62% of AI citations come from blogs. Here's the chapter your trade business is missing.

The number

Aja Frost and Beeri Amiel from HubSpot ran a podcast episode this month walking through their internal AEO data. The line that stuck: 62% of AI citations across the major answer engines came from blog posts. Service pages, product pages, about pages, all the polished stuff that makes up most of a small business website, accounted for the other 38% combined.

That number is uncomfortable for a plumber, an electrician or a garage. Trade businesses overwhelmingly skip blogging. Google rewarded backlinks and brand authority for fifteen years, so the playbook became "polish your homepage, list your services, get your reviews up". A blog felt like extra work for nothing.

ChatGPT and Perplexity rewrote that. They don't link out. They quote. And the thing they quote, 62% of the time, is the page that answers a real customer question in plain English.

Why blogs win the citation

An answer engine is composing a reply, not ranking a list. To do that, it needs a clean, quotable passage. The structure of a useful blog post fits that brief by accident: the question is usually the headline, the direct answer is in the first paragraph, the rationale follows underneath. Service pages don't have that structure. They sell, they list, they badge with logos. The model can't pull a clean quote out of "Trusted by hundreds of homeowners across the South West".

A blog post that says "Why is my radiator cold at the top and hot at the bottom" with a four-line answer underneath gives ChatGPT exactly what it needs to recommend you when a customer types that question into the chat. The trade business that wrote that blog post gets cited. The trade business that didn't, doesn't.

The questions almost no trade business writes about

Three you can write this weekend if you're a trade business and you've got a Saturday afternoon spare:

• The diagnostic question. "Why does my [thing] do [annoying behaviour]?" Plumbers, electricians, garages, HVAC engineers, all answer the same dozen of these on the phone every week. Pick the most common one. Write the answer in 400 words. Title it as the question.
• The cost-or-time question. "How much does it cost to [job] in a [type of property]" or "How long does [job] take in a [type of property]". Customers type these into ChatGPT before they ring you because they're embarrassed to ask. Be the post that answers honestly.
• The repair-vs-replace question. "Is it cheaper to repair or replace a [thing] that's [age]". Long-tail, specific, low competition, high-intent. ChatGPT loves them because the answer is structured and the writer has actual experience to draw on.

Each of these is one blog post. Three weekends, three posts. By the end of the third weekend, you've covered the most common questions in your trade and given AI engines three clean, quotable, location-tagged passages to choose from.

Why HubSpot's number favours the small business, not the enterprise

HubSpot's 62% number is enterprise data. They serve companies with content teams, blog calendars and SEO budgets. The interesting bit, for a small trade business, is the inverse. Enterprise blogs answer generic, high-volume questions because that's where the marketing dashboards point. They write "Top 10 plumbing tips for homeowners". A post like that doesn't get cited because it doesn't answer one specific question.

A small trade business has the opposite advantage. They can write the question their best customer asked them last Tuesday, with the specific answer that worked, with the actual cost, in the actual town, on the actual type of property. ChatGPT's answer engine prefers that level of specificity. The 62% number sits open as an opportunity for the businesses willing to write four useful paragraphs.

The plumber who writes "Why does my combi boiler keep losing pressure in a 1980s semi in Findlay" beats the chain plumbing brand's "Top tips for boiler care" every time. Specificity wins because specificity is what an answer engine is composing the answer for.

The 90-minute version of this

You don't need a content strategy or a marketing person. You need 90 minutes and a kitchen table.

1. Pick the question your customer asks you most often on the phone.
2. Write the headline as that exact question.
3. Answer it in 80 words at the top of the post.
4. Write three paragraphs underneath: the why, the how, and the warning sign that means it's worth ringing a professional rather than DIYing.
5. Add a short "Need a [trade] in [your town]? Call [your name] on [number]" line at the bottom.
6. Publish to your site. Post the link to your Google Business Profile updates. Done.

The $15 AI Search Readiness Workbook has a chapter on this exact pattern, with a fill-in-the-blank template, the FAQ schema you should drop into the head of the post, and a 30-day plan for repeating it three or four times until you've covered the questions that drive the calls in your trade. If the 90-minute version above feels like enough, ship that. If you want the structure laid out, that's what the workbook is for.

Sources and further reading

• HubSpot's Marketing Against the Grain podcast episode walking through the AEO data.
• Our guide on how to show up in ChatGPT for your business.
• The companion piece on schema markup for AI search.