AI visibility for carpenters: named for which job, and as what kind of shop

When does an answer about a staircase count as naming your workshop?

When a person who read the whole answer can point to your workshop in it. Each answer gets up to three marks. Named: the workshop appears anywhere, under any form of its name a homeowner would recognize, even fifth in a list of five. Recommended: the answer puts you forward for the work the line asked about, with a reason that belongs to that work, such as the wood you use or the stairs you have built. First: yours is the first business the reader meets. Those marks, line by line, are your AI visibility.

Carpentry adds two cases. An answer can name you for other work than the line asked about: the line wants a staircase and the answer lists you for kitchens. Mark that named, not recommended, and write down the work it did name. An answer can also put a maker in the wrong kind of list, such as your workshop among furniture stores, or describe you as a builder that runs whole renovations. That still counts as named, and the words it used go in a column of their own, because the homeowner carries them into the first call.

The visibility score our methodology describes takes the first mark only: the share of the twelve lines that named the workshop, a number from 0 to 100, with first place reported beside it and no weighting. Sort the answers by job before you read the headline. A workshop that leads every sash window line and appears on no kitchen line can post a respectable number while missing the work it wants most.

The one large reading we have published is blunter. In the probe beside our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), one buyer question per business went to Claude with web retrieval on, and 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named. It recorded whether each business was named, not the job or the words used for it. One Claude question per business on one day is a direction for the whole sample, not a carpenter rate, and says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.

A bracketed panel by job, wood and town

Write each line from work you want more of: one job, one wood or material where a buyer would name one, and one town, worded the way a homeowner, the owner of an old house or an architect would type it. Take the towns from your own job list rather than from a map. None of these lines is a question we measured; the brackets are yours to fill.

Twelve lines is what our panels for paying clients hold. Drop any work you do not take, keep the two lines with your workshop's name, and keep line 12 only if trade work matters to you. How each line goes to four assistants, three runs each, with every answer kept word for word, is in setting up prompt monitoring. The first full run is your baseline measurement, and the lines stay worded as they are, so the months compare.

Four columns a workshop adds to the record

The standard record stays as it is: the three marks, every other business named, and the answer pasted in full with its date, assistant and run. A workshop adds four columns to it.

Fill the description column for every business the answer names, not only yours. Kept month after month, it shows which workshops in your area are presented as makers and whether your own description holds from one month to the next, which is a sharper view of your share of voice than a count of names.

Maker, store or contractor: reading the description column

The description matters because a reader acts on it. A homeowner told you are a furniture store may expect a showroom and stock. A builder told you are a general contractor may expect you to take the whole job. An answer that files a maker under furniture retail has named you and described a different business.

When the tag is wrong, start with what your own pages call you. Read the homepage's first sentence: does it say you make and fit, or does it only say furniture? Then your page titles, and your business name as you write it. Then the structured data: on schema.org, FurnitureStore is a retailer's type under Store, HomeAndConstructionBusiness is the workshop's, and GeneralContractor belongs to the shop that runs whole projects, as the overview for carpenters and joiners sets out. Last, your Business Profile category, which should complete "This business IS a".

Google's Business Profile guidelines also say Google can detect category information from a website and from mentions of a business across the web. That describes Google's own listings, not how any assistant writes, but it is one more reason for your pages, your profile and your listings to use the same words for what you are. We have not measured how often answers describe a maker as a retailer. The column is there so you can see whether it happens to you.

Lead time, price and the page cited, checked against your site

When an answer gives your lead time or a price, set it beside your own page. A match is the answer agreeing with your page. A mismatch means the number came from somewhere else: an older page of yours, a price sheet in a file, a directory entry, a forum thread, or no page at all, which is what the glossary calls a hallucination. "Not given" is a finding too: if your page states a range and answers about you never repeat it, check that the range sits in the page text, beside the name of the work, on a page a crawler can reach.

Trace a mismatch on your own site first. Search it for the old figure, including blog posts and downloadable files, and correct or date what you find; a lead time published once and never updated is one you can fix today. When AI gets facts about your business wrong covers the rest of the trail. How to work out a range from your recent jobs is in what a made-to-measure workshop can state.

The page-cited column shows which of your pages the answers cite, if any, and which outside pages carry facts about you. A workshop whose lead time is always cited from a directory has two pages to keep true instead of one. For Google's AI features, Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions of your links in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date and device. It has no query dimension, so it sits beside the panel rather than replacing it.