Moving companies
The question arrives with the move already in it: the route, the date, the home and the budget.
Someone moving from Chicago to Denver asks an AI assistant for movers who can price a three-bedroom house from a video call and store the furniture for two weeks. The reply can name a few companies, perhaps with a reason for each; a reason true of your company has to be stated somewhere first.
A moving question turns on seven facts: the kind of move, the route, the pricing basis, what the price includes, the licenses and registrations held, the liability cover offered, and storage. An answer can repeat them about you only where some page says them, and only your pages say them in your terms.
How your customers ask
A move, described in one question
Seven facts a moving question turns on
The questions above are examples; we have not recorded what households type. Each carries the same seven facts, all yours to state.
- The kind of move: local, long distance, an office, a piano or artwork, or storage alone.
- The route: where you move people from and to, and whether a partner carries any leg.
- The pricing basis: hourly, a fixed price after a survey, or an estimate, and what can change it.
- What the price includes: packing, materials, disassembly, stairs, a long carry and [other items], each marked included or extra.
- The licenses and registrations you hold, as the issuer writes them: the number, where each is valid, its dates.
- The liability cover you offer, as your own terms: its limit, its exclusions, and any extra cover you sell, named as such.
- Storage: whether you store goods, where, for how long and at what charge.
On a long-distance move the person asking may live at the far end, so "near me" says nothing about you and the question names both places. Reading answers by route and move type covers the measuring.
Where each fact goes on a mover's site
| The household asks | What your site states | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Do you do my kind of move? | Each service by its plain name: local, long distance, cross-border, office, packing, storage and the specialty items you take | A page per service, each linked from the homepage |
| Do you go from my city to theirs? | The places you move people from and to, the routes you run regularly, and any leg a partner carries | A routes page, as text; areaServed in the structured data |
| Is the price fixed? | Your pricing basis in your terms' words, what it is based on, and what can change it | A quote terms page, in the same words as the written quote |
| What does the price include? | Each item marked included or extra: packing, materials, disassembly, stairs, a long carry, [fees] | The prices page, as HTML text |
| Are you licensed? | Each license and registration as issued: the issuer, the number, where it is valid, its dates and a link to the issuer's lookup | A licenses section on the about page; hasCertification in the markup |
| Who pays if something breaks? | The cover included and its limit, what it excludes, any extra cover sold and by whom, and how to claim | The quote terms page, beside the claims steps |
| Can you keep my things between homes? | Where you store, for how long, at what charge, and how goods are recorded | A storage page |
| How do I get a quote from here? | In-home survey, video survey or inventory form, what you need from the household, and how soon the quote arrives | A quote page |
| Which company is this? | One trading name, the legal name, one address and one phone number | Every page and listing; MovingCompany markup, written as JSON-LD |
Licensing, liability limits, quote rules and consumer protection for moves differ between the US, Canada, the EU and the UAE, and within them. Your pages state what your company holds and offers; whether that meets the rules where a customer lives is for the regulator there, and your counsel, to say.
MovingCompany in the markup, checked on schema.org
The trade has its own schema.org type, MovingCompany, "A moving company." We opened it before recommending it: it sits under HomeAndConstructionBusiness, under LocalBusiness, and Google's local business page asks for the most specific subtype possible, which for a mover is this one.
Licenses and registrations go on the node as hasCertification, each a Certification with issuedBy, certificationIdentification, certificationStatus, validIn, validFrom, expires and a url for the issuer's lookup, never as the bare Credential type, which schema.org defines as a certificate used to verify identity. An association membership is not a certification: it goes in memberOf, pointing to the association as an Organization, with the membership number in the text. The node carries no rating: Google's review snippet rules make a business that controls its own reviews ineligible for stars and exclude ratings aggregated from other websites. Reviews go in the page text instead, with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform.
What our crawl found for movers, and what it left unmeasured
Our audit of 9,483 small business websites read each site's homepage, contact page and about page with an AI crawler of our own, running no JavaScript, in 40 trades and 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, from late August to early September 2026. The sample was drawn per metro and trade, not at random; each percentage describes it.
It published one mover figure: 16.1% of moving company sites had no schema.org markup at all, against 17.8% across all 9,483. In the audit's words, carpenters (15.8%) and moving companies (16.1%) "are the best of the trades with a hundred or more sites in the sample." Markup is not the same as describing the business: across the sample most of it described the website, and LocalBusiness appeared on roughly a quarter of sites, with no mover figure for either.
The rest is sample-wide, across all 40 trades: 61.5% had no question-and-answer content, 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across those three pages, 64.7% showed a crawler no review signal, 2.1% kept real content such as the price list in a PDF, and 7.2% served our crawler a challenge page.
Beside the crawl, one buyer question per business went to Claude with web retrieval on: 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named, on one question and one day, across every trade. A direction, and a Claude figure, not a mover rate.
Where a mover starts, in order
- Run the crawler access check, which reads your robots.txt the way AI crawlers do, and open your quote page with JavaScript turned off: a form built in a script gives a text fetch nothing to read.
- Settle one identity: trading name, legal name, one address and one phone number, the same on every page and listing.
- Write the services and routes as text, with both ends of each route named.
- Put the quote terms, cover, licenses and claims steps on one page in your terms' own words, as in the terms a household checks before booking.
- Answer the planning questions in the order a long-distance move happens, as in the pages for a move planned from far away.
- Mark the company up as a MovingCompany whose values repeat those pages, with hasCertification for each license, memberOf for each association and no rating on its node; the address and hours template is in the article on the towns you serve.
- Measure with a fixed panel by move type and route, asked from both ends (reading answers by route and move type), scored as our methodology describes, and read it monthly beside your quote requests (AI readings through the moving year).
Go deeper
Five articles, each on one part of the work
Fundamentals
Which move were you named for? Reading AI answers by route and move type
Measurement & Reporting
Through the moving year: AI readings beside your quote requests
Authority & Mentions
The terms a household checks before booking a mover, stated as yours
Local & Industries
Planning a move from far away: the pages that answer it, in order
Local & Industries
Win locally as a mover: what buyers ask an assistant and what to state
Questions from the owner's side of the move
Most of our work is long distance. What should our Business Profile show?
Your base and the area around it. Google's Business Profile guidelines say a service area shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving from where the business is based, though larger areas may suit some businesses. Name the far ends of your routes on your own site, as text.
We hand some long-distance legs to a partner. What do we say on the site?
Say who does what, in the words of the quote: which parts your crew handles, which a partner handles and under what name, whose license covers each part and whose terms govern a claim. A household expecting your crew at the far end should not learn otherwise on the driveway. Disclosure rules differ by jurisdiction, so counsel checks the wording.
We mostly move offices. What does our site need that a household mover's does not?
The office manager's questions: after-hours and weekend moves, who disconnects, labels and sets up IT equipment and furniture, how you work with building management on docks, elevators and proof of insurance, who the one contact is, and what happens to old furniture. Give office moves their own page, with each question answered in text.
We also move pianos and art. Does each need its own page?
Each specialty you want to be asked about does, since its questions differ: how the item is protected or crated, the equipment and crew, climate-controlled storage if you offer it, what your cover says about such items, and what you will not move. A line in a services list gives an answer nothing to repeat about moving a piano.