What homeowners ask before they hire a heating or electrical firm

Trades content decays faster than most. A grant scheme's value, its eligibility list or the products that qualify can all be revised between one heating season and the next. Refrigerant rules change what an F-gas engineer may fit. In the US a tax credit's cap can change, a state rebate can close its funding round, and permit rules differ by county. A page carrying a superseded figure costs you the enquiry, because the homeowner finds the current number elsewhere and rings whoever published it.

Two mechanisms deal with that.

• Figures that move go on the list of things your articles must never state, which you set when the site is configured. Articles then explain how a scheme works and link to the official source for the number instead of baking a figure into the prose.
• The nightly loop reads each published article's Search Console impressions and clicks and queues a refresh when they decay. The refreshed draft passes the same checks as a new one before it replaces what is live.

A worked example of why the rule exists. As at 4 September 2026 the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, open to people in England and Wales, offers £7,500 towards an air source or ground source heat pump, £5,000 towards a biomass boiler and £2,500 towards an air-to-air heat pump, with an extra £1,500 for properties heated by oil or LPG off the mains gas grid until March 2027 (gov.uk/apply-boiler-upgrade-scheme/what-you-can-get). Every one of those numbers has moved before and will move again, and Scotland and Northern Ireland run separate schemes entirely. An article that bakes the figure in is wrong the week it changes; an article that explains who qualifies and links to that page is not.

If a scheme changes before a refresh is due, you can withdraw the article from your dashboard in the meantime.

Your standing rests on registrations a homeowner can check on a public register: Gas Safe, OFTEC, MCS, NICEIC, NAPIT and F-gas certification in the UK; EPA Section 608, NATE and state contractor licences in the US. Claiming one you do not hold is not an editorial slip, it is a trading standards matter, and a scheme name attached to work outside your scope is nearly as damaging.

When the site is configured you list the registrations you hold and what each one covers. Every other scheme name goes on the never-state list, which is applied to each draft as a rule rather than left to the writer's judgement. A draft naming a certification you have not listed is sent back for revision instead of published. The same list carries your wording, so if your firm says consumer unit and never fuse board, the articles follow.

What the engine does state is checked by models that did not write it, each check including at least one from a different vendor, which is what cross-model validation means here. Pro-tier judges are stricter: 25% cleared every check across a small sample of 16 runs. For articles about regulations and money, Pro is the tier we suggest.

Generic trades content reads identically on every site because it was written from the same public pages. What a competitor cannot copy is your data: datasheets for the boilers, cylinders and heat pump units you actually fit, the quotes you have issued for a like-for-like combi swap, the survey notes explaining why one semi suited a heat pump and the house next door did not, and the questions your office answers by phone every week.

Where that first-party data exists, IT Master ingests it read-only and grounds the articles in it. A sizing article then works from the output tables of the units you install rather than a rounded number from a manufacturer's blog, and a rewiring article reflects how you actually price a three-bedroom house. Every draft is also scored for novelty against the pages already ranking, so a draft that restates the top ten is sent back rather than published.

You do not need a data warehouse to start. A price list in a spreadsheet, a folder of PDFs and one page of frequently asked questions are enough to separate your article from one any tool could produce.

Plenty of trades sites run on WordPress and have not been logged into since the build, so that is the path we optimise for.

• Install the WordPress plugin and paste one key from your dashboard.
• Posts arrive with the Yoast or Rank Math fields already populated.
• Each carries JSON-LD schema, a hero image, an FAQ block and internal links into your service and area pages.
• IndexNow tells the search engines that support it about the URL the day it goes live.

Next.js sites use the @itmaster/sdk package instead, and any other stack can pull the REST feed or take a signed webhook at an endpoint you choose. Shopify and Webflow we set up on request. Wix and Squarespace sites get a copy-paste queue: article, meta fields and image, ready to paste.

You pay per published article from a prepaid balance, with no subscription, no seat fee and no minimum, and a draft that fails the checks is not charged. Fixed prices per published article: Lite £9, Standard £19, Pro £39 and Premium £69 — about $11, $24, $50 and $88, charged in GBP. Length does not change the price, only the tier does; the tiers are compared on pricing. One Standard article a week is therefore about £76 a month; for the grant and regulation pages we suggest Pro, at £39 each. When the balance runs out the next article does not start. Articles drip out on the cadence you set, which is worth raising a couple of months before your busiest season rather than during it.

Every night the engine pulls Search Console figures for each published article, including impressions, clicks and the queries it surfaced for, and queues the decaying ones for a refresh. Read those numbers with the season in mind: a boiler page losing impressions in July is behaving normally, while the same drop in October is worth a look.

The same loop asks GPT and Perplexity the questions your articles answer and records whether your site is named, because plenty of homeowners now ask an assistant what a heat pump should cost before they open a search engine. That citation rate belongs next to clicks.

Stated as measured rather than promised: Across 186 Standard-tier runs, 21% of drafts cleared every check on the first attempt with no revision, and 51% got there within the three revisions allowed; the rest never published. What no honest supplier can tell you is how a search engine will treat any particular article.

Before spending anything, run the site check on what you have, then the AI Visibility Checker and the AI Crawler Check. If a broader view suits you better, the local services page covers the same engine from the owner's side.

Content is the wrong first spend for plenty of good firms. The specific cases:

• Your Google Business Profile is unclaimed or thin. For a domestic trade the map pack and the reviews usually move more work than the blog. Sort those first.
• You need the phone to ring this month. An article has to be crawled, indexed and given time to gather links. That is months, not weeks. Paid search buys next week; this does not.
• One service, one town. There may be a dozen genuine questions worth answering, and after that the engine would be adding pages rather than answers.
• You want the articles to quote your prices. Job prices vary by property and by survey, and a figure in an indexed article becomes the number a customer holds you to. Prices belong on the never-state list unless you genuinely publish a fixed rate card.
• You expect the engine to keep a grant figure current. It does the opposite by design: volatile numbers go on the never-state list and the article links to the official page instead. If you want the figure printed on your site, somebody at your firm has to own updating it.

No trades tenant is live on the engine yet. You should weigh that when deciding whether to be first in your sector.