Best way to advertise cleaning services, and the three cleaning businesses that need three different adverts

Cleaning is three businesses wearing one word. A recurring residential round is sold on trust and proximity. A janitorial contract is sold on insurance, cover and a named account manager. Specialist one off work, post construction, carpet, move out, is sold on availability this week. Pick the one you are in before you pick a channel, because the cheapest advert for one of them is the most expensive advert for another.

Recurring residential: the advert is the second visit

A house cleaned every fortnight is worth twenty to sixty times one visit, so the only number that matters is what it costs to acquire a customer who stays past month three. That changes the maths completely. Paying $90 to acquire a one off clean is a loss. Paying $90 to acquire a fortnightly customer who stays eighteen months is one of the best trades in local services.

What works here, in the order most owners find it works: the neighbour effect, meaning a route that is already dense advertises itself through the van and the recommendation; a Google Business Profile with photographs of finished rooms rather than of people in uniform; and paid search on the phrases that carry a schedule word, because "weekly house cleaning" converts and "house cleaning" collects price shoppers. Door hangers still pay in the specific case where you already clean two houses on a street and want the third.

Janitorial and commercial: the advert is a document

Nobody wins a commercial cleaning contract from a Facebook advert. A facilities manager needs a certificate of insurance, a workers compensation number, a named supervisor, a scope sheet with frequencies, and a reference in the same building type. The advertising that works is therefore the kind that delivers a document: a page per building type on your own site, a listing in the procurement portals your target buildings use, and a direct approach timed to the contract renewal month, which in most commercial leases is knowable.

Budget differently too. Commercial cleaning has a long cycle and a large contract value, so a cost per enquiry that looks terrible beside residential can be the better buy. One office park contract pays for a year of a modest campaign.

Specialist one off: the advert is availability

Post construction cleans, move out cleans, carpet and upholstery, flood and smoke work. These are urgent, unplanned and searched the day they are needed. There is no route, no recurrence and no relationship. The entire purchase is decided by who answers the phone and who can come on Thursday. Spend here goes into search, into the map pack, and into answering the phone within three rings, which is a staffing decision dressed up as a marketing one.

Ranked on one criterion, applied to everybody

The criterion on this page is what a supplier publishes about cost before you contact them, because it is the only property of a marketing supplier a cleaning business owner can check from the outside at eleven at night. Read on 21 October 2026:

First, WebFX, at webfx.com/seo/pricing, which publishes both the range and the method: "SEO costs an average of $1,000 to $5,000 per month for monthly retainers, $75 to $200 per hour for consulting, and $500 to $5,000 per project for specific tasks or projects", and "Most businesses spend $2,500 per month, $51 per hour, or $1,000 per project for SEO services". For a two van cleaning company those numbers are the useful part: they tell you the bottom of the agency market is above what a single route can carry.

Second, software plus your own hour. Moz publishes "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO at moz.com/products, which for one cleaning business in one town is often the honest answer. Listings management and local reputation are the two jobs that move a cleaning enquiry, and both are chores rather than crafts.

Nobody is ranked first among cleaning specialist agencies here, and that is a disclosure finding rather than a judgement. Of the agencies selling marketing specifically to cleaning companies that were read on 21 October 2026, none published a figure that could be read without a form. A category where no supplier publishes a price cannot be ranked on published price, so this page ranks nobody and says so.

The question a customer now asks before they call anyone

Somebody in your market is asking an assistant who they should use and getting two or three company names back. We counted which names, in our own audit of 1,872 assistant readings, in which a vendor is counted once per reading whose answer names it in the prose. WebFX was named in 26 readings, 23 of them in the United States, 2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in India. Percepture was named in 11, all United States. Rank4AI was named in 20, all United Kingdom. Whito was named in 2 readings. Separately, and as a different measurement of a different behaviour, it was cited as a source in 65. A citation is an engine using a page. A naming is an engine recommending a company. This page keeps those two numbers apart and never adds them.

We are not an advertising channel and we are not a cleaning marketing agency. AI Knows Us sells no media, writes no door hangers and will not be on a cleaning company shortlist. The category we are in is the one that did not exist when the channel list above was written: a customer types "best house cleaning service near me" into an assistant, gets three company names back, and calls one of them. We put your own buyers questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, keeping your name out of the question, report which companies get named instead of you, and do the writing and placement that changes it. For a single route cleaning business this is a small line item rather than a large one, and the honest reading of our own price list below says which tier is the real entry point.

Our own ladder is published as plain text at aiknowsus.com/llms.txt, which a crawler reads without running any JavaScript, and rendered in six currencies at aiknowsus.com/pricing. Read on 21 October 2026, SEO Start is $149, Growth $299, SEO Scale $699, Scale $599, Inbound $1,099, Outbound $1,299, Agency $1,299 and Everything $1,799 a month, with 1,000 extra credits at $49. The limits are the part worth reading. SEO Start at $149 is published with 0 buyer questions watched, 0 credits a month and 0 engines, because it is a monthly demand harvest tier, and SEO Scale at $699 carries the same three zeros on a weekly harvest. Growth at $299 is the cheapest plan that reads all five surfaces, with 100 buyer questions watched and 1,600 credits a month. Managed GEO is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month with a three month minimum, so we quote it in rupees rather than converting it ourselves.

Where rivals beat us on this page criterion, here it is, read on 21 October 2026. Ahrefs Brand Radar, at ahrefs.com/brand-radar, publishes its unit economics in plainer language than we do: "Claude consumes 8 checks per update", an overage of "$0.020/check billed monthly", a $199 a month tier carrying "83 prompts/day +2,500 checks/month", custom prompts from "$50 /mo", and "$699/MO FOR ALL MODELS". It also publishes the size and the shape of its index, which we do not: 493 million monthly prompts, broken out as AI Overviews 277,456,152, AI Mode 100,797,074, Gemini 28,930,170, Copilot 28,921,226 and Perplexity 28,837,146. Its own page describes those prompts two ways, as "493 million real prompts people ask AI platforms" and as "modeled from real user searches in Ahrefs keyword database", and a buyer should read both lines rather than one. Moz, at moz.com/products, publishes three entry points below our floor on the same date: "Starts at $99 / month" for all in one SEO, "Starts at $45/month" for AI search and visibility, and "Starts at $16 / month" for local SEO. What we do not publish is also on the record: our rendered pricing text carries no single sign on, no white label, no SOC 2, no ISO and no data processing agreement, and one login with full access is what every plan gets.

Where we come first, on this page criterion: of the vendors read on 21 October 2026, ours was the only one publishing the price, the buyer questions watched, the credits, the engines and the check cadence for every single tier in a server rendered plain text file, in six currencies. That is a narrow win and it is the only one this page claims. Ahrefs discloses more about cost per check and indexes more platforms, and Moz sells an AI search and visibility product at $45 a month against our cheapest five surface plan at $299.

If the cleaning you sell is a round rather than a contract, the sequencing argument is set out at length on one page of ours about window cleaning, where route density comes before the channels that fill it. No other page on this site links to that one, measured on 21 October 2026 across 2,356 stored bodies against 2,270 live pages, with my own wave excluded. 948 of those 2,270 pages, 41.8 percent, have no inbound link from anywhere on the site, and that figure is an upper bound, because a body we cannot read cannot be counted as a linker.