IT service providers
The buyer's question reads like a contract: seats, hours, response time, stack.
An office manager at a 30-person firm asks an assistant for IT support that covers Saturdays, answers a server outage within the hour and looks after the design team's Macs. With web search on, the assistant reads some of the pages its searches return and may name a few providers.
An answer can say a provider covers Saturdays, responds within the hour or supports Macs only where a page says so. For an IT provider that means seven facts on public pages: the services, the client sizes you take, your response times, the hours you cover, the stack you support, the credentials you hold and how you price.
How your customers ask
What an office manager types before calling anyone
Seven facts an IT buyer's question turns on
Across the five questions above, the conditions are those seven facts, and each carries a number, a name or a date that can change with the contract. They have an edge as well: the systems you do not support, the sizes you do not take and the hours nobody answers are facts too.
If an AI assistant with web search on states one of those terms about your firm, it is repeating something it read or learned, such as your page, a directory profile or a review, unless it made the term up. Write yours with the condition beside the fact. "24/7 support" and "a technician on call for priority 1 tickets outside [hours]" are different promises; a buyer can hold you to the second.
Where each fact goes, and how to write it so a buyer can check it
| The fact | Written so it can be checked | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Services | Each service by the name a buyer types (managed support, security, backup, a network project), with what the fee covers and what is a project | A page per service |
| Client size | The smallest and largest client you take: "from [n] to [n] users" | The homepage and each service page |
| Response times | A target per priority level, with what the level means: "priority 1, a system down for everyone: response within [n] minutes" | A public service-levels page that matches the agreement |
| Hours covered | Help desk hours with the time zone, what happens outside them, and holiday cover | The service-levels and contact pages, and every listing |
| Supported stack | The platforms, applications and devices you support, by product name, and the ones you do not | A supported-technology page |
| Credentials | Each certificate and vendor designation in the issuer's words, with its scope and dates, as the article on credentials sets out | A credentials page |
| Pricing model | Per user, per device or flat; what the fee covers; an entry price such as [price] per user a month; onboarding and the minimum term | A pricing page in HTML |
| Evidence | Client descriptions with permission, by industry and size; reviews quoted as text with a first name, the date and the platform | The page each one is about |
Write terms as your own ("our standard agreement commits to"), never as an industry rule, since what a contract must say differs by jurisdiction and your counsel checks it. And keep ratings out of the firm's markup: under Google's review snippet rules, a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for review stars.
No schema.org type for an MSP: LocalBusiness or Organization, plus Service
Schema.org has no type for a managed service provider: none of the types under LocalBusiness fits, and ProfessionalService is marked deprecated "due to confusion with Service". Use LocalBusiness if clients visit an office, since it takes an address and opening hours, or Organization if you work only remotely; Organization has no opening-hours property.
Then give each offering a Service node with serviceType, provider, areaServed and audience. Its hoursAvailable property holds the help desk's staffed hours, which gives a remote-only firm a place to state them, and termsOfService can point to the service-levels page. Write it as JSON-LD that repeats the visible pages.
What our crawl of 9,483 small business sites found
Our audit fetched three pages of each of 9,483 small business websites with a crawler that ran no JavaScript, across 40 trades and 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, in late August and early September 2026. Every figure here is sample-wide, across all 40 trades; we publish no IT-only cut.
61.5% had no question-and-answer content, and 50.7% had a question as a heading with nothing under it a machine could isolate. On identity, 43.1% did not give one consistent account of who and where they are across those three pages, and 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse. 17.8% had no schema.org markup at all.
7.2% of the sites served our crawler a challenge page instead of the site, while 3.2% disallowed AI crawlers in robots.txt on purpose. A challenge comes from bot protection, never from the robots file, and a security-minded firm may have switched it on for its own site. Our crawler named itself and was on no allow list; whether the answer-side crawlers get through on your site is a test the article on bot protection sets out.
For 9,240 of the businesses we also asked Claude, with web retrieval on, one buyer question from their trade and metro, and 14.9% were named: one question, one assistant, one day, and nothing specific to IT providers.
The order to work in, starting at the firewall
- Check the front door: run the crawler access check on your robots.txt, then request your service pages with each answer-side crawler's user agent and read what your bot protection logged.
- Publish the service levels: response targets per priority, staffed hours with the time zone, and after-hours and holiday cover.
- Give each service a page with what it includes, what is billed as a project, the systems it covers and the client sizes you take, and name what you do not support.
- Put your credentials on one page in the issuer's words, with scope and dates, and remove any program name the vendor has retired.
- Publish the pricing model and an entry price in HTML, then settle one name, address and main number everywhere and add the markup.
- Take a first reading with a fixed panel of buyer questions, scored as our methodology describes; the article on MSP shortlists has the questions IT buyers bring.
Go deeper
Four articles, one part of the work each
AI Engines
When your own bot protection turns the AI crawlers away: a check for MSPs
Local & Industries
An IT provider's partner designations and certificates, stated as issued
Local & Industries
What IT decision-makers ask an assistant before they shortlist an MSP
Strategy & Planning
GEO instead of pure SEO? A decision by how your customers buy, and the work to do first either way
What MSP owners ask before they change the site
We support clients remotely. Does the site need an address?
It needs one identity a buyer can check: the firm's name, its base, the areas you visit on site and one main number, the same on every page and listing, marked up as an Organization if no client visits an office. Google's Business Profile guidelines give a business that travels to its customers one service-area profile for its base, and a firm that neither receives clients nor visits them is not among the businesses the guidelines say can create one.
Should we name the security products we resell and manage?
Name every product you support, as its vendor writes the name, and the ones you do not: a buyer who types a product into the question is asking whether you work with it. Do not rank vendors or call one product better than another.
Should we build a page for every city we cover?
No. Google's spam policies give pages targeted at specific cities that funnel visitors to one page as an example of doorway abuse. One page that names the areas you visit on site, and states what changes by area, such as on-site response times or the days a technician is there, serves a buyer in each of those towns.
How will we know whether any of this changed the answers?
By asking the same questions before and after. We put a fixed panel of twelve of your buyers' questions to Claude, with live web search on, and record whether each answer names your firm, whether it names it first, and who else is named. Nobody outside the companies that build the assistants can promise a place in their answers.