On October 10 we asked ChatGPT, logged out, for the best roofing marketing agency in Dallas–Fort Worth. It named four agencies, and Zentora wasn’t one of them. Three days later the same question named Zentora second, and on October 15 it named Zentora first. Here is what we changed in between, and how a roofing company can use the same method for “best roofer in” its own city.
ChatGPT told us where its answer came from
After the first answer we asked ChatGPT to list every web page it had used. Each source was either an agency’s own website or a published “best of” list. One of the four agencies, a small DFW shop, was named off a single page on its own site about roofing marketing in the area. No press release, review site or social media post was in the list.
So the answer was built from pages that say, in plain words, who a company is, what it does and where.
We published one page that says exactly that
The same day we published Roofing marketing in Dallas–Fort Worth. Its first line says Zentora is a roofing marketing agency in Dallas, and the page goes on to list what we run for roofing companies, which roofers we work with, and what we have measured on DFW roofers’ Google Maps rankings.
Google indexed the page on October 12. When we asked ChatGPT again on October 13, it named Zentora second, and the only Zentora source it listed was that page. Zentora’s press release went out on October 12 as well, and Digital Journal carried it, but ChatGPT didn’t cite the release. The page did the work.
ChatGPT’s answers change from one run to the next, so we keep asking. Anyone can ask it the same question from our home page.
The national question still leaves us out
Asked for the best roofing marketing agency in the US, ChatGPT still names other agencies. Its sources there are their own roofing service pages and named roofing case studies, with the client, the work and the result. A city page earns the city question, and the wider question takes published results.
How a roofing company can do the same
- Ask ChatGPT the question your customers ask, such as “best roofer in Plano”, then ask it to list the web pages it used. Those pages are what you need to match.
- Publish a page for each city you want to be named in. Say in the first line that your company is a roofing company in that city, then what you do there and the jobs you’ve done.
- Check that your website doesn’t block ChatGPT’s crawler. ChatGPT leaves out sites that block it, so check your robots.txt file and any bot-blocking setting on your host.
- Get named on the lists and listings ChatGPT reads, such as local “best roofers” articles and your Google Business Profile.
- Ask again a few days after Google indexes the page.
We run this for roofing companies on our ChatGPT and AI search service, and the guide on how roofers show up in ChatGPT covers the crawler settings in detail.