You want a local client to show up when somebody asks ChatGPT for the top three companies in their trade. Josh Thompson, who runs Brightbeam SEO in Boise, Idaho, tried the most literal fix there is. He put the word “top” in a client’s title tag and H1, and within a week that client was the number one answer for the chat query. He walked me through it on his Unscripted SEO episode, and the reasoning behind it is more useful than the trick.
Chat answers for local queries come from the regular SERP
Josh lives in Google Maps. Most of his clients are contractors, and he estimates that around 75% of their customers call straight from the map listing. So you’d expect AI answers for local questions to come from the map pack too. What he found was different:
“The interesting thing, like you said, is a lot of these are just search results, right? But they’re not map results as I’m seeing, at least now it shows it as a map sometimes, but it’s actually just pulling from searches, right? From the SERPs.”
That lines up with what I’d heard from Mike King’s read of Google I/O: the new AI search runs real searches and then summarizes them. It’s AI on top of search, not a replacement for it. If the answer is built from the organic results, the organic page is the thing you can change.
The test: one word, one client, one week
Here’s how Josh described it, start to finish:
“I typed in top three, you know, companies for one of my clients. They weren’t there. Great. That’s exactly what I wanted. I went and put top in their title in their H1, top company. And then within a week. They were the number one, right? In that search.”
Before you copy it, be clear about what this is. It’s one client in one mid-sized market, checked by hand. There’s no control group, and chat answers vary between sessions. Josh didn’t present it as more than that. What it does tell you is that the chat answer was matching the wording of the request against the wording on the page, and a page that never used the word lost to pages that did.
Why “top” and “best” are about to matter more
Josh’s bet is about phrasing. People don’t type to an assistant the way they type to Google. They ask for a shortlist:
“These terms like best and top are going to become way more important as this gets bigger. Right? I think people are going to type that in. [I] think more people are going to type on, give me the top three. Give me the top 10.”
That’s the same problem I work on with keyword clusters. When I pull the ranking keywords for the top 10 URLs on a local query and run a frequency analysis, the job is finding the intent-matched terms and phrases people use for the same service: HVAC, air conditioning, heating and cooling. “Top” and “best” are modifiers on that list now. If your service pages never use the words the request uses, you are asking the model to make a leap it doesn’t have to make.
For the page structure that carries those words, these service area page examples show what a clean city-plus-service layout looks like.
Everyone will copy it, and then authority decides
Josh was the first to say the trick has a shelf life:
“If everybody goes and does that, which they probably will, then what matters? Okay. Well, your authority, your backlinks and your history and every, can you outrank your competitors?”
That’s the part I’d underline for agency owners. If chat answers come from search results, the old work still decides who wins once the wording is equal. Links, reviews, a real business history and a site that tells Google what you do in which cities. Josh’s view is that this is actually good news for local SEO: “nothing really changes,” especially for bottom-of-funnel searches where somebody needs a service AI can’t perform.
What to do with this on your own clients
- Run the shortlist query yourself. “Top three [trade] in [city]” in ChatGPT, logged out, and note who shows up.
- Check whether your client’s title and H1 use the words the request uses. Add them where they read naturally, not stuffed.
- Re-run the query weekly and keep a log, because a single screenshot proves very little.
- Watch your own data with skepticism. Search Console doesn’t show you every click, so a chat-driven lift may show up in calls before it shows up in your reports.
Josh’s whole episode covers more ground, from AI agents requesting estimates to his first five moves for a brand-new contractor. Listen to the full conversation with Josh Thompson, or read Josh Shankowsky’s take on AI tools as consensus engines for a second local SEO view on the same shift.