How Roofing Contractors Can Win the AI Recommendation Race: An Interview with Evan Bailyn, the Father of GEO Marketing
The field services industry is more competitive than ever. Roofing companies, plumbing outfits, electrical contractors, and other service businesses are fighting for the same customers and increasingly, those customers are turning to AI chatbots to find them. We sat down with Evan Bailyn, CEO of First Page Sage and the founder of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), to understand what that shift means for field services companies and software platforms like Zuper. His agency, founded in 2009, became the first to offer GEO services in 2023 and has since conducted landmark research on how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude make commercial recommendations.
We spoke with Evan about how field services businesses and the platforms that power them can get ahead of this shift before their competitors do.
Zuper: Evan, let’s start with the basics. What is GEO, and why should a field services business owner care about it right now?
Evan Bailyn: Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your brand recommended by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews when someone asks those tools a buying question. A homeowner types “best roofing company in Austin” or “who has the fastest emergency plumbing response in Denver” and an AI answers directly, naming specific companies. GEO is how you make sure your business is one of them.
For field services companies, this matters enormously right now because the buying journey is changing. People used to Google something, scan a list of links, and click around. Increasingly, they ask an AI and act on what it tells them. If you’re not in that answer, you may never even be considered, even if you’re the best operator in your market.
Zuper: How do AI platforms like ChatGPT decide which field services company to recommend? What signals is it looking at?
EB: It’s a combination of what the model learned during training and, for tools like ChatGPT, what it retrieves in real time from the web. In both cases, a few things drive recommendations. First, how prominently does your business appear on respected third-party sites? Think review aggregators, industry directories, local business publications, and comparison articles. If you show up consistently across those sources, the model starts to associate your brand with quality in your category. Second, does your own website demonstrate real topical authority? Not just a homepage that says “licensed and insured,” but content that shows you genuinely understand the problems your customers face. Third, are the things said about you consistent? AI engines don’t respond well to fragmented or contradictory brand signals. Repetition and consistency across sources builds the kind of credibility these systems recognize.
Zuper: What does that look like practically for, say, a roofing company trying to build this kind of visibility?
EB: A great starting point is getting featured on the “best of” and “top 10” lists that already rank well on Google for your service area. Those articles are exactly what ChatGPT pulls from when it answers local buying questions, because its retrieval layer leans heavily on Google’s top results. If you’re on those lists, you’re feeding into the AI’s answer. That’s a concrete, near-term win.
Beyond that, you want to be building content that earns you organic Google rankings for high-intent searches, things like “how to tell if your roof needs replacing” or “what to expect during a commercial electrical inspection.” Ranking well for those terms means you’ll show up in AI retrieval pipelines too. The overlap between strong SEO and strong GEO is significant, especially for local and regional service businesses.
Zuper: What about platforms like Zuper, software companies serving roofing businesses? How does GEO apply to them?
EB: For a B2B software platform, GEO is even more important. When a service business owner types “best field services management software” or “how do I automate scheduling for my roofing business” into ChatGPT, it’s going to name a handful of platforms. Getting onto that short list is an enormous competitive advantage, because buyers at that stage are close to a decision.
The way to get there is through superlative presence, being included in credible, well-ranked comparison articles like “Top 10 Field Services Management Platforms.” Those articles live on third-party review sites, industry publications, and software directories, and they’re heavily weighted by AI retrieval systems. You also want your own content to be establishing you as the thought leader in your category. For Zuper, that might mean publishing detailed guides on operational efficiency for field services teams, or data-backed content on what separates high-performing service businesses from struggling ones. That kind of material signals domain expertise to both Google and generative engines.
Zuper: Is there anything unique about the field services space that makes GEO harder or easier to execute?
EB: It’s actually a favorable landscape for GEO. Field services is a fragmented industry, lots of local operators, lots of niches, and most of them are not thinking about AI visibility at all. That means the companies and software platforms that move early have a real chance to establish themselves as the default answer in their category before competition heats up.
The challenge is that field services encompasses a huge range of trades and use cases. Roofing is different from HVAC is different from pool maintenance. So your GEO strategy needs to be specific. A single piece of content that tries to address every trade won’t build authority in any of them. The more you can create clustered, deep content around a specific vertical, say, dispatching and scheduling for electrical contractors, the more the AI systems start to connect your brand with that specific domain.
Zuper: What’s your practical advice for a field services software company that wants to start building GEO traction today?
EB: Three things. First, audit where you currently appear in AI answers. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity and start asking buyer-intent questions in your category: “What’s the best software for managing field technicians?” “How do roofing companies handle dispatching at scale?” See who shows up and who doesn’t. That tells you your starting point.
After that, prioritize getting onto high-authority third-party comparison content. That means outreach to the publications and review platforms that already rank for your target terms. Being included on a well-ranked “best FSM software” article is worth more for GEO than almost anything you can do on your own site.
Finally, start producing genuinely useful educational content, the kind that answers the real operational questions your customers are Googling. Not because Google itself is the endgame, but because strong Google rankings feed directly into AI retrieval systems. The two are more connected than most people realize.
What I want to stress though is that the window is open right now. In two years, the companies that started building GEO infrastructure today will have a huge advantage. The ones that waited will be playing catch-up on a channel they should have owned from the beginning.
