AI visibility for electricians: named for which job, with which number

Three verdicts, read one job at a time

Every answer to a homeowner's question gets three verdicts from the person who reads it. Named: your shop appears in the answer at all, under any spelling of its name, even as one entry in a list. Recommended: the answer puts you forward for the job that was asked about and gives a reason, rather than mentioning you in passing or with a caution attached. First: yours is the first shop the reader meets. A homeowner reading at midnight with the lights out has little reason to scroll past it.

An electrician needs those verdicts per job, because the jobs do not share buyers. Someone pricing a panel upgrade on a Saturday reads three answers and compares them. Someone whose kitchen went dark an hour ago calls a name. The questions differ, and so do the pages an answer can draw on: the emergency page, the panel upgrade page, the EV charger page. A shop can be recommended first for chargers and missing from every night answer in the same month. For a trade with six kinds of work, AI visibility is a verdict per job, not one for the shop.

So keep the verdicts in separate rows. The visibility score in our method counts only the first, as the share of the twelve questions in which the shop was named, from 0 to 100, with first place reported beside it. For an electrician, the job each question asks about is the split that matters. A combined figure averages a strong job with a missing one and hides the gap that loses calls. Sort the answers by job first and read the headline after it.

A starting panel, by job and by town

Write the panel from the work you want to be called for, with two towns for each job: the one you work from, and one near the edge of your area where you would still drive. The lines below are a shape to fill in, not questions we measured. Replace every bracket with your own words, and phrase each line the way a caller says it on the phone, not the way it reads on your van. Where those words come from, and how to collect them without keeping anyone's details, is in the article on customers' questions.

Leave out a job you do not do; a line for work you turn away measures nothing you can use. Keep the two lines that name you whatever else you cut. A shop with nobody on call needs the after-hours line more than anyone: an answer that says you take night calls, when you do not, sends every one of those callers to your voicemail.

Write a town into every line instead of "near me". A line with "near me" does not say which town it is about, so two readings of it may not be about the same place, and a panel only compares month to month when every prompt in it reads the same way each time. How to run the lines, on four assistants with three runs each, and how to keep the record are set out in setting up prompt monitoring. This page adds only what an electrician needs on top of that.

Three columns an electrician adds to the record

The standard record for each answer stays as it is: named, recommended, first, who else was named, and the answer kept word for word. An electrician adds three columns, because three facts in an answer decide whether a shop that was named gets the call.

The list of lines is the part to prepare before the first run. Write down every number the business has used or paid for: the office line, the night line, the owner's cell if it was ever published, each tracking number from past ads. When an answer gives a number, it is either on that list or it belongs to someone else. A number on the list can still be the wrong one, if it rings a closed office at night.

License facts get the same treatment. An answer that calls you licensed without saying by whom is thin rather than wrong. One that gives another firm's number, an expired one, or a class of license you do not hold is wrong, and it is said to a homeowner who is deciding whether to let you into the house.

Why the night number is the fact to check first

Because a wrong number at night is a call you never hear about. A homeowner comparing panel quotes who dials a dead number on a Saturday looks you up again. A homeowner with the lights out at midnight dials the first number in the answer, hears a greeting that gives office hours, and calls the next name. The job goes to another shop, and nothing in your own records shows the call was ever meant for you.

Sites hand answers plenty of numbers to choose from. In 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), 36.9% published more than one phone number across their own homepage, contact page and about page. That figure covers all 40 trades; we publish no electrician-only cut. A shop with an office line, a night line and a tracking number from last spring's ads can land in that group without anyone deciding it should.

When an answer gives a wrong number, trace it before you change anything. Search your own pages for the digits, then your Business Profile, then the directories that list you. The way to correct a wrong fact where it is published is in when AI gets facts about your business wrong. What the page that takes night calls has to say, and how its hours stay the same everywhere, is the subject of the article on the emergency page.

Hours are the other half of the same check. An answer that says "open 24 hours" about a shop whose night calls go to voicemail sends callers to the voicemail. One that says "closed" about a shop with an electrician on call sends them to a competitor. Record both kinds of mistake; they come from the same places a wrong number comes from.

What our probe measured, and what it could not

The one large reading we have published asked who, not which number. In the probe that went with the audit, we put one buyer question to Claude, with web retrieval on, for each of 9,240 businesses, drawn from the business's own trade and metro; "Who are the best electricians in Brampton?" was one of them. Across all 40 trades, 14.9% of those businesses were named, and 17.7% among the 5,928 answers that gave a clearly differentiated list rather than a hedge.

Treat that as a direction. It is one question per business, on one assistant, on one day, and it is a Claude figure that says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. It also counted names and nothing else. It did not record which job a shop was named for, which number the answer gave or whether the license was right, so the three columns above have no published figure to compare with. Your own first reading is the baseline.

One detail from those answers bears on the who-else column. Of every name the assistant gave, across all 40 trades, 99.4% were actual businesses and 0.6% were directories or aggregators. If your own readings look like that sample, the column is a list of the shops you are being recommended against, not a list of directories. Go back to the overview for electricians for what those shops' sites state that yours may not.