Mike Andes rebuilt his contractor company's website for AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, adding FAQs and machine-readable schema. The shift now drives 9-11% of traffic from AI, delivering real leads. Small optimizations stacked to create their best quarter ever.
It's unheard of in the middle of like what many is calling a recession. It's so hard to get leads and like just staying disciplined to where can I save 3%, 1%, half a percent? And I've just mentioned the one so far of like all the little improvements to the website, the web form. I didn't even mention the fact that we redesigned the website to make sure it's really AI-focused and making sure that has FAQs, making sure the backend schema is very easily read by ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. We're now getting 9 to 11% of our traffic to the website from AI sources and we're getting real customers saying, oh yeah, I saw you on ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the benefit of being able to show up on an AI platform where they're not sharing 20 blue links, they're sharing 1, 2, maybe 3 options for the customer when they ask for a contractor or for a landscaper, for a lawn care business, and the ability to show up there, super high value. And so we re-architected the entire website over the winter to make sure we'd be able to also take advantage of that. So again, the only reason I'm sharing all this is not— it's not to brag. It is to say all these little 2, 3, 4, 5, 6% improvements is what added up to the best quarter we've ever had. And many of these things were in the works for the past 14 months. If you're in a hurry to double the business, if you're in a hurry to improve your lead flow, usually that means spending a bunch of money on ads without tracking.
