Ask a business owner whether they have a FAQ page and most will say yes. Open it and you'll find six questions like "Do you offer free estimates?" and "Are you licensed and insured?" each answered with a single word and a phone number. It's there because a web designer in 2016 said it should be. It has never brought anyone a customer.

That page is also the single cheapest lever you have for showing up in AI answers, if you rewrite it properly. Here's why, and how.

Why questions are the unit

An assistant's answer is built from fragments of pages it retrieved. When the customer's question is "how much does a plumber charge to replace a water heater in Tucson," the fragments that get used are the ones that look like an answer to that question — a heading that resembles the question, followed by a paragraph that resolves it. A page that already contains that pairing is doing the model's work for it. A page that buries the same information in a 900-word "About our services" essay isn't.

This is different from how you'd write for Google ten years ago. Google matched keywords to pages and let the customer find the answer on the page. The assistant has to extract the answer and say it. Pages that make extraction easy get quoted. Pages that don't get skipped.

The questions to use

Not the six from 2016. Use the ones customers actually ask, phrased the way they ask them. Sources, in order of quality: your phone log and inbox, your Google Business Profile's Questions & Answers tab, the "People also ask" box when you search your service and city, and — this is the one people forget — the assistants themselves. Ask ChatGPT "what should I ask before hiring a plumber in Tucson" and it will list ten questions. Answer those ten on your site and you have written the page the model wants to cite.

For a local service business, the questions that come up in almost every trade are about cost ("how much does X cost in [city]"), speed ("can you come today," "how fast for an emergency"), area ("do you serve [neighbourhood]"), credentials ("are you licensed in Arizona," "what does ROC-licensed mean"), and comparison ("repair or replace," "how do I choose a good X"). Eight to twelve questions is enough. Thirty is a wall nobody reads and a model can't weight.

The answer that gets quoted

Forty to eighty words. Direct. Starts by actually answering — a number, a yes, a timeframe — and then qualifies. Includes the business name and the city naturally, once. Ends. No "contact us to learn more," which is the sentence that tells the model there's no answer here.

Weak: "Every job is different, so please give us a call for a free estimate."

Quotable: "Replacing a 40-gallon gas water heater in Tucson typically runs $1,400 to $2,200 installed, including permit and haul-away. Saguaro Plumbing quotes a fixed price before work starts, and most replacements are done the same day. Tankless conversions cost more and we'll tell you honestly whether one makes sense for your house."

The second version is scary to a lot of owners because it commits to numbers. That commitment is the whole value. The assistant will cite the page that gave the customer a real answer, and the customer will call the business that didn't make them ask.

The markup

Once the content exists, mark it up as FAQPage so the machine knows the structure. Most SEO plugins have a FAQ block that writes this for you; if you use the WordPress block editor, Yoast and Rank Math both add one. By hand, it's a JSON-LD block listing each question and its answer text — the answer in the markup must match the answer on the page.

Don't put FAQ markup on pages that don't visibly contain the questions. That was a Google trick in 2019 and it's a liability now.

Where it lives

One FAQ page is fine to start. Better, over time, is a short FAQ section at the bottom of each service page — three or four questions specific to that service — because that's where the specific intent lands. "How much does drain cleaning cost" belongs on the drain cleaning page, with the drain cleaning schema. The general FAQ page collects the questions that are about the company rather than a service.

Link the FAQ from your main navigation. Crawlers find it faster, and the Duly Noted audit's About-and-Contact check is looking for exactly this kind of trust-signal page one click from the homepage.

What changes

In reports, the FAQ check flags three states: no question-style content at all, question-style content with no FAQPage markup, and marked-up FAQ. Moving from the first to the third is a week of writing, most of it spent working up the nerve to publish prices. Of all the items in the site readiness audit, it's the one that most reliably turns a "named" result into a "linked" one, because for the first time there's a page of yours worth pointing at.