Logistics providers
A shipper's question names a lane, a cargo and a deadline. Each is a fact your site states or leaves out.
An operations manager asks an assistant which carriers run frozen freight from Montreal to New York twice a week. An e-commerce founder asks for a fulfillment center near Dallas that ships same day. With web search on, the assistant reads a handful of pages before it answers, and the reply can name a few providers.
A logistics provider's pages give an answer something to repeat when they state, in text: each service, the lanes and regions it runs, the cargo it takes and turns away, its capacity, its cut-offs and service levels as its own dated figures, the certifications it holds and the systems it connects to. A fact your pages leave out can reach an answer only from someone else's page, or not at all.
How your customers ask
What shippers and founders type before they write to anyone
What a logistics question asks your pages to state
Read any of those questions as a checklist: a service (a reefer carrier, a 3PL, a forwarder), a lane or a region, a cargo with its conditions (frozen, oversized, hazardous, 2 to 8 degrees) and a service level (twice a week, same day). An answer can repeat "runs frozen freight to New York twice a week" about you only where a sentence says it, and the best place for that sentence is your own site.
| The buyer asks | What the provider states | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Do they run this service? | Each service by the name buyers use (full truckload, less than truckload, ocean, air, warehousing, pick and pack, customs brokerage), and what it includes | A page per service |
| Do they cover my lane? | Origins, destinations and regions by name; departures per week; transit time as your own dated figure ([n] days over [period]) | A page per lane or region you run repeatedly |
| Will they take my cargo? | What you accept and its limits (dimensions, weights, temperature ranges, hazardous goods under your own acceptance policy), and what you refuse | Each service page, and one acceptance page |
| Do they have room? | Capacity per site ([pallet positions], [square feet], [dock doors], [trailers]), each with the date it was counted | Each site's page |
| When do I have to book or drop off? | Cut-off times per service and per site, with the time zone; receiving and dispatch windows; holiday changes posted ahead | Beside each service, and on each site's page |
| Can we rely on them? | Service levels as your own figures: [on-time rate] for [period], with what counts as on time and what is excluded | A performance page, dated |
| Can we audit them? | Each certification and license you hold, as the issuing body names it, with number, scope and dates | A certifications page, linked from every service it covers |
| Will it connect to our systems? | Integrations by name ([store platform], [marketplace], EDI, API), what syncs which way, and how often | An integrations page |
| Which company is this? | One trading name, the legal name, each site's address and one main number | Every page, listing and profile |
Keep two things apart on every row. Licensing, customs, hazardous-goods and temperature rules differ between the US, Canada, the EU and the UAE, so your pages state what you hold and how you work, and the rule is for your counsel or regulator to state. And a rate, capacity or time with no period and no definition is a claim, as the article on operating figures shows.
No schema.org type for freight: what to mark up instead
We checked schema.org's full type hierarchy and found no type for a forwarder, a carrier, a warehouse or a fulfillment center. MovingCompany, "A moving company" under HomeAndConstructionBusiness, fits a household mover; SelfStorage is "A self-storage facility"; ParcelDelivery describes the delivery of one parcel, not the business that carries it. ProfessionalService is deprecated, so it is no fallback.
So describe the company as an Organization with its legal name and sameAs links to its own profiles; each site that receives freight or visitors as a LocalBusiness ("a particular physical business or branch of an organization") with its address, telephone and hours, since Google's local business page requires the name and the address; and each service as a Service with serviceType, provider, areaServed and audience.
Certificates and licenses have a place too: schema.org lists hasCertification on Organization and Service, pointing to a Certification with issuedBy, certificationIdentification, certificationStatus, validIn, validFrom and expires, for the ones you hold. Write it all as JSON-LD that describes only what a visitor can read, and give the company's node no rating: under Google's review snippet rules, a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for review stars. Quote reviews as text, with a first name, the date and the platform.
What the crawl found across all 40 trades
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites fetched each site's homepage, contact page and about page with an AI crawler of our own 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 logistics-only cut.
61.5% of the sites carried no question-and-answer content at all, and 50.7% put a question in a heading without an answer beneath it that a machine could isolate: on a carrier's site, a heading about cut-off times with no time under it. 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across those three pages; 36.9% showed more than one phone number and 34.1% gave no postal address a machine could parse.
17.8% had no schema.org markup, most of the rest described the website rather than the business, and 13.7% had business markup missing the fields that make it usable. Reviews were as thin: 64.7% gave a crawler no review signal to read, and 8.9% had rating schema.
7.2% served our crawler a bot-protection challenge, 3.0% rendered their content only in JavaScript, and 2.1% kept real content, such as a price list or a service menu, in a PDF, where a rate sheet kept as a file would sit. For 9,240 of the businesses, one buyer question from their trade and metro went to Claude with web retrieval on: 14.9% were named, a direction from one question on one day rather than a logistics rate.
What to fix first on a logistics site
- Run the crawler access check, which reads your robots.txt token by token, and open a service page with scripts off; what stays behind the client login is in the fulfillment center article.
- Settle one identity: trading name, legal name, each site's address and one main number, the same on every page, directory entry and Business Profile.
- Give each service a page: what it includes, the cargo it takes and refuses, its cut-off times.
- Write a page per cargo, lane or client type you handle repeatedly, with your record in counts, as the specialist article sets out. Never the same text with the city swapped: Google's spam policies count city pages that funnel visitors to one page as doorway abuse.
- Publish cut-offs, capacity and on-time performance as your own figures, each with its definition, period and measurement date.
- List each certification and license you hold in the issuing body's words, with number, scope and dates; temperature-controlled work starts from the cold-chain article.
- Add Organization, LocalBusiness and Service markup that says only what the pages say.
- Take a first reading with a fixed panel of questions by service, lane and cargo, as the article on reading answers by lane sets it up and our methodology scores it.
Go deeper
Five articles, one question each
Fundamentals
Which lanes AI answers name you for, and how current their facts are
Local & Industries
Temperature-controlled freight: what to publish for a buyer who audits
Measurement & Reporting
Operating figures a buyer can check, each with its period and definition
Brand & Positioning
A page per cargo, lane or client type, with the record behind it
AI Engines
A fulfillment center's public pages and portal: what crawlers can reach
Four objections from the operations side
Our rates change every week. What can we publish?
Publish how you price instead of the spot rate: the basis (per pallet, per shipment, per order), what the base covers, the surcharges you add, and a dated starting point where you can, such as [price] per pallet per month. Quotes stay quotes, and the published basis gives a question about cost something of yours to repeat.
Our clients are under NDA. How do we show a record?
In counts, without names: [n] shipments of [cargo] on [lane] between [month] and [month]. A count with its period needs nobody's name. Name a client or show a logo only with written permission, and quote them only in words they approved; confidential work as evidence sets out whose approval each kind of evidence needs.
Should each warehouse have its own page?
Yes, where the sites differ in what a buyer asks: the address, receiving hours and cut-offs, capacity, temperature zones and the certifications that cover each one. Write every page from that site's own facts. The same text under a different city tells a buyer nothing about the building.
Can you promise that shippers will find us through ChatGPT?
No. Nobody outside the companies that build the assistants can say in advance what an answer will contain. We put your buyers' questions to Claude, with live web search on, record whether you are named and what is said about your lanes, fix what your pages state, and ask the same questions again. The method is published.