Which is why a missed one hurts so much more here than anywhere else — and why being one of the two or three names an assistant gives when somebody asks for a builder in your town is worth going after properly.
Nobody decides to have an extension on a Tuesday morning. It starts months earlier, in the evening, with somebody looking at their kitchen and wondering what it would take. What used to be a Google session is increasingly a conversation with an assistant — "roughly what does a single-storey rear extension cost", "do I need planning for a loft conversion", "who does extensions around Heswall". It answers all three, and the last one with two or three names. By the time they ring, they have already shortlisted. The work is deciding who gets on that list.
Photographs are how a person decides and exactly nothing to a machine. A caption saying what it was, which town it was in and roughly what it cost is worth more than ten more pictures.
Single-storey rear, wrap-around, two-storey side, loft with dormer, garage conversion, full refurb, listed building, groundworks. These are the phrases people ask in, and "all aspects of building work" matches none of them.
You do not have to publish a price list. But a range, a "from", or even "most of our extensions land between X and Y" is the single most-asked question in this trade — and a page that answers it gets cited.
"Currently booking for spring" tells a customer and an assistant more than a homepage of adjectives, and it filters out the enquiries you cannot service anyway.
The enquiry that decides a fifty-thousand-pound job arrives while you are on site with a nail gun going. It rings out, and they ring the next one.
Your average job, your conversion, your numbers.
A modest single-storey extension, and a deliberately LOW conversion rate — most builders quote far more than they win, and pretending otherwise would make this number dishonest. Even at one in eight, the arithmetic on this page is unlike any other trade we write for. Change every figure to yours.
We ask the four assistants the question your clients ask and send you their answers word for word. One report, no charge, no account. You cannot fix a thing you have not measured.
A UK number for the business, live in minutes, that is not the phone your family rings. And when you are ready, Optiman Answered picks it up when you cannot — takes the enquiry, takes the message, and tells you straight away.
One answer is a coin toss; they vary by day, wording and location. So we ask the SAME questions again every 7, 14 or 28 days and show you the line. That is the difference between a curiosity and evidence.
We are not promising to put you top of anything. Assistants have no positions and nothing to buy. And we do not touch Checkatrade, MyBuilder or Rated People. Those are paid lead platforms with their own rules — and it is worth knowing that they often WIN the AI answer, because they have written far more about your town than you have. When that happens we will show you, because "a directory is being recommended instead of you" is a finding you can act on. What you get is the truth about one growing surface, in writing, for nothing.
You probably would not want more — you would want BETTER. Being named by an assistant tends to bring the researched enquiry rather than the price-shopper, because somebody who asked a careful question gets a careful answer. And "booked for a year" is a position, not a permanent state.
Which is the best possible position, and also the most fragile: it depends on the last customer still living locally and still talking. This is the same thing by another route — being recommended when nobody in the room knows you.
No. There is no lead fee and nothing per enquiry. And there is a specific reason to care: the directories frequently come up INSTEAD of you in an AI answer, because they have written more about your town than your own site has. The free check shows you whether that is happening.
Constantly — mostly about cost and planning, which is exactly the conversation that ends in choosing a builder. A page that plainly answers those two things is the most citable thing a building firm can publish.
Nothing, no account. Your firm name and your town is enough.
A number of your own that takes the job, the address and the timescale while your hands are full.
How a number worksTell us your firm name, your town and what you do. We put the question your clients actually ask to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, send you what each one said word for word, and tell you what it would take to change it.