What does "five per city" actually mean?

TradeCraft Builds accepts a maximum of five contractors per trade in each metropolitan area — five plumbers, five HVAC contractors, five electricians, and so on. Once the fifth slot in a trade fills, we stop selling that trade in that city to new contractors. As long as the existing five members stay active, no new direct competitor can buy in. If a member cancels, the slot reopens to the waitlist.

Who builds the website?

The senior team at Fifty & Five — the same agency that has built 222+ brands since 2008, including work in adjacent categories for Appliance Parts Pros, UTI Transportation, and Enterprise Holdings. AI accelerates production; senior strategists and creatives lead every build.

Is this AI-generated or human-built?

Both, by design. Brand judgment, copy direction, creative review, and customer relationships stay with the senior team that has built 222+ brands over eighteen years. AI handles the throughput — site production from intake, schema and AEO entity work, directory submissions across 40+ platforms, review automation, and monthly performance reports. The operating model is what makes a ten-day sprint at this price point possible without compromising on craft.

How long does the build take?

Ten calendar days from the moment intake is completed. Monopoly tier ships in seven. If the site is not live within ten days, the setup deposit is refunded in full.

What happens if I cancel?

The exclusive slot opens to the next contractor on the waitlist for that trade in that city. Cancellation is straightforward — we make it easy by design. The structural consequence is that the territory passes to a competitor, which is the intended retention mechanism of the model.

Is the setup deposit refundable?

The setup deposit is applied to the first month of service. If we do not deliver the live site within ten days of completed intake, the deposit is refunded in full.

How is this different from Angi, Thumbtack, or HomeAdvisor?

Lead marketplaces sell the same lead to three to five contractors at once; close rates run below 15%. TradeCraft Builds builds a property the contractor owns — domain, site, reviews — where leads arrive uncontested. Close rates typically run 40–60%.

What is included in the social media add-on?

For $499/month, the Fifty & Five social team produces and publishes twelve posts per month across Facebook, Instagram, and Google Business Profile. Captions written in the contractor's voice, approved monthly in five minutes. A separate Google Ads management add-on is also available at $399/month plus your ad spend.

Where is TradeCraft Builds based?

TradeCraft Builds is headquartered in Orlando, Florida, and operated by 5ifty & 5ive LLC. The parent agency Fifty & Five has operated out of Orlando since 2008.

Who owns TradeCraft Builds?

TradeCraft Builds is a product of 5ifty & 5ive LLC, founded by Lucas Vandenberg, who also founded the parent agency Fifty & Five in 2008.

What does TradeCraft Builds cost?

Three tiers: Territory ($499 setup + $699/month), Dominator ($999 setup + $999/month), Monopoly ($1,999 setup + $1,499/month). Setup deposits are applied to the first invoice. Optional add-ons: Social Media ($499/month) and Google Ads management ($399/month plus your ad spend). Annual contracts receive a two-month discount on any tier.

How does TradeCraft Builds compare to Scorpion or Hibu?

Scorpion and Hibu are large enterprise-scale agencies. They will sell to you and to the competitor across town. TradeCraft Builds is a productized, sprint-delivered offering with territory exclusivity (five contractors per trade per city) and Answer Engine Optimization as the lead discipline.

How does TradeCraft Builds compare to Angi or Thumbtack?

Angi and Thumbtack are lead marketplaces that sell the same inquiry to three to five contractors simultaneously, with close rates below 15%. TradeCraft Builds builds a digital presence the contractor owns; leads arrive uncontested and close at 40-60%.

Do I own my website at the end?

You own the brand, the copy, the domain, and all customer data and leads. The site is hosted on infrastructure we maintain as part of your monthly service, which keeps the SEO and AEO optimization current.

What if my city is not on the current list?

Twelve metropolitan areas are open at launch. Additional cities roll out across 2026. If your market is not yet open, reach out and we will prioritize it in the next launch wave.

Do you serve trades outside the five listed?

The current focus is plumbing, HVAC, handyman, electrical, and general contracting. Adjacent trades like roofing, painting, landscaping, and pool service are on the 2026 roadmap.

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for Contractors?

Q: What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization is the discipline of structuring a brand so that AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — cite it when answering buyer questions. When a homeowner asks "who is the best plumber in Orlando?", the AI returns a short list of named businesses. AEO engineers your presence to be one of them.

A homeowner with a flooded laundry room at 11 pm no longer scrolls ten blue links. They ask their phone. Increasingly, the phone is an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, or Claude — and the assistant returns a short, named list of contractors. If a business is not in that list, the call goes to whoever is.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the discipline that engineers a contractor into that list.

A working definition

AEO is the structured-data, entity, and citation work that makes a business citation-worthy to AI assistants. Where SEO optimizes for the ten blue links on a search engine results page, AEO optimizes for the named businesses an AI cites in a single conversational answer. They are increasingly different disciplines.

SEO rewards keyword targeting, link authority, and on-page content depth. AEO rewards entity clarity, structured-data depth, citation hooks (named, specific, dated facts), conversational subheadings, and infrastructure that tells AI crawlers exactly what the business is and where the authoritative information lives. Both still matter. Increasingly they require different infrastructure.

Why AEO matters more for contractors than most categories

Three structural reasons make trade-business AEO disproportionately high-leverage.

First, the queries are urgent. "Best plumber near me," "emergency HVAC repair tonight," "electrician for panel upgrade Orlando" — these are high-intent, low-deliberation searches where the homeowner wants a short, credible answer fast. AI assistants are uniquely well-suited to deliver that, and homeowners are training themselves on the format quickly.

Second, the job tickets are large. A $15,000 HVAC install, a $4,000 panel upgrade, a $20,000 kitchen remodel — these are not impulse buys, but the contractor who is named in the AI's short list is overwhelmingly likely to win the bid. The economic gap between being cited and not being cited is the entire job.

Third, the market is mostly absent from AI answers today. Most contractor websites have no structured data, no llms.txt, no AI-crawler allowlist, no Wikidata anchor. The category is wide open. Early movers compound.

The seven surfaces of contractor AEO

AEO is not a single trick. It is seven coordinated layers of infrastructure.

Structured-data depth: a full JSON-LD graph including the trade-specific LocalBusiness subtype (Plumber, HVACBusiness, Electrician, GeneralContractor), Service, Offer, FAQPage, Person, and BreadcrumbList — all interlinked with proper @id references.
First-mention entity definitions: every page introduces the business with a clean "X is a Y that does Z" sentence that LLMs can lift verbatim.
A complete llms.txt at the root of the domain — an emerging standard file containing citation-ready facts: pricing tables, service areas, methodology, comparison points, canonical URLs.
An explicit AI crawler allowlist in robots.txt — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bingbot, CCBot.
FAQPage JSON-LD paired with conversational on-page FAQ — written in the actual question form a homeowner types, not in marketing labels.
A cross-site citation moat: verified profiles on Clutch, Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, and trade-specific directories — all linked via sameAs from the organization schema. Where scale warrants, a Wikidata entity.
Ongoing citation-rate monitoring: periodically querying the major AI assistants for the queries that drive the business, and tracking whether the business appears in the response.

How to tell whether AEO is working

AEO outcomes are measurable, but the metric is different from SEO. Instead of rank tracking, the relevant metric is citation rate: the percentage of times an AI assistant names the business when asked the queries that drive the contractor's business. Citation rate moves on a 2-to-8-week lag after structural work lands, as AI assistants re-crawl and re-index.

Schema validation is a leading indicator: a clean Schema.org validation, a passing Google Rich Results test, and a parseable structured-data graph in the page source. These are necessary but not sufficient.

How TradeCraft Builds approaches contractor AEO

TradeCraft Builds engineers all seven surfaces above for one contractor per trade per city, as part of the same 10-day sprint that builds the website. The AEO layer is not an add-on — it is the differentiator that makes the offering meaningfully better than a templated website-only competitor.

The case for moving on this now is straightforward. The market is still early. The contractors who get cited in 2026 will compound their position through 2027 and beyond. The ones who wait will be looking at a different, harder market.

Want this engineered for your business?

TradeCraft Builds delivers a complete contractor digital presence — website, local SEO, Answer Engine Optimization — in a 10-day sprint. Five contractors per trade per city.

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