- The research
Original research on the machinery between home service businesses and the AI systems used to find them.
An ongoing body of work, written for the decision-makers inside scaling home service businesses. Sourced, specific, and grounded in real measurement.
- Coming soon, v1 mid-to-late June 2026
Whitepaper Vol. I
The Invisible Layer How AI search actually surfaces home service businesses, and why operators can't see it.
By Michael Purvis · 2026
The next paper
What's actually happening between a home service business and the AI systems people use to find them.
In development · v1 publishing mid-to-late June 2026
There’s a layer between a home service business’s marketing work and the customer using AI to find them. The operator can’t see inside it. There’s no easy way to know whether the business is winning or losing in there. This paper opens that layer up, shows how it actually works, and lays out what’s at stake when it breaks.
Built on direct measurement across 140 home service businesses in seven cities and four industries. The paper covers two things every operator has control over in this layer, but most don’t know they do. The first is a decision most operators have never made. The second is the check they should be running after the decision, that almost nobody is running.
Sample frame
140 sites, 7 cities, 4 industries
Industries
Roofing, paving, landscaping, HVAC
Audiences
Decision-makers inside scaling home service businesses
Format
Full whitepaper, PDF
- Inside the paper
Two halves of operator agency in the invisible layer. Both broken.
i.
The foundational decision
Every home service business has to decide what AI search systems are allowed to do with its website. Most owners and marketing teams have never made that decision. The default has been made for them by infrastructure layers they don’t control. The paper documents this as the Absent-Decision Pattern, measured across the full 140-site sample.
ii.
The observation that should follow
Once the decision is made, you need to be watching what happens next. The tool for that exists, and it’s free. Most home service businesses, and most of their marketing vendors, aren’t using it. The paper documents this as the UTM Instrumentation Gap, measured through fresh deployments across a 46-site subset.
iii.
What's at stake
What it costs a home service business to be invisible in the channel customers and partners now use first. The gap between visible and invisible businesses widens fast, and it widens in places the operator can’t easily see.
iv.
What to do about it
A ranked list of what to do in the next 90 days. Specific, practical work, not theory. The same work I’m running across the businesses I’m currently auditing and consulting to.
- In the queue
An ongoing research program. More papers, as the work surfaces them.
The Invisible Layer is the first publication. The work behind it continues to surface research questions worth a paper of their own. These are the next ones in the queue.
Future paper
Vol. II
The Latency Question
How long it takes for a change on a home service business’s website, directory listing, or schema to surface in AI search citations. A measured baseline, by source type, for the home services category.
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Future paper
Vol. III
The Query Rewrite Study
How ChatGPT reformulates a customer’s question before searching for home service businesses, and how often the rewritten query uses different vocabulary than the customer, or the operator, actually uses.
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Future paper
Vol. IV
The Source Substitution Pattern
When AI systems can’t read the operator’s own website, they cite somebody else. Documenting who that somebody else is, in the home services category, and what it means for the operator’s competitive position.
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