By Jonathan Floyd, Founder & President, LeadValets | October 7, 2026
LeadValets has rebuilt its Goodfirms profile so it finally says what we do: help plumbing and HVAC companies become the business Google and AI assistants recommend first. It carries a 5.0 rating across five client reviews, each marked "Verified Review" by Goodfirms. If you're comparing agencies, it's a place to check us that we don't control. That's the point.
One confession: we aren't new to Goodfirms. Our first reviews landed there in the fall of 2019. What changed is the profile's description, which now matches the company we've become.
The short version. Most B2B buyers have picked a favorite before they ever call you. A verified review on a platform you don't own carries different weight, because you didn't write it. AI assistants weigh that same third-party consensus when they decide which business to name. Rewriting an outdated profile was housekeeping we owed our own brand.
Why Third-Party Reviews Carry So Much Weight With B2B Buyers
Because most buyers have picked a favorite before they ever call you.
6sense surveyed more than 4,000 B2B buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Report, released November 12, 2025, and found that 94% of buying groups had ranked their preferred vendors before first contact. They went on to buy from that early favorite 77% of the time. A separate finding in the same report: 94% of buyers used large language models to summarize reviews or analyze data.
G2 saw the same shift from the software side. In its 2025 Buyer Behavior Report, built on a survey of 1,169 B2B decision-makers fielded in April 2025, 79% said AI search had changed how they research.
So the shortlist gets built in a room you're not in, by a buyer reading summaries of what other people said about you, often written by a chatbot. Your website is one voice in that room. A verified review on a platform you don't own carries different weight, because you didn't write it.
How Goodfirms Vets a Firm Before It Goes Live
Goodfirms, founded in 2015, publishes how it vets firms. Its About page, read on October 7, 2026, lists four checks before a profile goes live.
Legitimacy comes first: a registered entity, a tax ID, a physical office, at least two years in business, and verified founders. A portfolio audit follows, requiring at least five completed projects for each service a firm claims. Researchers then interview two or three past clients, and firms are re-verified every 18 months. Goodfirms says it accepts about 23 of every 100 agencies that apply.
Reviews get their own check. Goodfirms says its research team confirms a reviewer's identity before the review is published.
Goodfirms is open about one more thing. The platform earns money from sponsored placements and paid PRO Verified subscriptions, both labeled on listings. Its stated rule is that money buys visibility and nothing else: no star rating, no review, no spot in its algorithmic Leader Matrix ranking. We think that's the right line to draw, and it's the reason to read the labels. A sponsored slot at the top of a category page tells you who paid. The rating and reviews underneath tell you who delivered.
What Our Five Reviews Say, and What They Don't
Our Goodfirms reviews were posted between September and November 2019. They're old, and we'd rather tell you than have you notice. They come from a wellness center, a barbecue restaurant, a construction firm, and two other small businesses.
The one I come back to is from Ari Ford, owner of Harmony Wellness Center, who had looked at agencies across St. Louis and the rest of the country before we spoke. The review says I recommended, "not using his company until I had some other things in place first." That still describes how we work. If nobody answers your phones or your Google Business Profile is half finished, more traffic only exposes the leak faster, and we'll say so before we take a dollar.
The client list has narrowed hard since then. LeadValets now works only with plumbing and HVAC companies, and we take one of each per service area, never two competitors in the same market. We're headquartered in St. Louis, but work in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas, and all over the USA. The clearest result from the newer work is STL Air Pros, a St. Louis HVAC company that went from about two calls a month to more than 111 in roughly eight months. That number isn't on Goodfirms yet. We'd like it there, in the client's words.
Why an AI Search Agency Cares About a Review Directory
Because AI assistants don't take a company's word for it either.
Google's AI features can draw on Google Business Profile data. ChatGPT and Perplexity build their answers from what they can retrieve: websites, directories, review platforms, forums, and video. When one of them decides which plumber, or which agency, to name, a consistent story told by sources the business doesn't control is part of what it weighs.
We give that advice to every client: same name, address, phone number, and description everywhere you're listed. An old profile describing LeadValets as a general marketing shop was one more source telling the machines the wrong story. Rewriting it was housekeeping we owed our own brand.
This is the same principle behind off-site consensus signals for AI citations: AI engines require corroborating evidence across independent sources before they cite a business by name, and a verified review platform is one of the strongest independent sources available.
What Working With Us Looks Like
If a review brings you to LeadValets, expect the first conversation to be about whether search is really your bottleneck. Sometimes it isn't. When it is, the work covers the pieces that put jobs on the board: local SEO, Answer Engine Optimization, Google Business Profile management, review velocity, and a website built to convert. We run them as one system, the Search Authority Flywheel, and measure ourselves in booked jobs, not ranking screenshots.
If we've worked together, leave a review on our Goodfirms profile. Goodfirms confirms every reviewer is a real client before publishing, so expect a short verification step, and the next contractor comparing agencies gets to hear from you instead of from us.
About the Author
Jonathan Floyd is the Founder and President of LeadValets and the creator of the Search Authority Flywheel, the framework his team uses to build local visibility across Google Business Profile, Google Maps, and AI search.
He has spent more than three decades in sales and marketing and founded LeadValets in 2018, after watching small businesses get sold marketing with no help on the sales and operations side that turns a lead into a paying job.
He will also tell you when local search isn't going to move your numbers. That's a shorter conversation than most agencies are willing to have.
Connect on LinkedIn | jfloyd@leadvalets.com | 314-561-7101 | leadvalets.com
Written with AI as the framework, edited, developed and fact-checked by Jonathan Floyd.
References
- 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report - released November 12, 2025
- G2 2025 Buyer Behavior Report - survey of 1,169 B2B decision-makers, April 2025
- Goodfirms About Page - read October 7, 2026
- LeadValets on Goodfirms - 5.0 rating, five verified reviews