work, its name in the heading |
| Wood and finish | The species, such as [white oak] or [walnut], and each finish as its maker names it | Each kind-of-work page, and the caption under every project |
| Lead time | "[n] to [n] weeks from signed drawings to fitting, across our last [n] kitchens, as of [month year]" | The kind-of-work page it applies to |
| Price | "[low] to [high] for [the usual scope]", and what moves it: size, wood, finish, fitting | The same page, or a prices page it links to |
| Area | The towns you fit in, named, and the town the workshop is in | The contact page and the footer; areaServed in the markup |
| Visits and samples | Whether and when clients can visit, by appointment or not, and which samples they can see | The contact page |
| Who you work for | Homeowners, and whether you make joinery to architects' and builders' drawings | The about page, or a page for trade work |
| Licenses and insurance | What you hold, exactly as issued, and the insurance you carry | The about page and the footer, in the same words |
| The business | One name, phone number and address or town, identical everywhere | Every page, the Business Profile and each listing |
Schema.org has no carpenter or joiner type, so we checked the two candidates there. HomeAndConstructionBusiness, a LocalBusiness subtype, is "A construction business" that "provides services around homes and buildings": the type for a workshop that makes and fits. GeneralContractor, beneath it, is described only as "A general contractor." It fits a shop that takes whole projects as the main contractor and hires the other trades, not one fitting a kitchen for a builder.
Write the LocalBusiness markup as JSON-LD that repeats the page; the carpenter's recommendation guide has a filled template. Google's local business documentation recommends aggregateRating only for sites that review other businesses, and under its review snippet rules a business controlling the reviews about itself is ineligible for stars. So leave the rating off, and quote real reviews as text with a first name, the date and the platform.
The one carpenter figure, and the sample-wide ones beside it
Carpenters were part of our audit of 9,483 small business websites, which read each site's homepage, contact page and about page with no scripts run (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026). It published one number for carpenters alone: 15.8% of their sites had no schema.org markup of any kind, the lowest rate of any trade with a hundred or more sites, against 17.8% across the sample.
That counts markup that exists, not what it says, and we did not publish what carpenters' markup described. Across all 40 trades, most markup described the website rather than the business, LocalBusiness appeared on roughly a quarter of sites, and 13.7% had business schema missing the fields that make it usable.
The rest is sample-wide; we publish no carpenter-only cut. 61.5% of the sites had no question-and-answer content, 64.7% showed no review a crawler could read, and 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are. 3.0% delivered their content only through JavaScript and 2.1% kept real content in a PDF. On a workshop's site, those would be a portfolio built by a script and a price sheet kept as a file.
Beside the audit, one buyer question per business went to Claude with web retrieval on, and 14.9% of the 9,240 businesses asked about were named. One question, one assistant, one day, across all 40 trades: a direction, not a carpenter figure.
A workshop's first seven changes, in order
- Run the crawler access check, which reads your robots.txt for each AI crawler, then view your pages with scripts off: usually no scripts run in a text fetch.
- Make the name, the phone number and the address or town identical on every page, the Business Profile and each listing.
- Give each kind of work you want more of its own page, with the woods, a price range and a lead time from recent jobs, as what a made-to-measure workshop can state sets out.
- Say on the contact page whether clients can visit the workshop, when, and how to book.
- Write up two or three finished jobs for each page (documenting reference projects); timber framing, historic buildings and energy-standard work have a record of their own.
- Add HomeAndConstructionBusiness markup, or GeneralContractor if you run whole projects, repeating the pages, with no rating on the workshop's own node.
- Answer in writing the questions clients ask (what homeowners ask a carpenter), then take a first reading by job, wood and town, as AI visibility for carpenters lays out and our methodology scores it.
The list changes your pages and what a crawler receives. What an assistant writes stays with the company running it, and nobody outside can promise a place in it; the reading taken once the fixes are live shows whether answers moved.
Go deeper
Six articles for a workshop, one question each
Fundamentals
AI visibility for carpenters: named for which job, and as what kind of shop
Brand & Positioning
What a made-to-measure workshop can state that a flat-pack store cannot
Brand & Positioning
Timber frames, historic buildings, energy standards: a shop's own record
Content & Answer Pages
What homeowners ask a carpenter, and the page each answer belongs on
Local & Industries
Carpenters in ChatGPT and Gemini answers: what the shop's own site has to say
Authority & Mentions
Documenting reference projects so they count as evidence, not just photos
Questions from the workshop floor
We work from a workshop at home. What address goes on the site?
If clients visit, the address they come to. If nobody does, Google's Business Profile guidelines tell a business run from a residential address that serves customers elsewhere to clear the address from its profile; their example is a plumber. Then name the workshop's town and the towns you fit in, the same way on every page.
Most of our work comes from architects and builders. Is any of this for us?
Yes, in a trade form. An architect or builder choosing a joiner may read your site, or ask an assistant, before calling. One page can say what trade work you take (joinery to their drawings, site fitting, one-off pieces), the drawing formats you work from, the regions you cover, your insurance as issued and a lead time for trade orders.
We also sell finished pieces from a small showroom. Are we a store or a workshop?
Both, if both are true. On schema.org, FurnitureStore sits under Store, a retailer's type, and Google's local business page accepts several types as an array, so a workshop whose showroom sells stock can be HomeAndConstructionBusiness and FurnitureStore at once. If everything is made to order, the store type describes a business you are not. On the Business Profile, pick the category that completes "This business IS a".
Should the site say we are licensed?
State what you hold, exactly as issued: the license or registration, the issuing body, the number and the insurance you carry. Whether carpentry or joinery needs a license depends on where the work is done and what it involves, so the site states your own record, never the rule; the licensing authority where you work, or your counsel, can say what applies.