Use the most exact type name that exists for your trade. A plumbing company is Plumber, a roofing company is RoofingContractor, heating and air is HVACBusiness, and an electrical company is Electrician. If your trade has no name of its own on the list, use LocalBusiness and stop there.
Eight trades have their own name
Those four names are not something a marketer made up. They sit inside a group called HomeAndConstructionBusiness, defined as a business that provides services around homes and buildings.
Eight trades have their own name inside that group:
- Electrician
- GeneralContractor
- HVACBusiness
- HousePainter
- Locksmith
- MovingCompany
- Plumber
- RoofingContractor
Eight. Not eighty. You can count them yourself at https://schema.org/HomeAndConstructionBusiness, which is marked version 30.0, dated March 19, 2026. The list is kept by an open community that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex founded.
Spelling matters more here than it looks. RoofingContractor exists. Roofer does not, and that address returns a not found page. Neither does Landscaper, PestControl, or GarageDoor. So if you run a landscaping crew, a pest control route, a garage door shop, or a restoration outfit, LocalBusiness is your honest answer. A name somebody invented is a word no machine was ever taught to read.
What Google actually asks for
Google’s page on local business markup gives one rule for picking a type: use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible. That is the whole instruction. Google Search Central, last updated December 10, 2025.
The same page lists exactly two required items. The business name, and the address. Two. Hours, phone number, and price range all sit further down the page under recommended, not required.
So the job is smaller than most quotes for it. The right type word, your name, and your address. Written once, then left alone.
The code has to match the page
Google’s general guidelines for page markup are blunt about this. “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.” Google Search Central, last updated July 10, 2026.
That is not a technicality. The hours in the code have to be the hours printed on the page. The address in the code has to be the address a customer would drive to. If your page says you close at four and the code says eight, somebody is standing in your lot at seven.
The same care goes for a license number. Rules about displaying one are set by your state, not by Google, and putting a number in code is not the same as showing it to a customer. This is not legal or tax advice. Your state licensing board or your own attorney is the place to ask.
Will the right type name get you into AI answers
No. Anyone telling you it will is guessing in front of you.
Google’s own page on its AI features says you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in those features, and it names llms.txt among them. It goes on to say there is no special markup you need to add for them either. Google Search Central, last updated December 10, 2025.
Even in ordinary search, the label buys you a chance and nothing more. The local business page says plainly that Google makes no promise the features which read this markup will show up in results at all.
OpenAI’s page listing the crawlers it runs names four of them and says what each one is for. Page markup is not mentioned anywhere on it, in either direction. That page carries no update date.
So the honest position is narrow. A correct type name is normal upkeep for a business website, the same as a working phone link. There is no published test showing it moves an AI answer, and nobody can promise you a mention in one. What an assistant can and cannot read off your pages is a different question, and what ChatGPT reads on your website walks through it. If you want to know who gets named for your kind of job today, a free scan asks the assistants the question a customer would ask and writes down the names that come back.
What to do next
This is half an hour on a laptop, once.
- Paste your home page address into the free checker at https://validator.schema.org/ and read what comes back.
- Find the type word in the result. If it says LocalBusiness and you are a plumber, change it to Plumber. Same for the other seven trades.
- Read the name and address in the code against the name and address printed on the page. Fix whichever one is wrong, not whichever one is easier to reach.
- If your trade is not one of the eight, leave it as LocalBusiness. Do not let anyone invent a name for you.
- If it already checks out, stop. There is nothing to buy here and nothing to redo next month.
Two more things worth saying out loud. A type name is not a ranking, and it is not a lead. It is a label that tells a machine what kind of business it is looking at, so the rest of your page has a chance of being understood correctly.
And it is a once job, not a monthly one. On this site it rides along with the ongoing search checks instead of sitting on an invoice by itself, and a new build ships with the label already in place. If somebody is billing you every month to maintain a type word, a fair question is what they expect to change about it.