AI Search Readiness of Ohio Trades Websites, October 2026

People increasingly ask AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity to recommend a local plumber, roofer or
landscaper, and these tools can only recommend a business they can read. We did not measure whether any business is
actually recommended. We measured the public websites of 504 small home service businesses in Ohio across six trades
(plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical, painting and landscaping) on a single day in October 2026. Most sites have the
basics: 96% are mobile ready, 81% have a meta description and 92% publish a sitemap. Almost none block AI crawlers in
robots.txt (1.2%). The gaps are elsewhere. Only 46% describe themselves as a local business in structured data, only 37%
name their city in the homepage title, and 8% of reachable homepages showed a bot challenge page instead of the real
content. About one third already serve an llms.txt file, but roughly two thirds of those appear to be generated
automatically by the website builder or an SEO plugin. Only 41% pass all five core checks.