At The Dunk Camp 2026 in Salt Lake City, Dennis Yu and I audited 76 elite dunkers, athletes with real skill, real training, real competition results, and found that most of them were effectively invisible to Google and every major AI. The room was full of proof. The internet had almost none of it. That gap is identical to what I see every week when a plumber with 200 five-star reviews, a roofer who has been working the same county for 30 years, or a contractor with a full crew and a long job history calls us at Local Service Spotlight. Real work, real reputation, invisible online.
The problems are the same. The fix is the same. And if you run a local service business, the session Dennis and I ran for those dunkers is the clearest explanation I have found for why your phone is not ringing the way it should, and what to do about it.
Invisible by Default
Before the talk, Dennis and I built a ranked leaderboard of all 76 campers, scoring each one on how well Google and AI understand who they are. The full leaderboard is public at dunkerspotlight.com/dunkcamp26, and every row has a downloadable PDF so each athlete can see exactly where they stand.
Most scored low. Not because they lacked credentials. Because they had never structured their credentials in a way search engines and AI models could read. No Knowledge Panel. No Wikidata entity. No personal brand site that anchored their name. Their proof lived in the gym, on phones in their pockets, and in the memories of people who had watched them compete. That proof did not exist anywhere Google could find it.
Now picture your contracting business. You have been licensed for 15 years. You have done hundreds of jobs. Customers have left you reviews on Google Business Profile. You might even have a website. But Google still does not know who you are in the way it knows a brand. It knows a page or two. It does not know you as an entity. An entity has a Knowledge Panel. An entity shows up when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude who the best roofer in their city is. A page does not.
Verified Is Not Vanity
Dennis made this point on stage and I want to repeat it here because it is the single most important reframe for a local business owner who has ever looked at a Google Knowledge Panel and assumed it was only for celebrities.
“A lot of people think that being verified on Google, which is necessary to claim your Knowledge Panel, is like a vanity thing, like being verified on TikTok or verified on YouTube, but it’s actually deeper.”
Dennis Yu
The deeper thing Dennis is pointing at is the confidence score, a measure of how well Google understands who you are and what you do. Dennis explained how it works:
“It’s saying how well does Google understand who you are and what you do.”
Dennis Yu
For context on the scale: a score above 400 is celebrity tier. Dylan’s is above 3,000. Jordan’s is around 1,700. Shaq’s is around 40,000. Most local service businesses are scoring near zero, not because they are not legitimate, but because they have never built the structured signals that tell Google they exist as a real, authoritative entity in their category and geography.
And here is the part that matters most for where search is going: the same structured data that earns a Knowledge Panel is the same signal that makes you show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and every other AI assistant. Dennis put it directly:
“that’s also the key to showing up in ChatGPT or Claude, because that same structure is the same thing that all these LLMs look at.”
Dennis Yu
Google search and AI search are not two separate problems. They are the same problem. Entity authority solves both.
The Real Content You Already Have
One of the biggest misconceptions I run into with local service business owners is the belief that building a Knowledge Panel or a personal brand online requires creating a ton of new content from scratch. It does not. The same misconception runs through that room of dunkers. Most of them already had competition videos, interviews, training clips, and press mentions. They just had not structured it.
“our goal is to repurpose and take things that already exist, your real stories, and turn them into articles that live publicly.”
Dylan Haugen
For a dunker, those real stories are competition highlights, training videos, and podcast appearances. For a plumber or HVAC contractor, they are the 30-second video you took on a job site, the before-and-after photo, the Google review a customer left you three months ago, the interview you did with a local news outlet in 2019 and forgot about. All of that is raw material. None of it is helping you right now because it has not been structured into a public entity that Google and AI can read.
The method is: inventory what you already have, structure it for entity authority through a Person schema, a Wikidata entity, and a personal brand site that owns your name, and then repurpose each piece into articles that build your public footprint over time. That is the full dunker visibility playbook, and it works identically for a contractor in Minneapolis or a roofer in Phoenix.
People Who Manage Crews Already Know How to Do This
There is a specific idea that came up at The Dunk Camp that I want to name directly, because it applies to every business owner reading this.
At the Detroit AI Summit, Cam Hazzard, one of the top dunkers in the world and a DunkMan League athlete, demoed a positive-mentions agent he built himself. He built an agent that monitors what is being said about him across the web and surfaces anything worth responding to. He built that in weeks. You can see how that system connects to a broader personal brand strategy in the full Cam Hazzard personal brand breakdown on BlitzMetrics.
At the summit, Cam also showed what this looks like for a local business owner named Gail. A Detroit business owner with a real business, real reviews, real community standing, and essentially no Google footprint. The same system that built Cam’s presence as an athlete built Gail’s presence as a local business operator. Same inputs, same structure, same result.
“Instead of hiring someone from the Philippines or Pakistan on Upwork, imagine you had someone that worked just for you, and the cost is 20 bucks a month.”
Dennis Yu
If you have run a crew of three or five or ten people, you already know how to direct work. You give instructions, you check the output, you correct what is wrong, and you move on. That is exactly how you work with a Claude agent. A contractor who has managed a crew for 20 years is not behind on AI. They are more prepared than most tech workers who have never managed a team. The skill transfers directly. The only new part is knowing what to ask for.
“you just talk to the thing like it’s a team member or a coworker and just direct it.” That is not a metaphor. That is the literal mechanic. You tell the agent what you need. It does it. You review it. You redirect if it needs correction.
What Local Service Spotlight Does
Local Service Spotlight builds done-for-you personal brand sites and Knowledge Panel infrastructure for local service business owners. The core offer is Spotlight Core at $99 per month. That gets you a personal brand website hosted on WordPress, structured with the Person schema and entity signals that push your confidence score up, and monthly content repurposed from your own videos and job documentation.
For business owners who want the full Knowledge Panel guaranteed and live, we offer the Google Knowledge Panel Package at a one-time fee. We work until it is live, up to 18 months. For owners who want to build the skills themselves and run their own agents, the AI Builder Program is a one-year apprenticeship that teaches the full system Dennis and I ran at The Dunk Camp.
The starting point for any of those is a free audit. We run the same kind of scoring that produced the Dunk Camp leaderboard, applied to your business name and your market. You can see exactly where your confidence score sits, what is missing, and what would move it.
I laid out the full reflection on why this work matters to me personally in Dylan’s reflection on returning to camp. And if you want to understand the broader methodology that connects the dunking world to the business world, the one-video repurposing system we taught those 76 athletes is documented in full on BlitzMetrics. The on-the-ground recap of our Dunk Camp branding session covers what that room of dunkers actually heard.
The dunkers in that room in Salt Lake City have the same problem your business has. They trained for years and have nothing structured online. You have worked for decades and your customers cannot find you when they ask Google or ChatGPT who to call. The fix is the same playbook. The only question is whether you start running it. Read Dennis Yu on the creator knowledge gap to understand why most operators never close this gap, and what it costs them. Then look at the full dunker visibility playbook to see the exact steps that move someone from invisible to found.
The room had 76 dunkers. Most were invisible. The ones who run the playbook will not be. The same is true for every contractor, plumber, roofer, and local service business owner reading this. You already have the proof. You just need it structured.