What questions should a contractor put on their website?

The real ones customers ask on the phone, in their own words. Write down the last five questions you were asked, answer each in two or three plain sentences, and put them on the page where they belong.

How long should an FAQ answer be?

Two or three sentences is usually enough. Answer the question in the first sentence, then give the reason or the next step.

Does FAQ markup still matter if Google stopped showing FAQ results?

Google limited FAQ results to well-known government and health sites in August 2023, so the markup won't win a special Google listing for most contractors. It still labels each question and answer clearly for any program that reads the page, as long as it matches the visible text and is in the page itself.

Should I put prices in my FAQ?

That's your call. If you're comfortable giving a range, give one; if not, explain what drives the price and how a homeowner gets a real number.

By Jimmy Davidson · November 3, 2026 · Updated November 6, 2026

Answer the Question They Type Into ChatGPT

Think about the questions you answer on the phone every week. How long does it take? Do I have to be home? Do you work in my town? Is this an emergency or can it wait until Monday?

More and more of those questions get typed into ChatGPT before anybody picks up a phone. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers found that use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% the year before to 45% (BrightLocal). So the question is simple: when a homeowner asks ChatGPT what they'd ask you, is your website one of the places with the answer?

The phone questions are the search questions

Here's the thing about the questions homeowners ask. They don't type "roof replacement services." They type the way they talk: "My shingles are curling. Do I need a new roof or can it be repaired?"

ChatGPT has to answer that in plain words, and when it searches the web, it shows where its answer came from. OpenAI says answers that use web search may include citations to the sources (OpenAI Help Center). A page that answers that exact question, clearly, is the kind of page that can be cited. A page that says "Quality roofing you can trust" answers nothing.

You already know the questions. You've been answering them for years. The job is to write them down.

Start with your last five phone calls

Write down the last five questions a customer asked you. Not the ones you wish they'd ask. The real ones, in their words. Do it tonight, from memory, or keep a notepad in the truck for a week.

A few examples by trade, to get you started:

Roofing: Do I have to be home while you work? Can you put a new roof on over the old one? What happens if it rains halfway through?
HVAC: My furnace is running but the house is cold. Is that an emergency? How often should a furnace be serviced?
Plumbing: My sump pump keeps running. Should I worry? Can you fix a frozen pipe without tearing out the wall?
Builders and remodelers: How long does a kitchen remodel take? Do I need a permit for a deck in my town?

Those are examples. Your list should come from your own calls, because your customers ask about your work, in your area.

Two sentences, right on the page

Answer it in two sentences, right on the page. The first sentence answers the question. The second gives the reason or the next step. That's it.

Here's the difference. A homeowner asks, "Do I have to be home during my roof job?"

Weak: "At [Company], customer satisfaction is our top priority, and we work around your schedule to make the process as easy as possible."
Strong (an example): "No. We need access to the driveway and an outdoor outlet, and we send photos at the end of each day so you can see the progress from wherever you are."

The strong one answers in the first word, gives a specific detail, and sounds like a real contractor. That's the kind of answer ChatGPT can repeat without guessing.

A few rules that help:

Answer first. Don't make them read three sentences to find out.
Be specific to your area. Name your towns, your weather, your soil, your building season.
Write it as text. Not in a picture, not in a PDF, not in a video only. Google says important content should be available "in textual form" for its own AI answers (Google Search Central).
Write it yourself. Google's guidance asks whether content shows "first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge" (Google Search Central). Nobody has more first-hand experience with your customers' questions than you do.
About price: if you're comfortable giving a range, give one. If not, say what drives the price and how to get a real number. Don't dodge it, because it's the question everybody asks.

Why an FAQ page isn't fluff anymore

An FAQ page isn't fluff anymore. For years, it was the page web designers stuck at the bottom of the menu and nobody read. Now it's where the plain answers live, and plain answers are what ChatGPT is looking for.

There's also a small piece of code that helps, called FAQ markup (FAQPage, from schema.org, a shared vocabulary for web pages). It labels each question and each answer, so a machine reading the page knows exactly which is which (schema.org).

Let's be straight about Google, though. In August 2023, Google stopped showing FAQ drop-downs in its search results for most websites. It now shows them only for well-known government and health sites (Google Search Central Blog). So don't add FAQ markup expecting a fancy Google listing. Add it because it labels your answers clearly for any program that reads your page, and because Google says leftover structured data that no longer gets a special display doesn't cause problems for Search (Google Search Central Blog).

Two rules for the code. It has to match what's on the page, word for word; Google says "don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page" (Google Search Central). And it has to be in the page when it's sent, not added later by a script. A December 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ found that OpenAI's crawlers don't run JavaScript (Vercel).

That's what we found on our own sites. On Silver Loon Roofing's site, the FAQ part of our check was zero in August. Adding six real homeowner questions to the homepage, with the markup in the page itself, was the first fix on the way from 74 to 97 (our own five-part check, starting score August 2026, re-checked October 10, 2026).

Where to put the answers

Your homepage: the four to six questions every new customer asks.
Each service page: the questions about that service.
Each town page: local questions, like which towns you cover and anything local that changes the job.
One FAQ page: all of them in one place.

Then keep adding. Every time a homeowner asks something new on the phone, it goes on the list.

If you want to know whether your site already has FAQ markup in the page, our free audit checks it, along with four other things. It's at www.peakgrowthpartner.com/audit, takes a few seconds, and your web address is all it asks for.

Sources

BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (February 11, 2026; 1,002 US adults): https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/
OpenAI Help Center, "Searching the web with ChatGPT" (citations): https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-searching-the-web-with-chatgpt
Google Search Central, "AI features and your website": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
Google Search Central, "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
Google Search Central Blog, "Changes to HowTo and FAQ rich results" (August 8, 2023): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes
Google Search Central, "General structured data guidelines": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies
schema.org, FAQPage: https://schema.org/FAQPage
Vercel and MERJ, "The rise of the AI crawler" (December 17, 2024): https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler