Say Goodbye to SEO + AEO, Say Hello to AI Agent Optimization
In this interview, host Adam Bensman and guest Marcus Sheridan discuss the imminent shift from traditional SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to a new paradigm where AI agents—not human users—drive the majority of web traffic for home‑improvement businesses. They explain that agents differ from bots, often masquerading as human traffic, which makes current Google Analytics data unreliable. The conversation outlines why roofing contractors must redesign their websites for AI agents, focusing on schema markup to make online estimators discoverable, separating human, bot, and agent traffic in analytics, and implementing agent‑friendly features. Practical tactics include building a robust online estimator that provides price ranges through a guided questionnaire, embedding schema in estimator pages, linking ads directly to the estimator tool, and creating “mother of all” review and awards pages to signal legitimacy to AI. They argue that early adopters will gain a competitive edge, as AI agents will soon become the primary search interface, similar to the early days of Google. The discussion also tackles common objections such as “we’re not the cheapest,” recommending price conditioning via estimators and education throughout the sales process. Overall, the episode serves as a strategic guide for contractors to prepare for AI‑driven search and capture first‑mover advantages.
Chapters
Marcus, dude, it is so good to have you back. We're on round 3 together and I am overly thrilled for what we're going to chat about today, which is the ever-changing landscape of SEO and how we all need to optimize our web traffic, uh, not for humans any longer, but for bots. And this is different than AEO. It's different than SEO. And quite frankly, I've not heard anyone talking about this in the roofing space. So I am—
yeah, wait, wait, wait. And I wouldn't even use the word bots because a bot We've had bots, but we haven't had agents.
You're right.
Thank you. So we have to optimize them for buyer agents. And this is the thing that is gonna happen so fast. And everybody right now, there's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna have this convers— listen to this conversation today. Their head's gonna spin a little bit, but I promise this isn't just like silly future casting here. You know me, Adam. If I, if I say it's because I believe it, I've been right on a lot of predictions. I've had a lot of hits here and this is one of those I hope everyone pays attention because our whole industry is about to change in dramatic ways.
Yeah, it's, it's nuts. You know, when you reached out and you're like, man, a lot has changed and we got to, got to chatting, you know, I was like, okay, some of this we touched on, but when we hit this topic and I have some notes pulled up over here that say in, in there, by the way, there's a couple of, you're gonna correct a couple of these cuz this was, this was AI search I'm gonna be sharing. Because bots, which we just addressed, there's a difference between bots and agents, are now 40 to 50% plus of web traffic. And it says many AI agents don't identify themselves correctly. So Google Analytics dashboards are fundamentally wrong because they're mixing up agentic traffic, bot crawlers, as well as agents. So to set the record straight and gets to set the table for this conversation, there's been so much buzz from the SEO, search engine optimization, to the AEO, answer engine optimization, which is showing up in search. But now the new conversation is building a website that communicates with AI agents.
Yes.
Even more so than humans, because humans aren't jumping on the internet. They're having agents do it. So that's where we begin. Anything you wish to correct on that before we rock and roll?
Yeah. I mean, look, and I know you've had this, you've brought this up another on other, like, pods. But the, the fact that when someone searches "roofer near me" and now Google is showing that online estimate button, and the fact that Google has been experimenting with— if a lot of people haven't seen this, but they've been experimenting with "have AI check prices." What that is, homeowner does a local search for a contractor And then Google says, shows a CTA that says, have AI check prices. And as soon as that homeowner clicks on that, what then happens is they get asked a series of questions. Essentially, it's like a self-service tool, but it's just a few questions about the service that they need. Then what happens is Google says, hey, our AI, our agent, is going to go out and try to get this information for you, and we're going to get back to you with this information. And then that's what they do. And I actually did this. I actually used Google for this. I did a plumbing search. I saw they have AI check prices. I clicked on it. I answered a couple questions about a faucet repair that I didn't need, and then it sent me back a recommendation for a contractor in my area. What's interesting about it, Adam, is, is it said, hey, they can do the faucet repair, but I could not get an estimate for you. Now, Google knows it's always been their job to get the searcher the best, most specific, relevant answer to the question as quickly as possible. And so Google is naturally with legacy Google and with Gemini and ChatGPT is doing the same thing. Claude is doing the same thing is what they're doing is they are trying to take actions so that in this case, the searcher doesn't have to do it themselves. And they realize anything we can do to remove friction is going to mean that they use my platform more. And this is where agent search comes into play. Because if Google says, hey, I can do these things for you, well, you're like, that sounds great, full send. And Google gets the reward. They're going to somehow, you know, make more money. You're going to be more like inclined to use their product, et cetera. What you have to understand if you're listening to this right now is that within months, and we don't know exactly how long this is going to be, but this, you can be, it's safe to say months. Within months, we're going to have another ChatGPT moment. Now, if you remember when ChatGPT came out, within months, everybody started to talk about it. It was like, wow, this is really interesting. The adoption rate was just massive. I mean, just You know, like suddenly millions of people were using it, just like it was just like when Facebook came out for the under-30 crowd, you know, what, 15 years ago, whatever it was. So suddenly, like millions of people are using it. So you get mass adoption with, with certain things that's going to happen with agents. And so with the agent now, all of a sudden the homeowner is going to say, all right, agent, I want you— I need new shingles for my roof. So I want you to vet all the local contractors and I want you to come back to me with recommendations. And so what the agent is now going to do, just like a real estate agent, just like a travel agent, because we've used agents before. So we're going to continue to do this. Now it's just going to be in the form of AI and it's going to do better than a human agent could have done. It's going to say, okay, I vetted 45 local contractors for you. Not only did I vet those 45 local contractors, I read every single review of each one that was on the internet. Can you do that as a human? Probably not. All right. So it's going to be more thorough. It's going to give you like a reputation graph of any contractor you ask for, but it's going to say, hey, I'm going to recommend these 3 to 5 to you based on everything that I researched, based on their websites, based on what I read online. Now, I also saw that some of them had estimator or, you know, tools, calculator tools. Some did not. So I went ahead and did those, the ones that they could actually do it, which is another conversation we need to have because they can't see them on some websites and they can't actually interact with them on some websites, which is a problem with technology that we're gonna soon see a lot of contractors have, right? And then it's gonna come back to the homeowner and it's gonna say, okay, and so I've got these estimates for you as well. Here's the top 2 that I recommend. What would you like me to do next? Um, by the way, I can choose one if you want. Homeowner says, go ahead and set the appointment with this one right here. You gave me all the information. And bam, that's what, that's what happens, right? So we're not that far. We're not that far from that. And people, that seems like so like dystopian or sci-fi to some people. No, no, no. We're trending there very, very quickly because that's the ultimate example of eliminating friction and making life easier, making it faster for, in this case, a homeowner And that's exactly what they're gonna do. And the problem is the AI does vet businesses better than humans. That's true when it comes to what's online. And AI can do it much, much better because a human's not gonna read every review in the history on the internet. AI's gonna do that.
Yeah. Yeah. The volume, I forget the calculation, this was years ago. Uh, the speed at which AI could do things that, that humans need to do, and it's something like 500 pages a minute or something like that. And that was, That was like earlier this summer or late in the— excuse me, this summer. Colorado never had winter, so it still feels like summer. I think it was last summer, which is just wild. And I don't know what the current stat is. So what does this mean? Because I do want to touch on the online estimator piece and especially the schema component that we had discussed prior to recording. But before we do, I do want to spend a minute on analytics because one of the things that I know roofers get frustrated with is what I'll call vanity metric reporting from their marketing agency. Like, look, we got you so-and-so website visits and so-and-so impressions on your marketing. But now Google Analytics will inherently, or as this AI search I did, be fundamentally wrong because of bot traffic, AI agents, et cetera. So what do you need to do? What does a contractor need to do to start getting accurate information so they can make smart data-driven decisions and stop the guessing game that most are playing when it comes to marketing?
Well, the, the, the issue with answering this, it's a moving target, right? It's actually moving every single day. We can do the best we can right now, and I can give you just a couple predictions on this, but I think it's gonna, it's, we're gonna get to the point where Google Analytics shows you 3 types of traffic, you've got, you've got human traffic and you've got non-human bot traffic and you've got non-human agent traffic. I think they're going to need to be separated because a bot isn't necessarily very helpful to you. It's not, it's not like somebody is actually vetting your website there. Whereas if an agent is working on behalf of a human, that absolutely is going to be helping you. And we're going to get to a point. And I know this sounds crazy, right? Just work with me here. We're gonna get to a point where the majority of your website traffic is going to be non-human traffic. And ideally, the majority of that, if we're not talking about bots right now, it's going to be agent traffic. And so what this means is you're going to have to really just revolutionize the way we do websites and websites design. And there's like a whole bunch of components there, because An AI agent doesn't care necessarily about the stunning visuals. It doesn't care about the color of your CTAs on your website. You know, it doesn't care about, you know, did you have perfect StoryBrand messaging or not, which I love StoryBrand, by the way. Doesn't care about that stuff. It's just like, hey, I just want to get my answers as quickly as possible. I want to find them. To your point, I need to be able to find them because, uh, I can't waste time. And I, the way that I work is I parse stuff. This is an agent, right? And so it's gotta be labeled accordingly. Well, that's called schema. And schema is something that we weren't even talking about, about a year and a half ago. Like most common marketers, business people didn't know what schema was. Schema, schema in, in essence is a way to label your content in your pages on your website so that AI and search engines can quickly understand what it is that they're looking at. So if they're looking at an estimator, they can see, oh, that's an online estimator. And this is important because if Google now is showing online estimates, like they want to, to, to send you to an, to a site that has an estimator, you need to have proper labeling for this. And that comes with the schema. So this is one of those things like, and we were talking about it, like I built, everybody knows I have Price Guide. PriceGuide.ai allows companies to build software. We've got over 1,000 contractors that use it. And it, the way that the code comes out when you put the estimator on your site, it's built with schema. So automatically an agent sees it for what it is. Now, what we're working on next with this, and by the way, not all of these tools, I know a lot of, uh, contractors that have estimator tools that don't have schema and they're like paying a lot of money for these tools. It doesn't have schema. So it's like you're missing a huge opportunity. Because for whatever reason, your web company or the developer, whoever it was, is not— it doesn't understand how this stuff works. We're actually building Price Guide now so that it can fully interact with the agents. So as soon as you, Adam, as a homeowner, say, I, I, I want you to vet these companies and I want you to come back with the estimates, it needs to be able to work the estimator exactly like a human would, but the language whereby it does that isn't the same because it's not seeing the interface like the human sees the interface on the screen. And so that's where it gets really, really tricky. It, you know, just like schema is a new phrase that a lot of people don't really know and understand right now, things like MCPs, which allow AIs to communicate— MCPs are going to be like this common language that Nobody yet understands, but eventually is going to start to really understand in the future. It's gonna be common language for us because the agents will need to be able to communicate and interact. That's the key phrase, interact, take action on your website. If you can't do that, it's a problem.
Yeah. So I wanna condense some of this in, into the easiest possible terms to understand, and please do correct me if I'm wrong. Schema is basically a blueprint that says, here's how everything's laid out. Here's how to navigate.
Labels.
Labels.
Labels. Yeah.
And the problem is that so many roofing companies that are using online estimators, the tools that they're paying for on a subscription service generally are built for human use, but they don't have the right schema or blueprint that agents or Agentic AI can go in and use or even recognize that they're there. Essentially making them invisible. So at the moment, all is hunky-dory for human traffic. But in tomorrow's land of roofing, there's going to be a problem. So what this means for roofing companies— and I had, you know, Jim Malin, by the way, he said he had an amazing time learning to speak at your event and he said it was absolutely amazing. But Jim, was on the podcast. He's a fellow mentor inside the community and said, you know, a lot of roofers make this mistake of thinking of branding as, as a website. And as you mentioned, the story brand, the images, the call to action, and they're spending $20,000, $30,000 on this gorgeous website. But what, what we're seeing is that humans aren't going to be the ones interacting with it. So like all of the web designers and developers of today are focused on How do I make this have a good UX, which stands for user experience on a human level, or a UI, a user interface for a human level? And we need to now start doing, rebuilding for, for agentic AI. So would you agree or disagree with this, Marcus, that the hidden opportunity, because the way that I, that I think and the way I like to lead our contractor community is that With every facing threat, there's a hidden opportunity on the other side of it.
Yes.
And people look at this and they're freaking out, especially folks that are tuning in because I know them. We just did an AI event at the data center in Dallas 2 weeks ago, which was mind-blowing, by the way. And there were some folks in the room that were like, this is, you know, you're speaking French to me. So for those that are overwhelmed, don't be. All you need to do is know what you need done and why, and then find the right people, the right who. Quoting Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy in Who Not How. And the, the opportunity that I see, and I'm curious if you agree, Marcus, is the opportunity is to have a first mover advantage by starting to make these moves, which we should talk about with pricing transparency and online estimates with the proper schema markup so Agentic AI can communicate. Number 2 is to get clear analytics in place. To understand your web traffic. Uh, again, I am very shy to mention companies because I haven't used them. So my best recommendation, jump on your favorite LLM or AI platform and just search, what are the best website analytics, uh, to compare human traffic versus agentic traffic? There's a current list, you can play with those. And then 3 is to start building your site to be agentic friendly. Would you agree or disagree with that as the first mover advantage? In today's market?
Yeah, yeah. Every major transitionary period provides incredible opportunity for those that are willing to just lean into it. And I've never been more optimistic about our future. I'm super bullish on, on, on business in general, certainly on home improvement, man. It's freaking— it's a great time to be in home improvement. I'm just loving it. I'm speaking to people in the trades every single week almost, Adam, different conferences, different events. It's really, really happening in this space right now. We're seeing influx of younger people that are very forward-thinking in our space right now. It's just, to me, very exciting. We're seeing systems, right, that we never saw in the past. I mean, just new programs. It's like really, really great. I think there's a lot of really cool things happening. Should we do what you said? Absolutely, we should do what you said. And what doesn't help is, is coming from this place of, gee, I'm so ignorant, I'm starting late. Gosh, God, it's not— we're not out the first inning yet of AI, everyone. In fact, we probably don't even have an out yet. You might have a couple swings, so you might have one or two strikes, but I'm telling you, I'm here to tell you that this game is just getting started. So be excited that you're like at the beginning And if we were to compare this to the internet, it's like 1997 right now, y'all. I mean, imagine 1997, somebody comes to you and says, hey, use this thing called Google.
It works.
And you're like, really? Yeah, just do it. And it took 10 years for everybody to wake up to the fact that, yeah, I should probably be doing like paid. I should be doing organic, you know, like content and things like that. It took a long time for people to realize it. So those that were willing to move, man, they just, They just reinvented spaces. So we're going to see spaces reinvented right now. It's a lot of opportunity for the digital Davids that are, that are competing against the Goliaths because you're able to, to play by a new set of rules, especially if you optimize for AI. And there's, you can certainly, there's a lot of ways to optimize for AI. I'm going to have to talk. We're not going to talk about those right now, but giving AI what it wants, using the right schema as an example. Most of your competitors don't even, never even heard the word schema. You've now heard the phrase, you know, okay, that's labels that allows AI to see stuff and read it. Okay. I should have an estimator. Of course. No-brainer in the roofing space. I'm telling you, I've said it again, like it's going to be table stakes in 18 months. You're going to see at least 90% of the roofing space has some type of estimator on their website because this is where we're going. This is what the homeowner expects. It's what AI is demanding. And if you don't have it, they're starting to penalize and that's where it's going to go. You're going to, Say, I'm not in the answer. I'm not being recommended by AI. This ain't like it was with Google. It wasn't like page 1. It wasn't like, hey, I'm ranking for that phrase. It's like you're in the answer, you're not. You're recommended, you're rejected. So we've become more obsessed with giving the homeowner what they want, making it faster, making it easier, more friction-free. That's what we got to do. And, you know, one other thing I'll say about this, I just remind everybody every single time, is just go to your AI of choice. Whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Claude, whatever it is, and just say, hey man, I got no clue how to use you. Start with me in ground zero and just talk with me about how I could use you to improve my business. That's the mindset. Don't treat it like a search engine. Stop thinking it's Google. Start treating it as a genius human assistant. It's slightly on the spectrum, but just work with it in that regard and you're gonna see that you make great progress really fast.
Yeah, Marcus, we, we agree. We are so aligned. I just recently published the 2026 Roofing Marketing and Sales Playbook. And one of the items on there is an instant online estimator. I still have people challenge me on this and say, you know, things like, but I'm not going to be the cheapest. And I know you just released a book that you emailed me about that I have pulled up on my screen here. And in fact, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. But you would, you would publish this book. You're giving it away for free. I have popped into it here. So you go to priceguide.ai in the upper right, click free book, it'll bring you there. And one of the things that I stopped on was this one. Objection number 4, and I love that you put this here. We are not the cheapest. And so many folks, this is their number 1 wall of resistance in roofing. And what they're saying is, and by the way, here's where you can get the book, priceguide.ai, click free book, it'll pop up. And I just stopped on number 16, chapter 16 on this objection because I see roofers constantly being like, well, I'm so afraid to put my pricing out there because we're not going to be the cheapest. I'm never going to win the opportunity. And I think if we can help someone get past that obstacle, this is going to help them be like, okay, I'm awake to this idea. This is what homeowners want. And I kind of have no choice but to get on board. So talk to me through what, what you would say to the roofer that has the objection, well, we're not the cheapest. Yeah. Yeah.
To your point, this is in the book. Call for Quote is Dead. Which I love the title. Isn't that a glorious title?
It's a great title.
Call for Quote is Dead. Because people do feel like call for quote has become the middle finger of the internet. It just annoys people to death. And we've all experienced this in, in any type of purchase situation. Now, when they say, I'm not the cheapest, just analyze this just for one second. A homeowner, when they start the process of searching for a roof, let's say, rarely ever do they, they search for the cheapest roofing contractor. In fact, they just don't use those words. That's a very, very low search. What they're searching is this phrase: roughly, what is a new roof going to cost me? That's what they want to know. Notice I didn't say exactly. They want to know roughly what it's going to cost me. Once again, what you can do as a contractor is an estimator should have a price range. It should have a range. It shouldn't have a single number. It should have a range because there's gonna be variation in factors like, you know, what is the pitch of the roof and what is the type of shingles or material that they use for the roof itself? And do they want gutters or do they not want gutters? There's all these things, which by the way, within your estimator, you can ask these questions. And then at the end, you're gonna give them a range and this is gonna say, hey, here's roughly what you're gonna spend. So that's what is— that is the gateway drug and allows the homeowner to say, ah, Finally, I'm in the game. And, uh, in fact, if you came out and said, we are the cheapest, um, uh, uh, roofer in Orlando, people would be like, mm, I'm a little bit worried about that. Yeah. Like that actually causes concern for a lot of homeowners. Yeah. And so instead of doing that, you address that fundamental question and you haven't distorted value. In fact, you've built value. Now I will say, you know, a mistake that I see is if you have an estimator and the only thing it does is say, hey, give me your, give me your address. And then, oh, this is your square footage. This is, this is what you're going to spend. That's a mistake. You do not, that is not, this is not how you do it. I've tested over 1,000 of these tools. All right. I know exactly how it works. I know how it works in roofing. You want to ask a series of questions before you're asking them to give you information. So don't make your first thing, hey, give me your information, give me your zip code. No, say things, things like, okay, so when you think about your roofing material, which one are you most aligned with? And you give them some choices like, ah, I think I'm most aligned with that, right? And you could even show, here's different sizes of homes. Which home is the size of, is, is most like the size of your home? Oh, mine's, you know, 1,500, 2,500 square feet. Okay. See, all these things are allowing you to speak in terms of ranges with the homeowner. And now all of a sudden you've asked 5, 6, 7 questions, and then you say, okay, I'm ready to send you an instant estimate. Just give me your email and I will send it to you immediately. And now the person's like, okay, yeah, it's a fair trade. You're giving me an instant estimate. And listen, you're not saying it's not a quote tool. Stop thinking about like a quote tool. It's not a quote tool. It's an estimate. And that's what people want. When you go to the home, You give a quote. Mm-hmm. Now you might say, well, in the future, are we gonna be giving quotes online? Yeah, I mean, it's probably gonna, there's probably gonna be some people that are quoting online, but it's always gonna have caveats because they're always gonna say, I still need to see your roof for final approval that this is gonna be what it is. And there's gonna be a bunch of disclaimers because of it. So what we've seen converts the highest is to do what I just described. And by the way, one last thing I'll say about this, cuz there's a lot of contractors spending a ton of money on paid ads right now, Adam, as you know. The big tragedy I see is when, when a contractor like a roofer is doing, you know, a couple thousand to $10,000 to $50,000 a month on paid ads and they don't have a campaign that's tied directly to an estimator. When you make the call to action in the ad, like get instant estimate for your roof right now in seconds, and then they click on it, okay? And then they start the estimator process right then and there. There's no landing page. That just like is a bunch of fluff. Now all of a sudden the conversion rates are about 40% for those folks. Whereas your typical conversion rate for somebody landing on an ad landing page, as you know, is generally significantly less than 10%. So why would you do that? Why would you accept less than 10% if you can get a 40% conversion rate on your current ad spend for every visitor? I mean, it goes through the roof. I've had multiple contractors that have heard me talk about that this year. They put an estimator tied into their, to their Google Ads or Facebook Ads, and all of a sudden their conversion rates exploded, way more leads, and they were back in a good position again.
That's a beautiful tip. I really, kudos to you for making it to this part in the podcast and the video because that is a golden nugget. We, I, I do a lot of, uh, landing page audits for the community and a lot of folks are putting their, their, um, their online estimator in the landing page and I'll be honest, I, I haven't thought about just going straight to the, straight to the tool. Yeah.
The ad itself is, yeah, that's the payoff.
That's brilliant. And, and it, again, the lowest friction. I am, uh, I'm embarrassed that I didn't think of that. That's fricking beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Well, as soon as you test this, you're gonna be like, dude.
Yeah.
Dude, you were so right about that.
I'm like, yeah, that's golden. You know, I, I also, so that's a key takeaway and people just made a bunch of money for implementing that most likely on getting a much higher ROI from their marketing. Um, when you talk about giving a range, we had just run a leadership roundtable in our community where people were sharing best practices of their online estimator, and everyone that's had the best success has said the same thing. I don't give a direct quote, I give a range.
Correct.
Now on my other monitor, just for fun, 'cause I like looking at the auto industry as an example. They happen to have, um, pretty big budgets to experiment with these things. But I looked at the, uh, a Ford F-150. A new one starting at $39,330. Right.
Yeah. Paid by no one ever. Yeah, right.
Exactly. Purchased by no one other. Meanwhile, and then you go up and it's like, okay, Tremor starting at $64,000, Lariat's $59,000 and change. But the range ultimately is from $39,330, which gosh knows if they ever even sell one of those, up to a $110,000, $130,000 Raptor R. But it's still an F-150. And one of the key things that I see being so important, especially to overcome that objection of we're not the cheapest, I'd almost go to say, great, then you should definitely be using an online estimator because it provides price conditioning. And price conditioning is so important, especially when you mentioned affordable payment solutions, i.e., financing. So anything that you share in the home, they're gonna be anchoring against what they've seen online. And if you're not using an estimator, we were even talking about how important it is to use third-party tools like HomeWise as an example, to give, you know, an average roof in your area costs this amount. Now, it's not a quote for you because there's all these variables. And I took great inspiration from, from They Ask, You Answer, which I know was recently retitled, but to use education in your marketing to say, hey, here's all the factors that will go into your roof estimate.
Well, see, that's the thing. If you do an estimator the right way, again, this is gonna be table stakes, so it's good that we talk about it. I got a lot of data on this, obviously, with so many folks using Price Guide at this point. It, it should mimic the sales process that would occur in the home traditionally. So for example, if you're a sales rep, you go into the home, you're gonna ask a series of questions, especially about different options, accessories that they might want with their project. Now, when you ask some of these questions, occasionally the homeowner's gonna say, well, I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by that? Which is why a great estimator is literally educating them as they go through the estimator, which is why you have certain images. You can embed certain videos explaining the thing, the question, the option, the feature. You have what is this buttons or explain this further buttons that helps the homeowner say, oh, okay, that's what that means. Now I understand. So what happens is naturally they come to you much more educated and further along the buyer's journey because now they're able to say, okay, I already know what I want. I did that little tool on your site. I know I want this option. I don't want that one option because we don't need that. And here's the reason why we don't need that. And I also need this thing here, right? Is it classic, classic no-brainer. And the other thing about this, and this is what blows my mind the most. You take, you take a tool like Price Guide, average person spends between $20 and $69 on the most expensive one a month. You will literally pay your first year, usually in the first week of using an estimator. Like, that's— it's wild to me. Wild to me. And so that's why it doesn't make sense. Like, you can't find something that gets you more leads right now for home improvement. And I've like— You can't do a content campaign that gets you that many leads that quickly. There's like literally nothing you can do. You know, you can, you could, you do spend a ton of money on Facebook. Could you spend a ton of money on Google Ads? Yeah, you could. But if you do those without using an estimator with them, you're literally getting 25% or less of the leads you would've gotten had you've just given the homeowner the thing that they really needed for the conversion point, which is what's so confusing to me. And, you know, like I said, I've been talking about this for 15 years. This is— I was the first person in the swimming pool industry to really address pricing at a level nobody had ever addressed. I was the first person to have a pricing estimator in the industry. Nobody had ever done that before. You know, it's like I'm seeing all these things and I'm just like, I don't care that nobody's not done it. I don't— all I care about is, is the homeowner going to say, I'm so grateful for this. This helps me so much. I really appreciate the fact that these guys are willing to do this. Like, if the homeowner's gonna say that, that's the game I wanna play. That's where I wanna be. And when I get there, I don't want there to be shock at all. You know, for years I would walk into the home, I would quote somebody after 2 hours for a stinking swimming pool, and they would say, gosh, I thought this was $25,000. And I would get so annoyed with the homeowner and it was on me, Adam. I was the ding dong. I was the one that was allowing them to live in a state of ignorance. And a lot of contractors are like that today. You, if you, man, if you could see my inbox, because, because I talk about this stuff, people on LinkedIn like hit me up all the time. Marcus, I had this terrible experience with the contractor the other day and you wouldn't believe they spent 2 hours in my house and they still wouldn't give me a quote because they said they had to do such and such. It's like I wanted to kill the person. I see stuff like this all the time, man. I have to like control my, like my, my vibe here on this because if, if people were seeing the stuff that I'm seeing, they would be like on a, they would be on a wrecking ball mission. So I'm just trying to help these contractors. These are my brethren and my sisters that are trying to, to, to make it. We have this glorious time. We're gonna have the golden age of the trades is coming up. You're gonna have more potential employees than you've ever had because they're saying, okay, the trades is awesome. I want to go into the trades. I don't want to go into tech. I want to go into the trades. So you're going to have great people. You're going to have great opportunity. You're going to have tools to help you run your business more seamlessly if you're using AI. It's a great time to be alive, Adam.
That's great, man. Marcus, thanks for being here. If you had one piece of advice to send everybody away with to say, if you do this, it will give you a strong competitive advantage while everyone else sleeps on it. What would be the moves to make? 1 to 3 of them, whichever ones come to the top of your mind.
Okay, I'll try to do this really quick. We've done it a bunch and it's worked. Uh, not to beat a dead horse, number one, uh, for a contractor, roofer, pricing estimator. Number two, create a review page. Now this is a, this is a, the mother of all review pages. It shows, it shows all of the review platforms you're on. It shows your number of stars on each one. Shows, uh, your average score and it shows 6 to 10 reviews from each platform written in HTML so that all AI and search engines can understand it. And if you create this one single page, what you're gonna quickly find is that suddenly you, the AI, especially ChatGPT, will start referring to a lot of the reviews on that page. You see, ChatGPT can't read Google reviews. It doesn't have access to the API, but it can read yours if they're on your site. So you create the mother of all review pages and, and you, you sh— you, you one page that shows all the platforms, shows where you stand, where you scored, and a handful of reviews from each. That's number 2 action item. It kills. I've done it a bunch. Number 3 action item, again for this is for AI optimization, is you create the mother of all rewards recognition certification pages. And so any reward you've ever won, your company's ever won, you want to talk about that award. You want to talk about the recognition. You want to talk about the certification and talk about what it means to the homeowner. All right. And you want to source back to the award if you won an award, if you won the Parade of Homes, this or that, if you know, if you won the BBB, this or that.
Okay.
But you create one page with all your rewards, recognition, and certifications. And by doing that, that becomes a major verifier to AI that you're a legit business. You're gonna see that they source that page a lot and they will, uh, start showing it in the results and you're gonna get a lot more recommendations. Those 3 things, that alone, total game changer.
Yeah. Awesome. Marcus, thanks for being here. Word.
