Ask the Assistant What to Check. Never Ask It What It Found.

Three quotes for the roof, all plausible, all from people who were pleasant on the phone. The reviews are glowing. The middle one wants thirty percent up front to order materials.

There is a version of this where you hand the names to an AI assistant and ask which one is legitimate, and it answers confidently, with license numbers and complaint histories it invented. There is a better version, and the difference is which half of the job you give it.

Look Behind the Curtain

Start with the deposit, because in one state that request already ended the conversation. California caps a home improvement down payment at one thousand dollars or ten percent of the contract price, whichever is less. On a sixty-thousand-dollar remodel that is a thousand dollars, and a contractor asking for thirty percent is breaking the law rather than driving a hard bargain. Most states have no cap, but the FTC notes that some do, which makes it worth thirty seconds to find out what yours says.

The licensing picture is less uniform than people assume. California's board, Arizona's Registrar of Contractors and Florida's department all run public lookups. Arizona's is the most informative: license status, the qualifying party, bond details including how much has already been paid out and how much remains claimable, and two years of complaint history with outcomes. Texas, by contrast, does not license general home improvement contractors at state level at all. It licenses specific trades, and anyone there can call themselves a general contractor.

Insurance is where the routine check is usually done wrong. A certificate handed to you by the contractor proves a document exists. Both the FTC and the BBB say the same thing: call the carrier and confirm the policy is in force today.

The reviews deserve less weight than they get. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, in force since October 2024, bans fake reviews, reviews bought with payment conditioned on being positive, undisclosed insider reviews and company-run sites presented as independent. It is an enforcement tool, not a labeling requirement, so nothing on the page tells you which reviews were affected. Academic work presented at the FTC found that among products whose sellers had bought fake reviews, more than half the reviews were fake.

The Capability Multiplier

The division of labor is a clean one.

An AI assistant is genuinely good at the procedure. It will tell you what a surety bond does not cover, what a mechanic's lien means for your house if the contractor does not pay a supplier, and which questions to ask a reference so the answers are useful. Paste in a contract and ask what is missing against the required elements, and it will spot the absent start and completion dates, the missing license number, the blank spaces and the missing statement of your three-day right to cancel. That is real work, done well, in minutes.

It is catastrophically bad at the findings. Asked whether a named company is licensed, it will produce a license number in the right format for that state and a confident status, because generating a plausible record is exactly what it does. The same goes for complaint histories, bond amounts and court cases. Fabricated citations have gotten lawyers sanctioned; a fabricated license number just gets you a contract with somebody unlicensed.

So the rule holds up. The assistant tells you what to check and how to read what you find. Every fact about a specific contractor comes from the board, the carrier, the county or the court, typed in by you.

The quiet advantage is that this takes an hour and almost nobody does it, so the contractors who welcome the scrutiny identify themselves. An honest one hands you the license number unasked.

The Sovereign Action

An hour before you sign anything.

- Look up the license yourself on the state board's own site. Never accept a number an assistant produced.

- Call the insurance carrier directly and confirm the policy is active today, for liability and workers' compensation.

- Find out your state's down payment rules before discussing money. California caps it at a thousand dollars or ten percent, whichever is less.

- Paste the contract into an assistant and ask what is missing: start and completion dates, license number, full scope and cost, the three-day cancellation notice, no blank spaces.

- Treat pressure as the signal. An immediate decision, a cash-only price, leftover materials from another job, or a request that you pull the permits are all documented red flags.