hellojade field notes
Practical writing on structured data, AI search, and local visibility for home-services businesses.
How AI search engines actually recommend contractors
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews do not rank links — they name a business they can verify. Here is what they read, why a fragmented digital identity makes you invisible to them, and the split between what your marketing partner does and what you do.
Read →Why your Google Business Profile is now your most critical digital asset
Your profile stopped being a listing and became the source of truth feeding Maps, your pay-per-lead ads, and AI answers at the same time — which makes an unverified or edited profile a single point of failure for the whole lead pipeline.
Read →The hidden leak in contractor marketing: reactivating past customers with automated SMS and email
A new lead costs $150 to $350 in a competitive market; the customers who already trust you cost a fraction of that and are sitting untouched in your CRM. How behavior-triggered SMS and email sequences close the leak — and what carrier compliance actually requires.
Read →The local authority playbook: winning rankings without burning budget on pay-per-click
Paid ads rent space on Google; local authority owns it. How geographic verification, neighborhood-level entity mapping, and schema-defined service boundaries replace duplicate city pages — and how to get off the ad treadmill.
Read →Structured data and schema for home services: what AI crawlers look for on your website
AI crawlers do not read your gallery — they read JSON-LD. What subtype precision, sameAs entity linking, areaServed boundaries, and llms.txt actually do, and what an unreadable website costs you in an AI answer.
Read →Google is retiring the LSA dashboard: what the move into Google Ads means for home services
Google is sunsetting the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and moving LSA accounts into Google Ads as a Performance Max pay-per-lead campaign type — with home services in Phase 1. What stays the same, what changes, the one real risk, and the action plan.
Read →Featured snippets vs. rich results vs. AI Overviews: what's the difference?
Three different ways to win space at the top of Google — and they work in completely different ways. Here's what each is, and what actually earns it.
Read →What is structured data, and why home-services businesses need it
Structured data is the machine-readable code that tells Google and AI assistants who your business is and what you do. Here's what it is, why it matters for contractors, and how to get it right.
Read →How to show up in AI search: getting cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews
AI assistants now answer the questions your customers used to type into Google. Here's how to become a source they cite — through entity clarity, structured data, and answer-shaped content.
Read →NAP consistency: why your name, address, and phone must match everywhere
A single mismatched listing can quietly suppress your local rankings. Here's what NAP consistency is, why it matters so much for local search, and how to fix drift across dozens of platforms.
Read →What these are for
These are working notes, not thought leadership. Each one exists because a customer asked the question, or because we measured something that contradicted the usual advice. Where a post makes a claim about how Google or an AI assistant behaves, it says how that was checked — and where the honest answer is "nobody knows yet", it says that instead.
They are written for the person who runs the business, not for other marketers. If a post needs you to already know what a canonical tag is, that is a defect in the post.
Where to start
If you have never looked at structured data, read what structured data actually is first — everything else assumes it. If you already know and want the current picture, how AI search engines pick a contractor is the one that changed most recently.
If your listings are the problem rather than your markup — which is more common than not — skip the writing and run the 20-minute NAP audit instead. It is the single highest-yield hour most home-services businesses can spend, and it costs nothing.
How this connects to the rest of the site
The guides are step-by-step and meant to be followed with your own profile open. These notes are shorter and more argumentative — they explain why something is worth doing at all. The research page holds the sourced numbers both of them draw on, and the glossary defines the terms without assuming you have met them.
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