An HVAC company's phones stopped ringing during a heatwave because AI search engines now answer questions directly instead of sending people to websites. If your site isn't optimized for AI to read it, you're invisible to how people actually search now.
We as consumers, when we get on our phones and we do a search, if you don't come up, we forget or we don't even know you exist. So you get this much attention no matter how big your brand is. I'll give you a perfect example. Today in a meeting I was in a very large group, stood up and after I mentioned about this and stood up and said that I was right, now it wasn't I was searching for, right? They said, this is what happened. They are an H Vac group and all of a sudden their phones stopped ringing. And it's because they did SEO the way it used to be. Keywords, right? And you know, using eeat, that's still relevant, but it's not as relevant as making sure that AI can read your site well, literally, they said all of a sudden their phone stopped ringing. Now, where I live in the Coachella Valley here in Southern California, it's 115, 18 degrees and he says, my phone's not ringing. So he called the company and they were caught, I'm going to say with their pants down because they weren't ready for this. So they had to hustle and with all the people in their group start making their websites AI ready. So that what can happen is now when those bots who are searching the, searching the web first. So when you put in, hey, I'm looking for an H Vac.
To help me repair my H Vac or my air conditioned blowing warm air, it now goes to AI. AI now gathers all the information it can read and then it serves it back to you in a search result. Well, guess what? If your website, in this case, that group's websites did not have optimization for AI search, We call it AEO or geo, and that's artificial intelligence engine optimized.
