Publish a real price range for water heater replacement, on a page built for one city, with the range inside the first 40 words and the reasoning underneath it. That page will out-convert every “call for a free estimate” page on your site, and it is the shape of page that AI answers pull from when a homeowner asks what the job costs. The number is a range, not a quote. You are not giving anything away that the homeowner cannot find in ninety seconds; you are deciding whether your company name is attached to the number when they read it.
Emergency calls do not research. Water is on the floor at 11pm and somebody dials the first number that answers. Planned work behaves nothing like that. A water heater that is eleven years old and making noise gives the homeowner two or three weeks of thinking time, and the first thing they do with that time is find out what it costs. They type the job and the city. Then they read.
Whitespark ran 540 manual queries across Houston, Phoenix and Denver in six local service industries, plumbing among them, and published the methodology. AI Overviews appeared in 68% of local searches. Local packs, the map results every plumber has been told to fight for, appeared in 39%. On informational local queries the AI answer appeared 92% of the time. On queries that mix information with intent to hire, 97%. Their worked example was “average cost of dental implants in Phoenix,” which is the same query shape as a water heater cost question with a city on the end.
So the homeowner asks what it costs in your city and gets an answer above the organic results, assembled from whoever was willing to write a number down. If every plumbing site in your market says “call for a free estimate,” the answer gets built from national averages, big-box retail pages and forum threads, and none of it has a local phone number in it. The click is intercepted before it reaches anyone. That is the part worth sitting with. The page is not losing to a competitor’s page; the page is losing to an answer that no local company contributed to.
This is the real objection and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance.
The homeowner gets a number either way. They will get it from a national averages page, from a manufacturer’s site, from a retailer’s installation landing page, or from an AI answer that blended all three. The only decision available to you is whether your company is in the room when the number forms. A range you publish and explain sets the frame. A range somebody else publishes sets the frame against you, usually low, because the pages that rank for national cost queries are not accounting for your city’s permit process or a code upgrade on a thirty-year-old install.
The honest cost: you will get fewer calls from people whose budget was never going to reach your low end. If your model depends on getting those people on the phone and talking them up, this page will hurt that. Most owners find that trade acceptable, because those calls occupy a dispatcher and a truck and end in nothing. The second honest cost: if your range sits well above your market and you cannot articulate why, publishing it exposes that. The fix there is the reasoning underneath the range, not hiding the range.
Two findings are worth building around.
Kevin Indig analyzed 1.2 million ChatGPT responses and found that 44.2% of citations come from the first 30% of the page. Burying the range under six paragraphs of company history means it may as well not be there. Front-load it.
Omniscient Digital reviewed more than 23,000 citations and found roughly 23% pointed at content the brand owned, and roughly 77% pointed off-page, at somebody else’s site, on branded queries. That split was measured on branded queries, so it describes what happens once your name is already in play, but the direction still matters. Your page is a necessary piece and not a sufficient one. The same number should show up in your Google Business Profile posts, in the way you answer review questions, in local forum threads where you answer as yourself, in anywhere a third party might repeat it.
Google’s own documentation says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary,” and that structured data “isn’t required for generative AI search.” There is no schema trick and no plugin that fixes this. What separates the pages that get used from the pages that do not is whether the answer is present, specific and readable.
Before you write anything, pull your last twelve months of quotes and sort them by job type. Your own numbers are the only defensible ones. Do not copy a range off a national site.
| Scenario | Your low | Your high | What pushes it to the high end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gas tank, like-for-like swap, garage or basement | your low | your high | venting changes, code upgrades |
| Electric tank, like-for-like swap | your low | your high | panel capacity, circuit rework |
| Tank in an attic or crawlspace | your low | your high | access, pan and drain work, removal labour |
| Tank to tankless conversion | your low | your high | gas line sizing, new venting, water treatment |
| Tankless replacement | your low | your high | brand change, mounting relocation |
Build one for your primary city first and see what it does before you clone it across twelve suburbs. Twelve thin duplicates with the city name swapped will not earn the citation and will not convert; the local specifics are the entire value.
GEO building on SEO" width="1344" height="768" loading="lazy" />Neither Google nor OpenAI publishes the selection logic behind which sources get cited. Anyone guaranteeing you a citation is guessing and charging for the guess. What is observable is that the engines answer these queries constantly, that they need a source with a number in it, and that most plumbing sites in most cities have declined to be that source. That gap is the opportunity, and it is temporary in the way all of these gaps are temporary.
The same gap exists one level up. “Internet marketing for plumbers” gets 320 US searches a month at a difficulty of 6 out of 100. “Marketing for plumbing company,” 210 a month at 11. “Plumber marketing,” 880 a month at 23. Those are low numbers for a reason worth noticing: the people selling plumber marketing would rather write about brand storytelling than answer the plain question, so the plain answers stay unclaimed. Your customers’ cost questions sit in exactly the same condition.
NetPageTwo runs technical SEO, on-page and AI search optimization as a fixed monthly service, starting at $489 a month, month to month, 14 days notice, no contract. The cost pages are a standard part of the work for trades. No rankings promised, no lead volume promised, no timeline promised, because nobody can honestly promise those.
Book a call: https://cal.com/l-b-marketing/netpagetwo
Related: plumbing SEO work.
