Transcription
The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, said in a recent interview that 2027 is the year of the agents. At the same time, 58% of Google searches end with no clicks. That means over half the people that are going to Google and searching for things never end up on a website. They're getting their answers from AI.
In this video, I'll show you why websites will matter dramatically less over the next 3 years, what's replacing them, and what home service businesses should be building right now to stay ahead. I've been doing digital marketing for home service businesses for 8 years, and I can tell you that this is the biggest shift from an agency perspective, from a business perspective, and in this video, we're going to break it all down for you.
All right, before we talk about why websites are not going to be important, let's talk about where we are right now and how it's been for the past 10 years. People went to Google, they searched for something, they ended up on your website, and then they converted into a lead. And everything revolved around driving traffic to your website. So, we were obsessed over conversion rate optimization. You get 100 people to your website, you convert at 10%, so you get 10 leads. You had chat widgets and pop-ups and things to convert leads, and these still work right now: sticky headers on mobile, landing pages for Google Ads, call to actions, and form submissions.
This where we're at right now, and we're over the next 6 to 12 months, we're shifting to the next phase, which is a very, very dramatic shift that a lot of people are not seeing coming. And that is phase two, the AI search era.
So, essentially before, people were searching for keywords. They were searching for "HVAC repair near me," and they were finding businesses, they were reading reviews, and then they were going to websites and converting into leads, exactly what I just showed you.
Now, people are shifting to conversations. In fact, Google just made the biggest change in 25 years to their search engine box. If you go to Google right now, and you type in something, instead of it saying "search," it says "AI mode." And when you click that button, it actually goes to Gemini. It does not go to traditional Google search, unless you click actual enter on your keyboard.
Why is this so important? Because Google is training people on how to use conversational AI search. And what's happening is that people are not searching for "HVAC repair near me"; they're realizing that they can actually have conversations with these platforms and ask them questions. So, for example, now we see questions like, "My thermostat is on, the fan is running, but no cold air is coming out. Why?" And maybe they upload a picture and they're asking questions to try and diagnose the problem because they know AI is smart. And AI might be able to give them a quick fix or explain what's going on so that way they can figure out if they need to call a professional or not. People are searching for answers first. This is the AI search era.
So, your content isn't competing for ranking anymore. It's competing to become the source AI trusts. And there's three main things that businesses need to do right now when we talk about the AI search era. Specifically, we need to build out pricing content.
So, people are going to Gemini, ChatGPT, uh, Claude, and they're asking questions and then they're saying, "Well, how much does that cost to do?" And the reason pricing content is so important is because people ask AI pricing questions constantly, and if you don't publish pricing online, AI has nothing to reference. And businesses that answer this openly are going to win.
So, imagine your business, if you do multiple different services, you have a pricing guide for all of them. Now, when people hear me say this, they're like, "I don't want my pricing out there. My competitor's going to see this and blah blah." I'm not saying that you have to have exact pricing, you know, like your price book uploaded online or something. What I am saying is that you need to build a guide as the authority. You need to say, "Okay, well, if you want to get your gutters cleaned, here's what the high mark is. Here's what the low people do, and here's how they interact with people." And, you know, it's 99 bucks, but it's not 99 bucks. It's 600 bucks, and it is 600 bucks. And here's what makes the price go up, down, sideways. Um, here's the add-on things. And let's say you also do gutter installation, right? So, you start building out your pricing guides based off of the service that you have. The reason is, people are asking AI how much you things cost, and they want to have the answer. If you do not have the answer to give them, they're going to sort source someone else when they actually are looking for the information.
All right, number two is online scheduling. There's a very popular thing out there called agentic booking. And if you're not familiar with it, what agentic booking is, is you can actually ask an AI platform: Gemini, ChatGPT. You would say, "Hey, I want you to schedule a reservation for me at an Italian restaurant on Friday at 5:00." And right now, it can go out to OpenTable and Resy. Um, this is in Google Labs. It can go out to OpenTable and Resy, find an Italian restaurant for you, and actually schedule it for you. And come back and say, "Cool, you're all scheduled. Here's the recommendations, here's the pricing, and here you go."
Now, I was literally just out in Las Vegas, and I was talking with the head of product development with Jobber. And they said that they are building a native booking with Jobber online booking already that plugs as an app directly into Gemini and into ChatGPT.
What does this mean? Imagine for home service businesses, there's a native online booking tool, whatever CRM that you use, that allows people to schedule right online, right inside of these AI platforms. This is, in the next 6 to 12 months, going to be a very, very, very real reality. I literally just talking to Jobber about this exact thing.
And then the third thing is content from real customer questions. So, we know people ask about pricing. We know that they're going to schedule online with agentic booking. But more importantly, we know the shift from keywords to conversations. And content from real customer questions is what we need to do.
And the problem is, so Google just released a white paper on how do you rank for AEO SEO AI search. They told you exactly what to do. And I made a whole video on it. But the basic crib notes is this: Google does not want commodity content. They literally say commodity content is going to hurt your brand. And they're not going to show commodity content. Commodity content is like, "Here's seven ways to repair your home for summer." Very, very neutral fluff things that anyone could say. This is called commodity content because you could create this straight from ChatGPT. What they do want is very hyper-specific, niche, real content.
And I, I used to be at a home service business. The hardest thing was getting the stories from my technicians, getting the stories from my CSRs, and actually getting real stuff. We had to try to come up with it our own. So, what people need to be doing is, every phone call your company receives contains future content. Document questions, answer them publicly. This is how you train AI to trust you.
So, for this big shift of calls to content, which is a system that we built, we actually build an AI agent that we plug into home service businesses. It listens to the calls, it analyzes them, and every single call that comes through that's over 3 minutes that has a valuable conversation, it gets turned into content: social media posts, video hooks, SEO blog posts. And the whole reason is that we want the real content to be available to then post.
So, some of the content that we've seen is like, instead of saying, um, you know, "HVAC repair near me," which is one of the keywords, it would be the example that I gave: "My thermostat is on, my fan is blowing, but no cold air is coming out." Or, "Should I repair my entire roof or just the one section where the shingles came off?" Like, that's an actual question. There's, you know, millions of questions. I think this past month we've generated over like 3,500 pieces of content or something. But, at the end of the day, what it comes down to is, real real is real, and that's what they want is real conversations because people are switching from keywords to conversations.
So, here's some of the things. AI search is just the bridge. The real destination is personal AI agents. So, this is the most important part of the next 2 to 3 years and why websites are really going to be irrelevant. We already know 58% of are uh from 58% searches are ending with no clicks.
But, when we talk about the next thing, Google just rolled out what's called Gemini Spark. So, Gemini Spark is a personal AI agent that you can interact with, that researches, books stuff for you, and works on your behalf 24/7 without you having to actually be there to manage it. So, the examples that they literally gave was, um, "I need someone to work on my car. So, can you go out and research how much does this cost and a good person and then come back to me and let me know when I can schedule the service?" Or, "I want to plan a trip somewhere, you know, go do all the research and schedule everything out. Here's my budget." These are personal AI agents.
Now, here's the big shift. So, Google at Google Cloud Next rolled out their A2A protocol. So, A2A protocol is this: agents talking to agents. So, imagine you order something. "Where's my package?" You're, and and you ordered it from Target. Your personal agent, let's just say you use Gemini Spark (if you know, you're going to get enrolled into that anyways, probably). Your agent goes to Target and is interacting with Target's agents, okay? Then, the Target agent says, "Okay, well, let me go check on UPS's system." Okay?
Now, there's three agents involved: there's Gemini Spark, there's Target's agent, and there's UPS's agent. Where we stand right now, peop- these companies are spending millions of dollars investing in these agents, and there's no protocol to connect all of them. What Google rolled out is the protocol to connect all of them so that they can interact and come back to you with an answer. So, you have something that you want, you reach out to your agent, your agent goes and figures it out, and then comes back with an answer instantly. No search, no website, no calls, nothing.
Now, here's the most important piece to this whole thing, which is why I believe that these websites are not going to be relevant in the next three or five years. And that is because Target has an agent. So, are people going to go to Target to buy things, or are they going to go to their agent and say, "Hey, can you buy something for me? Go to Target and figure it out"?
Imagine local businesses, home service businesses. When when people go and ask their agent, "Hey, can you go and do? Can you go find things for me?" What's going to happen is we're in the crawl era right now. It's crawling websites, which is what I just showed you, you know, the pricing page, the content, uh, the online scheduling. But, what if there was a place where you had all of your knowledge, all of your information, not on a website, but in what Google calls a knowledge catalog?
And a knowledge catalog is a verified data set of information about your business where you can then deploy it as an agent on your behalf to interact with it. This might sound all woo-woo and crazy, whatever, but Google's literally talking about this for businesses. Like, you got to have a knowledge catalog; they already rolled that out. You got to have, uh, the connection with Google Search Console with a verified domain; they already rolled that out. You have to have a discoverability API; they rolled that out. They're rolling out all these things to give people the assets, but most businesses don't know about this.
And so, remember I mentioned about the agent that we built, listens to the calls, creates content. We also have it roll up knowledge bases because we need to have a knowledge catalog, because we want our clients to be ahead of the curve and make sure that they have information.
Now, I'm not saying, "Hey, reach out to us and and work with us and you have to do that cuz we're the only people that do this." No. What I'm saying for you is that you need to make sure that you have these knowledge catalogs for your business. You need to make sure that you're creating content. You need to make sure that you're documenting everything that's happening in your business, not just for likes and shares and clicks and all that stuff from social media, but so that you have these knowledge catalogs so that you can deploy an agent on your brand's behalf. Because if we're talking about agent-to-agent interactions, you want to make sure you have an agent, a brand, a digital twin, a knowledge base, whatever you want to call it, for your business.
So, how do you build a knowledge catalog? A structured database of everything your business knows that foundation AI systems consume. So, you take your customer questions and answers, your services offered and service areas, your expertise and credentials, your frequently asked questions, your pricing information, your policies and processes, reviews and testimonials, real call transcripts, insights.
Today's websites are the front end. Okay? Tomorrow, knowledge catalogs are the foundation. We talk about this A2A interaction, agent-to-agent interaction. Websites are not going to be relevant. The crawl era is going to be over, and the data era is going to be what it's about. All right.
So, let me just go back and forth: old internet, new internet.
What drives traffic? The old approach is SEO, keywords, and backlinks. The new approach is AI trusted content and data. This is why you need to create the real content with real customer questions because it's not just about jamming a bunch of keywords anymore. It's about conversational AI search.
How customers find you? Before, they did search, website lead. Now it's going to be AI answers, then the agent takes action on both parties' behalf and takes care of this, say it takes care of it.
What your content is for? Rankings and engagement, but rankings are not going to matter, and engagement is not going to matter. It's to train AI to trust you. I can't stress this one enough. Content is not about rankings and engagement. It's literally to train AI to trust you as the authority and the subject matter expert.
Core digital asset. Right now, people would say, "Yeah, my website. It's the hub. It's the hub of everything that goes to my website." Knowledge catalogs are going to be that because your website is essentially a knowledge catalog right now. However, it's waiting on Google to crawl it and then source it. So imagine you could cut out all of that and give it the knowledge catalog on your business, and everyone has a knowledge catalog. Right now is the first mover advantage because people do not know about this. So you can actually build your knowledge catalog and have the information in there and have a repository of trust built with these platforms that then you can deploy.
How transaction happen? Customer fills a form? No. AI agents act for them. You're going to have a Gemini Spark or some type of personal agent, Claude agents, whatever you want to call it, that are going to be interacting with other agents on different platforms that are working on your behalf.
The competitive advantage is not just the best looking website or even the highest converting website. It's the most complete data. The most complete data. That's what it really comes down to.
So here's the checklist. Um, I've been mentioning, you know, we have this agent. This is how I'm thinking about a digital marketing relationship for home service businesses going forward. So if your marketing company is not talking about this, or you're like, "Hey, I. This is way past, you know, just running some ads and throwing some content up there." I'll put a link down below. Love to talk to you about your business, see if we might be able to help you out, but I want to give you this checklist so that way you can go through it real quick.
So first, start publishing pricing content: be transparent, become the source that AI references. I can't stress this one enough. The more transparent and real that you can do, the better.
Audit your online scheduling. So, ensure AI agents can transact with your business. If you set up online scheduling, whether Jobber, Jobber Service Titan, Housecall Pro, whatever tool that you might want to use, make sure that it has some type of integration with Agent Sync booking or AI search, or that at least something's coming down the pike with that type of tool. If it doesn't, then it's good right now, but it's not going to help you in the future.
Number three, document real customer questions, turn them into public content. Do not work with a marketing company that starts with ChatGPT or AI slop and just throws up blog posts and Happy Earth Day social posts. Like this, we're so far past this that you can't rely on that anymore. That's fluff and noise, and I, it pains me when people are paying 1,500, 200, $2,000 a month for that. Like, do not do that. You can create content on your business's behalf. You can work with tools like, like the AI agent that we built that's like, you know, way less than that, that you can actually deploy these things in your business and get an advantage.
Build a knowledge catalog: FAQs, services, policies, service areas, expertise. I can't stress this one enough. You got to be documenting all of your stuff.
Optimize for AI citations, focus on being recommended, not just ranked. So, right now people will go to ChatGPT and say, "Oh, you know, who's the best plumber near me?" or whatever, and then they'll evaluate if they're showing up for that keyword or not. Um, I made a whole video on this, which is how to actually track your rankings in AI search, and it's the shift from keywords like what you are traditionally used to doing to prompting and actual like tracking prompts. And there's two things: share of voice and mention rate, which are the most important ones. And when I say share of voice, it's how many times that they share your information, which is why you can't just rely on a blog post; you have to have multiple different types of content to be shown. And think of every piece of content as training data for the future internet. Every single thing that you create is training the future internet, your knowledge catalog. Like, it is gold. This is, this is the gold of the future.
Measure AI share of voice, track how often AI recommends your business. It's not just about them citing you, which is your mention rate. It's about how many times did they share your stuff and also mention you, which it builds trust.
So, hope this video is helpful. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. I'll see you in the next video.