References and a list of buildings a facility manager can check

Why a cleaning contract needs a different kind of evidence

A reference project, like a case study, is a finished job with a date on it, which is what documenting reference projects covers, and a post-construction clean fits that shape. A cleaning contract is a relationship still running. Its evidence is the building, the scope, how long you have held it and who will vouch for you, and none of that shows in a photo of a clean floor.

"Trusted by leading businesses" gives a buyer nothing to check and an answer nothing specific to repeat. "We clean [n] medical offices between [size] and [size], the longest since [year]" is a citable sentence: it gives both something exact, and a facility manager can ask you to show it.

A list of buildings you service, by type, size band and sector

The list is one table on one page, in HTML text, linked from each commercial service page. Each row is a building, or a group of similar buildings: its type, a size band, the client's sector, the services and how often, the year the contract started, and whether the client is named with permission or anonymized.

Keep the size bands the same across the list, so a buyer with a building of [size] can find the rows that look like theirs, and use the sector names a buyer would use.

Name a client only with its written permission, and keep the permission on file. Otherwise describe it by type, size band, sector and town. Never publish what would help someone who wanted to get into a building: keys, alarm arrangements, the hours your crews are on site, or which floors stand empty at night. A list of buildings is evidence of your work, and it should tell nobody when those buildings are unattended.

Contract lengths and client tenure, as your own counts

How long clients stay is the nearest thing a cleaning company has to a track record, and it belongs on the page as a count you can defend.

• "[n] commercial contracts running today, the longest since [year]."
• "[n] of our [n] commercial clients have renewed at least once."
• "Our contracts run [n] months, with [n] days' notice on either side."

Define the count next to it: from the first signed contract to today, renewals included, clients who left counted, one-off jobs left out. Date it, as of [month year], and change the date when you recount. A count with its method beside it is one a buyer can ask you to show.

Who will vouch for you: references offered, contact details held back

Publish the offer, not the referee. A line such as "References from [n] current commercial clients are available on request" tells a buyer they exist. The names and numbers go out one request at a time, after you have asked each referee, so nobody's contact details sit on a public page.

Keep a short log: who asked, which referee you offered, the date the referee agreed. Rotate referees so one client is not called every month, and drop any who would rather not be asked. What you may pass on about a person differs by jurisdiction, so ask your counsel how those details are held.

A reference a client has written for publication, such as a short letter, can be quoted on the page as text, in the client's approved words and attributed as the client agreed.

Reviews on the page, as text with the platform named

Reviews are the brand mentions households leave, and some commercial clients leave them too. Quote real ones as text on the page each one is about, a move-out review on the move-out page and an office review on the office cleaning page, each with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform it was posted on.

Keep ratings out of the structured data. Google's review snippet rules say ratings must come directly from users, that reviews and ratings from other websites are not to be aggregated, and that a business controlling the reviews about itself, on its own site in markup or through an embedded widget, is ineligible for review stars. Google's local business page recommends the aggregateRating property only where a site captures reviews about other businesses. So the company's node carries no rating; markup, if you add any, is only for reviews customers left on your own site, and it earns no stars either.

Never quote a review you were paid for without saying so, and never write one. Google's rules name fake reviews, and incentivized ones that are not disclosed, among what they do not allow.

Across all 40 trades in our audit of 9,483 small business websites, with no cleaning-only cut, 64.7% of the sites showed no review signal a crawler could read, and 8.9% carried rating schema.

Where the evidence sits, and how to tell whether it is read

One references page holds the list, the counts and the offer of references, and each commercial service page links to it and quotes the one or two rows that match the service. The list needs no special markup: an HTML table in the page text is what a fetch receives, while an image or a PDF of the same list gives a text fetch nothing to read.

To see whether it helps, add two lines that name a building type and your area, such as "cleaning contractor for [building type] in [city]", to the monthly panel in AI visibility for cleaning companies, and read whether answers begin to name you for that type. Ask each new client what they read before they called. The rest of what the site states is on the cleaning companies overview.