A painter's monthly panel: job, surface and town, exterior in season

What counts as named, recommended or first for a painting company?

Three marks, given by a person who has read the whole answer. Named means the company appears somewhere in the reply, however briefly, under any form of its name a customer would recognize. Recommended means the reply puts it forward for the job the line asked about and gives a reason that belongs to that job: the surface, the town, the kind of building. First means no other painting company comes before it.

Two painting cases are worth keeping apart. A line asks who paints stucco exteriors in [town] and the reply names you for interiors: that is named, not recommended, and the job it did name you for goes in the record. Or the reply names you with a qualifier attached, such as "does not list exterior work" or "based in [another town]". That is a mention, and the qualifier's exact words are worth keeping, because a page of yours, or a page about you, may say the same thing.

Our methodology turns the first mark into a visibility score from 0 to 100, the share of the twelve lines that named the company, with first place reported beside it. For a painter the split that matters is the job. A company that is first for cabinet refinishing and absent from every exterior line can post a middling number that describes neither half of its work, so sort the answers by job before you read the headline.

The one large reading we have published is coarser than a panel. In the probe that went with 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), Claude, with web retrieval on, got one buyer question per business, and 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named. It reports whether each business was named and publishes nothing about the job, price or license beside the name. It is a Claude figure from one day, across all 40 trades, and not a painter rate.

Twelve lines by job, surface and town, in brackets

Write each line from work you want more of. A line names one job, one surface where the surface changes who gets the call, and one town, typed the way a homeowner or a property manager types. Pick the two towns from last year's invoices: where most of the work was, and where you would like more. Every bracket is yours to fill; none of these lines is a question we measured.

# Year-round lines: asked in the first week of every month, worded the same each time
Y1  interior    drywall        [town A]  "interior painters in [town A] who patch drywall, price per room"
Y2  interior    plaster        [town B]  "painter for plaster walls in an older house in [town B]"
Y3  cabinets    [wood or MDF]  [town A]  "who refinishes kitchen cabinets in [town A]"
Y4  commercial  office         [town B]  "commercial painters in [town B] who work nights or weekends"
Y5  commercial  common areas   [town A]  "painting contractor for apartment hallways and stairwells in [town A]"
Y6  your name   any            any       "is [company] licensed and insured"
Y7  your name   interior       any       "how does [company] price an interior repaint"

# Exterior lines: asked only in [months], the season your exterior page states
E1  exterior    stucco         [town A]  "exterior house painters for stucco in [town A]"
E2  exterior    wood siding    [town B]  "who paints wood siding and trim in [town B], and what does it cost"
E3  exterior    brick          [town A]  "painter for a brick exterior in [town A]"
E4  exterior    deck, fence    [town B]  "deck and fence staining in [town B]"
E5  your name   exterior       any       "when can [company] start an exterior job"

Strike out any line for work you turn down, but keep the lines that carry the company's name: they show what answers say once your name is already in the prompt. Twelve lines is the panel size we run for paying clients, so twelve is the ceiling. How each line goes to the four assistants, how many runs it gets and how every answer is kept word for word is set out in setting up prompt monitoring, and this page does not repeat it.

The two commercial lines get a tag of their own. A property manager's question names a building and the hours it can be worked in, and being named for bedrooms does not make a company named for a lobby. Reading the tag apart keeps the two from blending into one number.

Why the exterior lines run only in your exterior season

An exterior line asked in a month when you do not paint exteriors measures a question you are not selling into, and its answers would sit beside in-season answers as if they described the same thing. So the exterior lines run only in the months your exterior page names as your season, in your own dated terms: "[months], booking from [date]". Out of season, the monthly reading is the year-round lines alone, and the report says so.

Read the exterior lines season against season. This season's [month] set beside last season's [month] compares the same lines at the same point in the season. Setting the first month of a season against its last mixes the start of the work with its end, and the months between seasons carry no exterior readings at all, on purpose. The first season you run the lines is the baseline every later season is read against.

The season is yours to set, not a rule. Climates differ across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, and so do the conditions under which each company agrees to paint outside; your exterior page states yours as your own terms, and the panel follows the page. The painting year as a publishing plan covers when that page and its booking line change. In season, note beside each exterior answer any start date or booking status it gives, next to the dated line on your page.

Five columns a painter adds to the record

Keep the base record the monitoring article sets out, and add five columns to it. Each one compares what an answer said with something your own pages say.

• Job named: the job and surface the answer named you for, in its words, beside the job and surface the line asked about.
• Prep: anything the answer says your price includes or your crew does before painting, marked as matching your page, differing from it, or not stated.
• Price basis: the basis and any figure the answer gives (per room, per square foot, per door, per job), marked the same way against your prices page.
• Licensing: what the answer says about your license, registration or insurance, set against the sentence on your about page: right, wrong or not stated.
• Page cited: every page the answer links or names as a source, and whose it is: yours, a directory, a review platform, another company.

The others-named field is what turns the marks into a picture of your share of voice for each job. The five columns turn them into a list of places to look.

What each mismatch points to on your own pages

A column marked "differs" is a lead, not a verdict: a page somewhere may say something other than yours, or the answer may have it wrong on its own. Start with your own site, because it is the source you control: an old price sheet posted as a PDF, a project write-up quoting a per-room figure from years ago, a footer that says "licensed" with no number. Then go to the listings and directory profiles the page-cited column names for you.

Each column sends you to different pages. A price-basis mismatch starts at the prices page and anything else that quotes a figure. Prep starts at the kind-of-work pages and the project write-ups, where the record of a painting job puts it. Licensing starts at the about page and the footer. A wrong job name sends you to the page for the work you wanted named: if your exterior page says little about stucco, an answer has little of yours to repeat about it.

Correct the source, date the change, and read the same line at the next monthly reading rather than the next morning. Tracing a false statement further, into listings and other people's pages, is covered in the article on wrong facts about a company; a wrong town is covered in last year's jobs beside the answers, town by town. What the site should state before any of this is on the painting contractors page.

Over a few months the page-cited column builds a list of the pages answers link to when they state your facts, season by season. Read it before rewriting a page that is already being cited.