Owning Your Narrative: How Construction Companies Get Found by AI Search
Most construction companies think AI search visibility doesn’t apply to them because they don’t get leads from the internet. That’s exactly the assumption this episode of Construction Hot Takes pushes back on: if you haven’t told AI who you are, AI will build an answer about you anyway, sometimes from an old bad review or a competitor’s take, because it’s designed to produce an answer regardless of whether good information exists.
Adam Cooper and Katherine walk through what it actually takes to control that narrative: deciding what to make public versus private, structuring content specifically for how AI answer engines pull and synthesize information (not just traditional keyword SEO), and why platforms like LinkedIn articles, Google Business Profile, and review sites now carry real weight in whether AI recommends you. They use a live example, a subcontractor trying to break into a data-center market flooded with unfamiliar general contractors, to show how a “top five contractors” AI Overview query could make or break a shortlist.
The conversation also tackles the objection every consultant hears: “we already have enough work, why does this matter?” Their answer: buyer behavior is shifting fast enough that even companies with full pipelines can’t assume it stays that way, and the companies moving now are getting a head start that won’t last much longer.
Watch the Episode
In This Episode
Why AI search engines will fill in gaps about your company with old reviews or competitor claims if you don’t feed them the right content
The real difference between old-school SEO keyword writing and today’s AI answer engine optimization (AEO)
Why LinkedIn articles are one of AI’s most-cited sources…and how Construction Hot Takes uses them
What a “minimum viable” structured content build actually looks like, and why skipping straight to a full rebuild wastes money
Why “we already have enough work” isn’t a reason to skip your digital presence
What is AEO (answer engine optimization) for construction companies?
AEO means structuring your website, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity can extract and cite you directly. It works alongside traditional SEO but focuses on question-and-answer content those systems are built to scrape.
Why does my construction company need AI search visibility if I already have enough work?
Buyer behavior is shifting even for companies that aren’t actively chasing leads. New general contractors entering your market, project executives changing firms, and referral partners increasingly ask AI tools for recommendations first, so a thin digital presence can quietly cost you future pipeline.
How do AI search engines decide which contractor to recommend?
AI engines scan for expertly written, well-structured content across multiple platforms: your website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and review sites; then weigh how helpful and consistent it is. Companies with more verified content in more places get cited more, regardless of how long they’ve been in business.
Why are LinkedIn articles important for AI search visibility?
LinkedIn articles are one of AI’s most frequently cited sources because they combine clear authorship, engagement signals, and searchable structure. Publishing them regularly gives AI systems another credible, well-organized place to pull information about your company’s expertise.
What’s the minimum amount of content needed to show up in AI search results?
There’s a minimum viable build, a set number of structured pieces written around the specific questions your buyers ask AI, that determines whether you show up at all. One or two pages isn’t enough, but a full multi-year website rebuild isn’t required either.
How is writing for AI search different from traditional SEO keywords?
Traditional SEO optimized single pages around target keywords. AI search rewards an interconnected web of question-and-answer content across multiple platforms that demonstrates expertise on a topic, not just one page optimized for one phrase.
Not Sure If Your Company Is Even Showing Up?
If you don’t know what AI is currently saying about your company, or whether it’s saying anything at all, that’s the first thing to find out. Book a free 30-minute consultation with Ascent Consulting and get a clear read on where your digital presence stands.
About the Hosts
Adam Cooper: President & CEO of Ascent Consulting. Adam is the primary host of Construction Hot Takes and works directly with construction company owners on operations, growth, and leadership systems.
Katherine: Co-host on this episode, leading the marketing and content strategy conversation for Ascent Consulting’s clients on AI search visibility and digital presence. (Confirm Katherine’s full title/last name before publishing.)
Not Sure What AI Is Saying About Your Company?
If you don’t know whether AI is recommending you, ignoring you, or surfacing an old bad review instead of you, that’s the first thing to find out. With a 30 minute consultation with Ascent Consulting, we will help you understand where your company stands with AI search and what you can do about it.
Join our mailing list & gain more construction business insights from our experts.
Episode Transcript
[00:00] Adam Cooper: Welcome to Construction Hot Takes. What are we talking about today?
[00:05] Katherine: Well, you would know if you read the schedule.
[00:07] Adam Cooper: I don’t do that. It’s called hot takes. I just show up.
[00:10] Katherine: Okay, well, we are talking about an article that you wrote that I actually wrote for you that we published a couple of weeks ago. Because it’s a great concept.
[00:21] Adam Cooper: Don’t tell people that I wrote it. Of course I wrote it.
[00:24] Katherine: No, he doesn’t write. So anyways.
[00:28] Adam Cooper: What was the article?
[00:29] Katherine: About controlling your narrative online. Something that has come up in a lot of sales conversations that we’ve had over the last several months with construction companies. Of course, that’s who we serve. But they, you know, why would I want to care about AEO or GEO or SEO? I don’t get my business from online leads. Right? You know, you know the conversation where I’m going now.
[00:57] Adam Cooper: Kind of.
[00:57] Katherine: Kind of. Yeah. Okay. So I wanted to talk about it because I think it’s just a really valid concept for anyone. But specifically in our construction industry, people really don’t think that they need it. And I don’t think what you don’t realize is that AI is out there making up information about you, unless you give it the right information about you.
[01:23] Adam Cooper: Or it’s ignoring you.
[01:25] Katherine: Well, yeah, saying that you that you can’t find any record of you, it will literally go find anything that’s ever been said about you. And maybe it was a horrible review or something shit talked about you by a competitor that’s online and they’re going to go surface that and it could be years old, but because there’s not a whole lot of information about you that they can find there, it’s going to go scrape that and pull that up.
[01:46] Katherine: So I wanted to talk about yeah that that concept that okay. How do you how do you do it? How do you control your narrative online in the age of AI?
[01:57] Adam Cooper: Please do tell us.
[01:59] Katherine: Well, you wrote the article. Why don’t you tell us more about it?
[02:01] Adam Cooper: How does one control their narrative? Well, I think first would be what’s the story you want to tell? Like start with the end in mind. Who are you? What do people—what do you want people to know about your company? What is the information that you want public facing, you know, versus the information you keep private?
[02:24] Adam Cooper: For example, how do you show that you’re established, credible, and that you’re capable of doing large projects, but you don’t want to share your revenue numbers. You don’t want to tell people how much, what construction volume you perform in a year, or you know, the largest project values or who some of your key clients are, because maybe you have nondisclosures or it’s not publicly available knowledge.
[02:52] Adam Cooper: So you have to start to figure out how you’re going to balance that together. We run into this a lot with companies like—it’s hard to tell how big they are sometimes or how small they are based on their presence. And sometimes smaller companies want to look bigger than they are, to appear more established and more sophisticated. And big companies know that they’re big and everybody knows that they’re big, but they don’t want to divulge, you know, privately held information.
[03:15] Adam Cooper: These are not public companies. They don’t have to talk about, you know, their value to shareholders outside of the company. So I think starting with the end in mind and understanding what is the story you want to tell, what can we promote, what do we want to promote, what would people want to know about us? Yeah.
[03:31] Katherine: I think on the flip side of that too, though, like you—because of the way that search engine—AI search engines work, right? Generative and answer engine. It’s going to pull an answer from somewhere. It’s going to—it’s made to give an answer. So it is going to create an answer. Right? And so you actually have an opportunity now to very much so influence that answer before there’s I don’t know too much information out there about all your competitors that is structured in a way that AI is actually made to go and gather and formulate the answer, right?
[04:06] Katherine: So it’s not just about putting that story out on a website. It’s about structuring the content in a very specific way that the LLMs and the AI search engines are made to pull it from there first. And so I have a client right now that I’m talking to about doing a big project to restructure all of their content online, right?
[04:28] Katherine: They had their website done before—before AI was a thing, which is crazy, that that was really just two years ago. And, you know, in normal world, two years is not that old for a website. But if you published your website before 2024 at this point or in 2024, it’s old and you need to redo it. That being said, they want to do data center work.
[04:50] Katherine: Everybody knows data centers are booming because of AI. They also realize that the state that they’re working in is one of the big data center booming states, and there’s not enough GCs to even handle all that work in one state. So there are now GCs coming into the state to do data center work. And so the GCs coming into the state are fresh.
[05:11] Katherine: They don’t have relationships. They don’t know who’s who. Maybe they’ve heard some things they’ve asked around. But like, I guarantee you that their, you know, precon people are going to be “top five list of X types of contractors in the state of Georgia that can handle this type of work.” Whatever. And AI overviews is going to pull them up a list, and they’re probably going to go down that list and make a short list to recommend to their boss. Right? So I mean.
[05:41] Adam Cooper: To clarify, this is a trade contractor that’s trying to get into…
[05:46] Adam Cooper: The game, become visible to the new general contractors that are coming into the area. They’re already doing work for the—the local GCs and the local GCs are loaded. So now there are more general contractors coming in to take up the surplus, and they don’t have relationships with those general contractors yet.
[06:04] Katherine: And or this, you know, this company maybe hasn’t done a ton of data center work, but they’ve done a little bit and they absolutely can do more of it and want to get a piece on that pie. So they got to go tell AI in a very structured and particular way that they are super capable, the best, and able to handle and part of the top five.
[06:22] Katherine: And because it’s still early days, especially in the world of construction and adoption into this whole “controlling your own narrative” from a marketing perspective in construction—like if you’re moving now, you are early moving. So you can really still get the jump. And I guarantee you probably for the next six months, you can still get the jump on your competitors, but now’s the time to do it and invest and go tell AI in a very structured content way that you are the best.
[06:46] Adam Cooper: Now being Q2 of 2026. True. So by the end of 2026, it may be—it may be too late to get out in front of everybody. You might be playing catch up by the end of this year.
[07:00] Katherine: Or just in with the main mass of people that are finally doing something about it, right?
[07:05] Adam Cooper: So not getting as much benefit, but avoiding detrimental effects.
[07:09] Katherine: Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so it’s like I just want to encourage our—our clients, be it even large commercial GCs as well, like new developers are coming in to—to your state likely if you’re—if you’re in one of these data center boom states. There’s so much work to be had that you really want to leverage this kind of golden opportunity.
[07:36] Katherine: Gold rush opportunity. It’s like early 1949, you know, like get on—or not 1849 not…
[07:43] Adam Cooper: Just to say Tombstone was 1849.
[07:45] Katherine: 1849.
[07:48] Adam Cooper: San Francisco. Yes, 49ers. 1849.
[07:50] Katherine: Exactly. Kind of say this is the gold rush of this era, right? Of like it’s still early days to get the jump on owning an entire narrative online. Like, absolutely, you can do it. And it’s not as big of a lift as maybe you think it is, like it can be done with a couple of months and a killer content team who knows what they’re doing, and you can go and own an entire narrative online or a niche over your big competitors too, because also some of the big competitors are slow movers and they don’t think they need this.
[08:25] Katherine: AI treats everybody—are—the same. As long as you’ve got the right information out there, they don’t know and they’re not going to, you know, be weighted to—that name has been around for 100 years. If their online presence isn’t saying that in a structured particular way, then they’re not going to give that one any more weight than somebody new in the field who’s done all their content really well and put it out in the right way.
[08:49] Katherine: So I think an underused—an underused piece as well, and we’ve talked about this before, is LinkedIn as a piece of not just content to be consumed and then forgotten about, but as a place to put structured content. So the articles people are putting onto LinkedIn, you’ll see you follow Ascent Consulting, we’ve been been doing this for months now because as one of AI’s number one cited sources is LinkedIn articles.
[09:18] Katherine: And it’s also pulling from Reddit, which I keep talking about. But it’s still the truth, and it’s pulling from things like Yelp and Yelp reviews. And if you think you don’t need Google reviews or Yelp reviews, you are wrong. Every single business needs reviews because it’s not about people looking you up online and seeing reviews. It’s about AI looking you up online or the agents—AI agents looking up online to make the recommendations.
[09:44] Katherine: And they’re going to go read the reviews. So there’s so much to apply to these companies who maybe in the past have been like “this kind of marketing has been irrelevant for them.” It’s no longer irrelevant. It is no longer irrelevant for…
[09:58] Adam Cooper: So—so what would you say to the construction company owner who’s been in business for 20 years? And he has his stable of general contractors that continually give him bid opportunities. He doesn’t have to qualify with them anymore. He—he’s already on the bid list. He gets more than enough work to fill his pipeline to keep his people busy year round.
[10:23] Adam Cooper: He has a very stable top of funnel and bottom of funnel system. You know. Is there any benefit outside of pipeline generation for this type of work and building a narrative like this? Like, what do you say to them? They’re like, “No, everything’s fine. We don’t need—we don’t need new clients. We just take care of the ones that we’ve got and—and business as usual.”
[10:47] Katherine: Yeah, well, to that I would say everything’s fine now for the way that the world is working now. But have you been under a rock for the last 18 months? Because the world is shifting dramatically in every single sector. And the way that people are behaving, acting, searching, buying, understanding is rapidly changing. And we’re in the middle of the biggest revolution since the technology—or since the industrial revolution.
[11:15] Katherine: Right. Like fundamentally changing how we as humans are working. So I would say you really can’t afford to not step into this new era.
[11:25] Adam Cooper: Well, I’m not saying don’t use AI. They may be saying, “We’re going to look at using AI in other areas of the business,” but is there—is there—is there—is there value in that when—we’ve had this conversation—they’re not doing marketing? They’re doing business development. They have relationships and they are just nurturing and maintaining those relationships that provide for their pipeline.
[11:49] Adam Cooper: And if the people at the general contractor don’t change, then the bid list never changes and they continue to get opportunities and they win their three out of 10 or 4 out of ten. What’s the value in doing all this work on their website?
[12:04] Katherine: So it’s so much more about—on the website, right. It’s like your entire digital presence. So it’s so much more than the website. But if you think about it and to what our friend Jeff, who we talked to the other day, I think it’s a really great mindset to have, is that if you think about your digital presence as another…
[12:21] Katherine: And in this case, we’ll say it’s like a biz dev hire. It’s like having an entire—your best biz dev person is your digital presence. And so that digital presence needs to be thought of as having almost the exact same capabilities. And because of the way the world is working and shifting towards rapidly every day, even our own baked in behaviors are beginning to shift.
[12:48] Katherine: Like you and I. I mean, you’re in your mid-50s and you have ways that you’ve always done something, but how often have you found yourself instead of just looking up something you’ve always thought you’re asking, “Hey Chatty G, tell me where I should go to dinner tonight,” or “Tell me what things I should buy” or whatever, right?
[13:11] Katherine: Like your behaviors are shifting and—and you also now listen to podcasts and you have a podcast. So I think the world is—what I’m saying is that behaviors are shifting. And even if you think you’re not going to be touched by it, your industry will be. And it’s important to have that polished, professional biz dev person of your digital entity to be out there with, saying the right stuff, looking the right way, showing up in the right places.
[13:44] Katherine: Does that make sense?
[13:46] Adam Cooper: Yeah, I mean, I would push back on it a little bit, but…
[13:57] Katherine: Push back.
[13:58] Adam Cooper: I love a hot take. Now I’ve got to think on my feet. So I’m gonna—I’m gonna buy myself a little time. Okay. And I’m going to say you’re right in that where I used to Google things, which we’ve been doing for 20 plus years now, we just Google it. I mean, it’s literally a verb in our language. Now we’re just going to Google.
[14:16] Adam Cooper: It means look it up through Google. Now I might go to one of the AI searches, the AI tools like chat—ChatGPT or Claude. I might…
[14:28] Katherine: I might go to and do go to.
[14:28] Adam Cooper: Well, no, I still go to Google for things.
[14:30] Katherine: But Google’s serving you up an AI Overview.
[14:31] Adam Cooper: Google is still serving me up an AI answer that I’m now paying attention to. Like they put it at the top and that’s their AI, that’s Gemini. So it’s like it’s unavoidable. Like I can’t tell Google, “Don’t give me AI results.” It doesn’t—doesn’t listen to me when I tell it that. So you’re—you’re going to see it anyway.
[14:55] Adam Cooper: To that end I would—I would question: are there levels of what you’re talking about? Is there—is there a mid-level of redesign or restructuring the data on your website as—as opposed to a full overhaul and rebuild of the website? Yeah. Because—because I as—if I’m that contractor I was describing, I might not need the full thing because it’s not a—it’s not a huge source of pipeline for me on the marketing and biz dev side.
[15:33] Adam Cooper: If I’ve already got those relationships, sure, I might want to update it, but you know, to make me look more current, just like a regular website refresh. And if I’m going to refresh my website every 3 to 5 years, this would be an opportune time to take that on, to take advantage of this new schema, the new structures, the new—the new way of doing things to make you more AI search and answer friendly.
[15:59] Adam Cooper: But I don’t think of it as imperative to my business. Like my business isn’t going to fail if I don’t do this, but I could gain some benefit out of getting it done sooner rather than later. I’m going to have to do it at some point, because the future of web design, this is just going to be native.
[16:14] Adam Cooper: It’s going to be the way websites are now constructed, whether you like it or not, because you’re just going to lose points if you don’t. This is like when WordPress came out, what, 15 or so years ago, it was brand new and people started getting bonus points if they had a WordPress design site, and then it became the standard.
[16:34] Adam Cooper: And if you didn’t have web—WordPress, you got demoted. Basically, you were given demerits on your website ranking. So I think this is going to become like the new standard is how I—is how I view this right now. Does that resonate?
[16:51] Katherine: There’s definitely a minimum viable product. You know, there’s—there’s either don’t do anything at all because doing just a little bit is not helpful. You’re wasting money. There’s a—there’s a minimum impact lift that needs to be made in order to make the impact. Right? So—and it’s not small, it’s not huge, but it’s not nothing and it’s not small and it’s not “Oh $1,000, a couple thousand”—no it’s there’s a minimum viable product.
[17:14] Adam Cooper: Maybe it would help if you explained: what—what are we actually talking about here? Like what on a technical level—spend 60 seconds from a technical standpoint—what are we actually talking about here?
[17:27] Katherine: Yeah. So we’re talking about a structured content suite.
[17:32] Adam Cooper: And what does that really mean.
[17:34] Katherine: Well, do I want to give away all my secret sauce?
[17:37] Adam Cooper: I would like you to explain it in layman’s terms so that our audience can understand what we’re actually talking about.
[17:44] Katherine: So there’s a specific way of writing and structuring content, and a minimum number of pieces of content that need to go in that we’ve found make the best impact. So the content has to be written for, you know, search terms and queries that are actually in AI and that AI is associating with your, you know, ideal search terms and what you want your company to show up for.
[18:12] Adam Cooper: So similar, like writing for keywords as we used to do. Similar. Yeah. Like we can make some analogies here.
[18:19] Katherine: Yes. But now it’s—it’s about writing for questions and queries. But then there’s also a whole set of interlinked questions and queries that you want to make sure that you’re also writing for, because the way that AI “thinks,” right. It’s more of in this sort of like web metric versus—necessarily taking—a human would kind of go from here to here to here.
[18:43] Adam Cooper: To here instead of a tree and a branch.
[18:45] Katherine: Yeah. So it’s—yes, it’s like this huge interconnected web. And if you’re showing up in with a valuable, intelligent, you know, helpful answer and content that’s structured in such a way for it to be able to read it and understand and know that it was done with expertise and authority in all of these different little sprinkles of the web. Then it’s going to see all of that in a way that—that pulls you out as like the answer that it should be serving up to this query.
[19:16] Katherine: I don’t know if that was clear as mud or horrible, but it’s—it’s slightly convoluted a little bit, but it’s really all about producing enough expertly sourced, cited, linked, and helpful content about specific sets of queries and questions that relate to what you want to be serving up for in multiple places across the internet, multiple different outlets. So using Google Business Profile, your own website, LinkedIn, Reddit, social media.
[19:55] Katherine: Really being all of those places in the right ways and factions for it to know you are who you say you are and you’re the best at the job you’re supposed to be doing.
[20:02] Adam Cooper: Got it? So let me say it back to you in a more…
[20:07] Katherine: Succinct way.
[20:08] Adam Cooper: Than my language, in a way that maybe I’m understanding it and see if I get this right. So in the old days, you would write content on your website that promoted and spoke to the keywords that you wanted to be found for so…
[20:24] Katherine: So much stuff of keywords.
[20:25] Adam Cooper: Well, I was going to say—so, like if I’m a mechanical contractor, I would write all about, you know, my HVAC capabilities, the types of work I’ve done, the different facilities I would talk about, I would have some technical articles on there. I would have project portfolios on my website, and that was enough for Google to crawl the web and pull those see that I had content around those keywords and match me up.
[20:49] Adam Cooper: And then, yeah, in the old days we would just keyword stuff, but that—they—they got smarter than that. But if you had enough articles or enough content around that, Google served you up as, “Hey, this looks like a pretty authoritative source.” They scored pretty high because they have multiple pieces of content around that, but I didn’t have to go outside of my own website very much to get decent results.
[21:10] Adam Cooper: Then as things evolved, then there was back linking. Back linking came out, and then that was like having other people cite your website as a reference, gave you more credibility and got you a higher score on Google. So the more backlinks you had. So what I’m hearing you say now is now it’s not about getting backlinks, it’s more about publishing your same content, but in multiple platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn and Google Business Profile.
[21:34] Adam Cooper: And when AI sees that you’ve got similar content that’s helpful in multiple venues, multiple places on the web, now, it’s giving you better. It’s thinking you’re a more credible source and serving you up as a—as a more likely candidate to people’s queries. And it’s—it’s not just your content like that. It’s also, like you said, it’s more helpful.
[21:57] Adam Cooper: It’s more question and answer instead of just factual stuff.
[22:01] Katherine: Almost.
[22:02] Adam Cooper: But along those lines.
[22:03] Katherine: I mean, but don’t—backlinks are still very important in writing SEO and your website is still very important. But sure, yes.
[22:09] Adam Cooper: This is like the next—the next version or the next thing. Remember, like there’s keyword stuffing. Then there was back linking, then there was the next thing, then there was structured metadata. Then there was on and on and on. It’s just the next—the next layer is now is what I’m hearing.
[22:24] Katherine: Yes. And what I want people to remember to at the end of the day, like the—the way that search engines work, like the companies aren’t evil in trying to keep people from getting answers. They aren’t changing the game like it’s always continually being structured more and more towards how can it—we serve up the very best answers to the queries that are being given, and so they’re finding new and better ways to be more precise and serve up better and more helpful content, and get even more specific about where they’re scraping information from to pull together the very best thing.
[22:56] Katherine: So it’s really about now that it’s gotten smarter. And so you really—you have to feed it more smart stuff in order to continue to pass the test. Right? So yes, it has to be in more locations. It has to be structured specifically.
[23:13] Adam Cooper: I thought of another analogy. Yeah. In the beginning, we were writing for sixth graders, and sixth graders liked sixth grade level reading. And now the reader has grown up and now it’s reading college level material. And if you’re still serving it up, a sixth grade novel, it gets bored really fast and it doesn’t give you much credibility. So you have got to have to write at the level that the—of the brain that is reading it—and that brain is AI.
[23:38] Katherine: Yeah. Kind of it’s—yeah. It’s really about—well, let’s, you know, let’s just say yes. Yes.
[23:44] Adam Cooper: It’s why I don’t—that’s why I’ve never read Harry Potter too. I was too old when it came out. It was below my reading level.
[23:51] Katherine: Never too old for Harry Potter. Harry Potter is one of the very best pieces of literature that’s been written in the last 20 years.
[23:58] Adam Cooper: All right. So I think we should wrap right there.
[24:01] Katherine: If you are questioning me, then you actually don’t understand the literary genius of…
[24:06] Adam Cooper: J.K. Rowling. Yeah, I don’t know. Sorry.
[24:09] Katherine: It’s too advanced for you.
[24:12] Adam Cooper: Yeah, let’s say that. Yes. All right. Thanks for joining us for Construction Hot Takes. I hope this was educational and informative. It was for me. Thanks. I enjoyed the conversation.
[24:21] Katherine: If you’re a construction company who says, “I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, but I want to know what you’re talking about.” Reach out to our team. You can find our website. Book a call with me. I’m happy to just chat marketing with you all day.
