3 Things Every Local Business Must Do to Get Found on AI Search in 2026

The average AI search has 347 words people are using. So people are not just going to Google, typing something in, and then making a decision on their own. They're using search as a copilot to make decisions and ask it questions and distill down who's the best company to work with. That is literally how search has shifted over the last 3 years. Large language models find their information from content that's floating on the internet. So if you wanted to train large language models on your business, the number one thing to do is feed it content about your business so that it knows who you are. There are AI avatars of people that can communicate with your customers, that can communicate with your team members, and every single business owner will want this when they find out about it. If you had an LM about your business that you could just be like, hey, here, ask it any question. It knows everything about us. It's gonna tell you about the promo. It's gonna tell you about the seasonality of our business. It's gonna tell you about if we do this or that. Like, come on. This is the future. This is the future.

Today we're gonna be talking about how businesses can ensure visibility in the age of AI-driven search experiences. And I think you and I are singing from the same hymn book on this with our clients, prospects, anybody who will listen to us. Search has completely changed how consumers will search and find a local business, especially home service businesses. The landscape is totally different than it was even just a year ago. So we're gonna be jumping in on that topic today. I'm super excited for that. But before we do, for those who may not have caught your episode, it was way earlier back in 2025. Give us a quick origin story about who you are and how you got to owning Flash Consulting.

Yeah, for sure. Phil Risher. I'm based outta Maryland. I have a wife and a daughter and a little boy on the way in one month.

Oh, congrats.

Yeah, thanks man. I started in SEO in 2015. I started a blog about personal finance and learned from Neil Patel, basically, you know, create content. I was writing 2, 3 blog posts every single week. Google Search Console, keyword research, drive traffic. I was featured in Forbes, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, got a bunch of people to my website, started saying, how do I convert these people into leads? And then I, you know, set up email newsletters and all stuff. I bought a tiny school bus, traveled around the country, made content, and then I ended up working at a $3 million home service business. And when I went to work there, my worlds collided. Prior to that, I had been trained at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in their management trainee program. And when I went to work at Enterprise, at the duct cleaning company at $3 million, he did not have good digital marketing. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't have any numbers. He was just basically, you know, flying blind, throwing things at the wall. Within a year, he went from $3 million to $4 million, and then he went to $5 million the next year and then sold to private equity. And he was like, you need to go help other people do what you did for me. And that's a hybrid of digital marketing, data in their CRM, and then automations as well. And that's what we do for our clients now.

I love it. Yeah. And your business has been crushing it the past handful of years. All right. So at Flash Consulting, so you guys, you essentially, you're handling all those main core tenants you just mentioned for home service businesses. Knocking it outta the park. Tell me how things have changed in the last year, 2, 3 years as it pertains to search. So, and when I say search, I mean when I'm going, I'm a civilian homeowner, I'm going onto the Google machine and I'm trying to figure out someone who can come clean my ducks or do my roof or mow my lawn. How have you seen that change in the age of AI and especially with Google introducing AI mode last year?

Yeah, I would say that there's, pretty much there's 3 inflection points that I can recall. So the first one is 87% of people, like 3 years ago, were starting a search for a home service business on Google. So they would go and say HVAC repair near me. And every single year, BrightLocal, they do a report on where people are going to search for local service businesses. And every year it's going down, down, down. And the most recent one that they just put out is boomers still use Google in this way. But when you move down, you know, through millennials and Gen X and then Gen Z, slowly the search is shifting off of Google search for local service businesses and onto social and AI. So one stat in particular that they pulled was that 26% of Gen Z finds local service businesses via social media. And right now they might be searching for coffee shops or bars or whatever, but when they own homes, they're not going to just magically shift to Google like the boomers do. So this is the big inflection point number one, which is Search is shifting from an age perspective and people are searching differently. The second one is, this happened about a year and a half ago, Google started indexing short-form content. So if you go to Google and you type in HVAC repair near me, one of the results at the top, like images, videos, it's going to say short videos, and you're going to actually see short-form content that is being indexed in Google search. That's the second inflection point because now content has more weight than just likes and shares, and maybe a customer sees your video and reaches out. And then the third inflection point, which is happening as we speak, is the age of AI overviews, AI mode, like what you're referring to, which is if you are listening to this and you go and search HVAC repair near me or whatever typical search would be, just add one or two words to that, which is how much does it cost for HVAC repair near me? And the results are going to change. You're going to see this little AI overview section. And this is going to be their LLM, large language model, that's going to be educating customers. One whole synopsis on this is that the traditional Google search has 4 words is what they typically search. HVAC repair near me, Italian restaurant near me, whatever. The average AI search has 347 words people are using. So people are not just going to Google, typing something in, and then making a decision on their own. They're using search as a copilot to make decisions and ask it questions and distill down who's the best customer company to work with. That is literally how search has shifted over the last 3 years.

It's wild, isn't it? And not to mention those who are, so you said 25% of Gen Z using social, but all the people who, and the rising percentage of people using the LLMs like ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, et cetera, that is rising too. And I presume it's gonna be the younger generations who are using that as their search masters.

Yeah, exactly. And another differentiation on this is that even boomers that still use Google Search, they're not even going to know that it's AI mode, right? Like they're not going to understand what the AI overview is. But this is the whole shift that's happening in how people are interacting with these platforms. That's just Google's going to naturally do because of the ChatGPT side of things. So it's just going to shift to this.

Yeah. Well, and if you look, I know last year, at least part of last year, AI mode on Google was in beta and then they released it for everybody. And I've just kind of noticing on my mobile or on my desktop, it sometimes kicks me into it, it sometimes prompts me for it. I think there's still A/B testing if people can choose it or just take it. But I feel like at least half the time it just dumps me right into AI mode. So like thinking of myself, someone who knows more than the average person, just like you Phil, on how AI search works, but the average person who's just trying to find a gutter cleaner in near them, they might not, they probably don't even realize they're in AI mode. They'd just be like, oh, this is a cool new layout for Google. And look, it gave me the top 4 results. Near me and I can just click or call, boom, right away. Like it's all part of Google going to the whole zero-click experience too, right? They want to keep you on the platform, but they also, if they want to provide the best result so that you call that best result right away, right? Because then that advertiser will stay on Google, et cetera, right?

Exactly. And what Brian is saying is that there were 3 shifts. There's Yellow Pages to Google search. That's been the last 20 years. Google search, Google search to AI is the next shift. And that's why we're saying like, we're kind of like in the middle of this whole thing happening right now. And the companies that are are gonna win are the ones that are not just praying to the Google gods, bless me with leads, but the ones that are actually preparing for the next phase of search and finding out about your business.

Exactly. I can't say that enough. It's so good to have a guy on the show who totally gets it and is gonna help me sing it from the mountaintops.

Thank you.

All right, so if we're talking to any business owners out there right now, any local service providers, any small business, a service provider, even a, you know, a retail product type of business, you've gotta be prepared for how to position yourself to be noticeable on AI. Or through AI searches. What are you doing with your clients, or what are you recommending that local businesses do to start getting ahead of this curve and to start positioning themselves to be the featured business in local AI searches?

Yeah, so over the last year I had Neil Patel on my podcast and I drilled him on this, and I had Marcus Sheridan who wrote They Ask, You Answer, who's like the SEO guy for home service on my podcast twice, and I drilled him on this because I didn't want to just come up with my theory. I wanted to drill the guys that I trust as well, that like their perspective on. Basically, what it distills down to is this. If we know that large language models power AI search, so when you go to AI search, they're trained on large language models. Large language models find their information from content that's floating on the internet. Okay? So if you wanted to train large language models on your business, the number one thing you can do is feed it content about your business so that it knows who you are. So when we talk about AI search, It's like, okay, well, how do I show up here? And one secret thing, just go there and ask it, how do you rank home service businesses? And then it's going to tell you and then plug your business in and say, why did you not rank me? And then it's going to tell you. But aside from that, if you want to trade large language models, it's create content that trains large language models that you stand out as a subject matter expert.

I mean, it seems so simple. And, you know, honestly, for the last, you know, 4 or 5 years, everybody's like, well, you need to have content. And it was mostly to put it on Facebook or put it on social media, right? Just have the content so you can check that box. But now it takes on a whole different meaning. You have to be seen as the authority. It, it might be that not many people view your video or look at your YouTube channel, but the language models, AI's gonna look at it and they're gonna understand whether or not you're trustworthy.

That's right.

And that's gonna affect where you get featured or if you get featured or if you get, you know, selected to be in certain AI searches. And like you said at the beginning, you add a couple different words to the search or to the query. And it could lead to totally different results. So tell me if I'm wrong, but when you have tons of content out there, and not just garbage content, it's gotta be good content, it's gotta be worthwhile, it's gotta be valuable, it's gotta be how-tos, you name it, right? Positioning you as the authority. If you start fueling the background with you in it as you the authority, then the AI doesn't really have an option but to not recognize you as such, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll give you some secret sauce, Brian, on this. Okay. So we actually built an agent. And you could take the agency thing aside. If you're listening to this, you can do this exact thing. Okay. We use call tracking phone numbers and we put them on ads, landing pages, whatever. And that allows us to get transcripts from calls. Those transcripts have the real questions that your customers are asking. They also have the expert information that your CSRs are saying to these people, right? They ask them a question. Your CSR answers it based off of what your business does. That is a goldmine of information that most home service businesses do never connect it with their marketing company. They have smart people internally saying smart things and salespeople saying smart things. Then they have a marketing company out here who's using ChatGPT junk, and then they're wondering why they're not standing out as the authority because they don't have it connected. So like the agent that we built, and again, if you're listening to this, you can just do this. Take your call transcripts, turn it into a blog post. Take your call transcripts, turn it into a social media post. Take your call transcripts and turn it into video hooks of what you need to say on video, or just have it turn into a video script that you just read and put pictures over top of it. What I'm telling you is that you have real good content that's happening every single day that you need to use for your marketing and not just rely on ChatGPT junk or a marketing company that's going to use ChatGPT junk to market your business.

That's such a huge point. And I think that's such an unlock that is, it's so simple yet so few businesses do it where it's, you need to get your data. You need to get your information from the live source, the people who actually have the problem. Um, so that is, that's some serious secret sauce there, which hopefully shouldn't be too secret. Like it's just literally listen to your calls. What are the prospects asking? What are your clients saying? And how can you improve and how can you help answer those questions? So you mentioned using those, turning them into blog posts, social posts, video hooks, video scripts, et cetera. So if you're the business owner out there right now and you're like, oh my gosh, there's so much I need to do. I, I don't know how to do it. I don't know where to post it. I don't have professional this, that, or the other thing. How simple can this be for a small business owner to just get out and start doing this?

Yeah, so I, I actually ran a test personally, so People still ask about likes, shares, and views opposed to actual content that's going to get you leads and help you rank. So personally, I wanted to see how many pieces of personal content I had to make to go viral. And by viral, I mean like tens, hundreds of thousands of views on a social platform. And it took me 20 videos. It was a video of my daughter. I made some spaghetti. I said, how was the spaghetti? And she said, that boy cooks. Like, like, that boy cooks. I say that a lot. And she thought it was funny. And it got on video. Then it got 160,000-170,000 views. Okay. I got nothing out of that at all. The reason I'm sharing this is because like, I didn't get any leads or anything. It just got some views and likes, you know, some exposure, branding. A lot of business owners, when they think of making content, they think I need to dance, I need to do something funny or viral or this and that, right? You ask me how easy is it to actually do something. I would argue that it's better to take out your phone and record yourself in the shop like this and show people what's going on than this whole polished up thing. Because people right now, there's this trust crisis, right? Like people cannot trust anything because is this AI or is it not? They want it to be like the phone like this and then goes like this, hold on, it's a little blurry, you know, like they want the real. And I think a lot of business owners, they misinterpret premium brand or professional content, and I don't want to cheapen my brand by this overproduced type of content that they have to make. And I want to like put a cherry on that, that you do not need this overproduced content in order to be a premium brand. You need to help people solve their problems to be seen as a premium brand. So how easy is it? Go to your salesperson, or if you're the salesperson, write down the top 20 questions that you get in your sales call and make content about those things. And whether you make a video of it, a blog post of it, a social post that's written of it, I don't really care. Most important is that you get it somewhere online so that it can get indexed. So some of the simple things that you can do is have a simple pricing guide, what makes the price go up or down on your thing, like what Marcus Sheridan talks about, or talk about a specific project that you did and use your CompanyCam pictures and use before and after pictures and talk about the different, the things that you did. You don't have to be the face of it. Just talk to it. So there's a lot of like simple— interview your team members, you know, hey, why do you like working here? What's going on? I mean, there's so many different small things that you can do. I think the hardest part is just getting over the initial hump of, now I got to do another thing and create content. And I'm not saying that you have to be some huge content creator. That's why you might work with a company like ours that we can kind of help streamline this process, but either way you got to do it.

Well, and I think an easy way, at least what I try to do with clients and specifically I'm going to use lawn care as an example, but there are so many things throughout the year that a lawn care company owner or representative at the company can go and educate their clients about that people who are not lawn nerds such as myself will know about a lawn, right? Like when, you know, June and July roll around and it's hot as heck and it's, it's been rainy and then it dries out, but you get this brown patch fungus in your yard and it can kill off, it can appear to be kill off entire patches of your lawn. And you know what that customer's gonna do? They're gonna call the lawn guy and be like, why is my lawn dead? What's going on? Well, how can you help prevent this? You can go out and film a video with a patch of brown patch one year, tell them exactly what it is, show them what it looks like, explain to them that this is not the end of the world. After the weather clears out, new grass will fill in and it'll be fine. What we can do in the interim is let us know what happens. We'll drop a little bit of extra nitrogen on it, right? But this is the example of a video that of something that happens in your business that you can go use to A, inform your customer base, you know, send it out via newsletters, send it out via notifications when the season is at the right time. but also post it, put it on your YouTube channel. Like you said, put it everywhere you can so that now you can also rank and be indexed with Google and all the search engines as an authority. Because what are you doing? You're creating a homemade helpful video for customers and prospects alike. And that's exactly what the engines want.

Yeah, exactly. One of the things, kind of like what you're alluding to that we do with our clients is we set up a content calendar. So January, February, March, April, May, June, you would know in your business what you should be talking about based off the seasonality. And then each month you'll have the topic for that month. So whether it's your blog content or your social content or your newsletter content, now you have a theme that you can be talking about so that way you're not just randomly trying to pull something out of the hat and what am I, should I say? It at least gives you some type of a target what you should be talking about.

[Speaker] Yeah, I think that's an old playbook trick, right? Like just map it out, plan ahead, and this way as a business owner, you don't have to freak out this month because I need to come up with something, I need to be informative, I don't know what. And amidst your day-to-day with your business, which can always be hectic, that's gonna probably get backburnered. And that's why most businesses don't do it.

Yeah.

Just gets, ends up on the back burner.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So Phil, tell me about other things that business owners need to do to essentially build the foundation so that they are more discoverable on AI. And I'll kind of give a more specific question here as it pertains to business websites. Yeah. And business landing pages. What are your tactics when it comes to making sure that, cuz a big part of it is knowing like your domain score, your domain rank, things like that, your backend SEO. Yeah. Well now it's like GEO, AIO, all the different EOs. Now there's a lot of different things that go into this, but what type of things affect that? And do you guys help rebuild websites or make them to be more efficient in that manner so they're more discoverable?

Yeah, I'll give you something that's kind of like in the future-proofing and then more tactical things for today. So the first thing is there's this thing called Agentic Booking. What agentic booking is right now for OpenTable or Rezi in Google Labs, you can turn on agentic booking where you can go to AI mode and you can say, could you find an Italian restaurant that has the best fettuccine? And I want to go with my wife for a party of two on Friday at 5 o'clock. And then it's going to go to OpenTable and Rezi, find the best things, come back to you and say, these are the ones that are available at this time. Here's the best ones that have the best fettuccine, da da da da da. Do you want me to book it for you? Okay. This is agentic booking. Yes. And this is already there for restaurants. Now, home service business owners, for me in particular, but this is any business, you need to have online scheduling set up. And the reason is because when agentic booking comes and you say, hey, I need someone to come fix my toilet, then it can go and find local plumbers. Go to their website, find their availability, come back and say, hey, here's a couple of companies that are available today. Here's a couple of availabilities that are tomorrow, whatever's best for you. One other piece of this, you need to have a pricing page on your website because people want— they want to know two things. When can you do it? When can you do it? And how much does it cost? So if you can tell it, when can you do it with online scheduling and then how much is it going to cost roughly? This agentic booking, and whether it's agentic booking or even them just communicating back and forth with AI model, they're going to want to know those two things. So you need to put that on your website to make sure that it happens. So that's like future-proofing your business. I would say if you have a solid home service business, you already have online scheduling. You might not have a pricing guide or not, but you should have that. So that's two things that is coming down the pike that I see is like AI mode, rank all the way. And you mentioned about no clicks happening on Google at all, and this is the future of it. Like People probably won't even have websites at some point. It'll just be all brand.

Mm-hmm.

So that's what I think you can do for future proof. Right now on your website, what can you do? If you have an FAQ page with all the frequently asked questions, take those out and turn them into specific blog posts because each one of those should be a standalone content piece for you. Also, if you do like community stuff, highlight that on your blog because I mentioned about brand being the authority, the main piece. It doesn't really matter as much now about— I mean, there is this thing for page load speed and SEO in this, and I think that this is a fair point, but brand is going to trump everything when it all switches to AI mode because it's going to care about your reviews. It's going to care about where you're showing up on all these places, and then it's going to care about how much you educate people as the authority and subject matter expert. So you need to be building your brand is the most important piece. I'll be completely honest with you, Brian, this is a big shift for me because I was trained like with Neil Patel, just like numbers, you know, I create this blog post, they go to my website, my conversion rate is 2% and like I'm good and I just do this and it was very like mathematical for me and then Gary Vee kept beating me over the head that no brand is everything, brand is everything, content, content, and I see that we're shifting to that.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and tell me about your opinions on PR. So whether traditional public relations, you know, doing press releases or doing releases that in order to be picked up by different publications out there. Do you guys do a lot of that? What does that do in the AI search mode these days?

Yeah, this one's tough because there's the thought process of backlinks. And for people that are listening, this is like technical stuff, but like backlinks, you might have heard this 5 or 10 years ago, it was like a big push. Backlinks, backlinks, you could buy backlinks and blah, blah, blah, and it's going to boost your domain authority and blah, blah, blah. And while that can be good, this BrightLocal report that I mentioned is like backlinks is dying. There is a rise in citations like name, address, and phone number being cohesive across the board. But to your point about PR and getting featured in things, I believe that local community engagement with links and talking about your business is the number one thing that you could do from a branding and PR perspective. It's okay, you know, get on a podcast and have some signals that like, wow, they're relevant all over the place. I don't think that's bad. I think if you can dominate a local area by doing that, it's much better. So like some examples of things that we've done with clients, we had a client there, an HVAC contractor in southern Florida. They did a giveaway where they gave away a $7,000 HVAC unit, and it was a play so that way they could get a bunch of leads coming in and then make money, whatever. What we did was we said, hey, you need to go reach out to the local news stations and tell them you're doing this giveaway so that way they feature you and you can get more leads from it. But also you get a backlink from them that says, hey, wow, this cool company did this thing. Another one is if you have referral partners, for example, you do roofing and you find gutter cleaning companies to work with, have them link back to you and talk about this partnership. You can also build partnerships with local charities, with local PTA organizations. Like all of these things ingrain you into the local ecosystem. And to your point, when you talk about building a brand of local connections, this is a really important piece for Google to say this is a local trusted brand.

Yeah, totally agree with that. When you can become the trusted authority in your local community, whether that's New York City or Cincinnati, Ohio, or Baltimore, Maryland. Yeah. If you are seen not just by the actual people who will be your customers, but the LLMs and the search modes who will understand that you are the expert in your area, you are the authority, you are one of the top authorities. Based on all the things that you have done through PR, putting, like you said, putting a release out or getting a feature in all the local news stations, the local, you know, insertcitynamehere.com, news channels. All of that makes a huge difference in when AI goes to look to see if you are the expert. If you are all over these trusted ABC, CBS, you know, all the big name outlets that are in your local area, the affiliates, then AI has no choice but to think that, okay, you guys are legit.

Exactly.

So to that end, I want to talk about reputation management as it pertains to AI search experience these days, because I know with our customers it is huge. Like reputation management is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. It's always been about getting your 5 stars, right? But there's even more to it now. What are you seeing in the market right now when it comes to the reputation side of being able to rank in AI?

Yeah, so everyone knows, hey, you, we need to get 5-star reviews. We need to beat a competition. Of course, do that. And have a system for it. But there's a little part that a lot of people miss, which is responding to the reviews, and specifically 1-star reviews, because Google cares that you care about your reviews because they care about their reputation, and they don't want to put your name out there if you're going to give someone a bad experience and then not even care about responding to your review. So if you're not responding to your reviews, you should be, specifically the 1-stars, in a nice pleasant way. That's the first thing. The second thing is making sure that you're posting on your Google Business Profile is important. Again, it's another signal back that you're doing the right stuff. If you were to go to ChatGPT and say HVAC contractor near me and then ask it, how did they get these results? It's going to tell you, I went to these aggregators, I went to Google and I found the top ranking things, and it's going to tell you exactly what it did. So what I hope that you don't get from this is that local SEO, whatever you might hear from your marketing company, local SEO is not dead. It's just shifting. That's still important. And all those things are still good signals, whether that's on Google Search or an AI platform. And that's kind of like the thing with reputation management is that it's like, it's not dead at all. You should still be paying for this and still be doing it. It's just the wrapper that it's on, which is on Google right now, is shifting to some other platform that's gonna pull from this exact same stuff.

We've done a lot of this for clients in just the last 6 months here where we take someone on, we do an AI search on them. They get generally good reviews, right? Maybe they're a 4.7 on Google.

Yeah.

And the AI review will always end with, however, some reports of shady business practices or poor customer service or never answering the phone, poor communication arise in some people who have used this bit or reviewed this business. And just put yourself as a business owner in the shoes of a searcher when they're trying to find the best possible place to get them to have this service completed. If they read one of those AI overviews and things are mostly good or maybe only halfway good, and then AI suggests that there's possibly something wrong with this company, am I likely to call them or am I gonna call the one where I get a, everybody loves them, they do a great job, their communication is spot on, right? Like common sense.

Exactly.

But those source those from your online reviews, which is why it's vitally important to still maintain your 5 stars, to still actively get them and not just get one every 6 months. And like you said, replying to them as well. It's just, it's so key for consumers or prospects that are viewing you, but also for AI.

Yeah, for sure. There's a layer here that I want to go a little bit deeper on that we didn't get at, and I don't know if it's on your agenda, but I think that we would do a disservice if we didn't get to this. So let's do it. We talked about content training large language models on your business to help rank in AI search, and that is a very feasible thing in the next year or two years. That's very important. I think there's another layer to this that a lot of people don't know about, and I want to make sure that I share this. Right now, there are AI avatars of people that can communicate with your customers, that can communicate with your team members, and every single business owner will want this when they find out about it. Okay. So like, I have one. It's through a tool called Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I.ai. It's trained on all of my podcasts, all of my content, all of our SOPs, and my team internally can ask it any question that it wants. And it's going to cite the source of wherever the content came from. The reason I'm saying this is because the content that you're creating is going to help you rank in AI search. It might help you get some customers on Instagram, whatever, Facebook. But what you're going to want is an AI avatar. And what you need is content to train that thing. You need to get the concepts out of your brain into some type of a platform so that way you can train your avatar. Because I believe that in the next year or two, Imagine you go to your website and you have a little avatar of you on your website that a prospect can interact with and ask questions to. It's already there right now for my team members. And, you know, if there are a lot of people out here that use this for internal use, it's not good enough yet for external use, but it's going to be good enough in the next year or two. So I'm telling you right now that if you're not creating content, you're not going to have the backlog to fill this and your thing's going to be junk because you're not going to have the stories and the— and all of that stuff to feed it when it gets to that point. Wow.

Okay. I like that. And this is video, audio. If you're on podcasts, if you host your own little podcast to create content, that's fine too. And you just dump it into delphi.ai and it— okay.

Let me give you, let me give you a little bit more secret sauce. Delphi is just a tool that I use. I think we pay $50 to $100 and it automatically curates it for you. But we are building AI avatars for our clients. And the reason is because as a marketing company, We want a knowledge hub of all of their stuff because we need to access it and ask it questions. So all of those call recordings I mentioned, they're getting dumped into it. All of our Fathom recordings from our meetings are getting dumped into it. All of our onboarding conversations are getting dumped into it. And there's a tool called NotebookLM, which is free from Google. And NotebookLM creates a mini LM language model for whatever you want to do. You can create your own LM on your business. So you could do this for free. You don't even need Delphi. NotebookLM, you put in, you know, you can attach your SOPs drive, you can attach some videos or whatever you want. But again, basically what I'm saying, Brian, is that you don't have to use Delphi or some other tool. You can create your own. But what you need to do is have the content to feed into it. Because imagine, business owner, you're listening to this and you have a marketing company that you bring on. If you had an LM about your business that you could just be like, hey, here, ask it any question, it knows everything about us. You know, it's going to tell you about the promo. It's going to tell you about the seasonality of our business. It's going to tell you about if we do this or that. Like, come on, this is the future. This is the future. Yeah.

Well, so, and essentially in practice, this would be where someone goes to the local HVAC contractor's website and it's got this avatar, almost like the traditional chatbot that pops up, but exactly doesn't know anything, right?

Exactly.

This is completely different where you can be like, hey, my heat exchanger's cracked. What do I do?

Yeah.

And it can be like, fill you in.

Yeah. Or it's like, hey, I've been trained on over 1,000 hours of content and SOPs from this business owner. I'm literally the digital twin. Ask me any question that you want. Upload a picture. Boom. Picture. It looks like your heat exchanger might be cracked. I think we should have a technician come out. Our next availability is going to be on Tuesday. Here's a link you can schedule. Like, not even them diagnosing their thing, but just interacting with your business. Imagine in your sales process, you send out an estimate and it's like, hey, you got any questions? Just ask our thing right here. Like, hey, okay, so then let's take this another step further. Imagine you have this agent that you can create content with for your business, because now you have this flywheel of real stuff happening in your business that's getting fed into this avatar that can create content on your behalf.

Wow, there you go. And that alleviates the 'I hate creating content' complaint, right?

Exactly. So like right now, I mentioned that we have this agent, right? So agent gets to the point of creating hooks, you can, we can connect it with HeyGen, which is an AI avatar tool. But the, if you go to HeyGen, H-E-Y-G-E-N.ai, you can create your own avatar. Like I have an avatar that looks like me and it talks like me and it does my hands like me, but it's still a little glitchy and it doesn't look as clean for someone to see it and be like, eh, that, this looks a little off. But that's right now. Imagine in one year from now, it's all gonna come together.

Wow. All right. That's next level. I like that. You're really dealing the sauce here today.

Yeah. That's why I said I got to make sure that I hit this because I feel like a lot of business owners, like when I talk to them, they'll say, okay, I don't want to create content. You know, I don't want to be the face of it. And I'm like, guys, don't care about the likes and the shares or whatever. Even if you don't share it, you're going to want this Rolodex of information out of your brain because there's a whole future that's coming that you're not prepared for.

Yep. Yep. And it's one of those where it's like, it doesn't matter if you're scared to be on camera. You could have fallen outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. I don't care. You gotta get on camera, you gotta talk, you gotta do th— you gotta get that information outta your head.

Exactly.

So that it can be at least used to help you serve your end goal of training the LLMs. Because if it's locked in your head and you're the only one who knows it, it's benefiting no one, especially yourself.

Exactly. Yeah. I'll give you another big shift that we see right now in the market for home service businesses, and that's virtual estimating. So there's a tool out there called LiveSwitch, and basically what LiveSwitch allows you to do is to hop on a virtual estimate. So imagine someone fills out a form, your CSR calls them and says, hey, you know, I can schedule you a quick virtual estimate if you just walk me through your project and show me what it is. LiveSwitch will take that call recording and it will actually measure out what they're looking at, and then it will take that and put it into some type of an AI overview of something. You know, you can prompt it to do whatever you want, and you could give it to a salesperson. You could put it into a work order. You could generate an estimate from it. Basically, what this whole thing is about to happen is that there's going to be a shift from just like, you got to go out there to diagnose things. But now, like, from a marketing perspective, it's not just the phone calls because the phone calls might be like, my toilet's leaking. Cool. I got to have a technician come out there and look at it. There's not much context there. Now it's like my technician is sitting in the office and he does all of our virtual estimates. So let's just walk him through and then we'll send a technician out there to do the work. Now that has a lot of meat in there with the content. And the other thing is if you have a big service area and you don't want to go 2 hours away for a $2,000 job, now you can have virtual estimating and onsite estimating. And the virtual estimate is the first step or the smaller ticket jobs. There's a big shift, like literally every single business that we talk to is like, how do I get virtual estimating set up? What do I do? And it's a big thing, especially if you can layer an AI on top of it.

Yeah, I mean, that would be huge. And how many times I find myself with some sort of home project or something that breaks at the house. And I'm like, I wish I could just hop on a Zoom with somebody with knowledge and point my camera at the problem because I just feel like at least 8 times out of 10, someone who's smarter than me with this thing will notice, oh hey, that little piece fell off or that thing is cracked. You need a technician to come at, like insert problem here. It feels like it could be solved like that. And then layer on the AI capabilities behind that. That sounds incredible.

This is why I'm teeing it up. Imagine you take your AI avatar with your virtual estimating, put it together. Now you have virtual estimating and it's walking them through all your questions and your diagnosis, and you have your avatar that knows everything and it's basically telling it, and then it's going to build an estimate and send it to them. Come on, man.

That's crazy. That's next level. I love this. So it's funny. I got to admit, a couple of weeks ago, our heat exchanger cracked. Like it was a whole— the heating died. It was 0 degrees. So like at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night, I'm calling all sorts of HVAC places trying to see— they all say 24/7 service, right? The first 2 places I called, I was completely fooled by the AI agent for about 90 seconds. Wow. I was a little mad at myself for being fooled, but once I figured it out, you gotta learn how to talk to 'em and actually get to a human.

But there's something to be said about this. So there, there's a report that just came out from a guy named John Torrey. He runs a company called Searchlight. And basically what John, it just came out last week, they do like $11 million ROAS analysis for home service businesses and they distilled it down that last month, so recording is February, in January, 21% of bookable jobs were lost because of AI agents or call trees. 21% of bookable jobs. A lot of people right now, they think AI search, AI, AI, AI, like what I'm saying. I don't think that it's there yet. I'm like getting everyone excited about the future of it, but like even the AI agents, like it's better than your answering machine, but people still want that trust, that real human-to-human interaction, like exactly what you just experienced. So like we tell our clients, you should still have your customer service representative answering the phone, but then if you go to an answering machine, we'll definitely roll it over to AI because it's better than nothing. And you could just say like, I'm the AI answering service. You got me after hours. I might be able to help you. And go from there. So I like, that's right now, maybe in a year or two it's, people are gonna be more comfortable with it. And I think that's the case, but right now that's where we're at.

Yeah, no, and I have to agree. AI agents are not there yet, though I was fooled at the first two of them. I figured it out by the end where I was like, after the first one, I was like, I don't think that was a real woman named Brooke. And I don't think they're coming between 8 and 5 on Monday, which I need them to come on Sunday cuz I got a problem and it's cold as heck out. Yeah. And then the second one, it started getting all these things wrong. I just go, wait a minute, you called me Heather. My name isn't Heather. I'm also not Ernest. You must be an AI agent. And it goes, oh yes, I am an AI agent for blah, blah, blah HVAC. And I was like, ah, son of a. And, uh, I was just like, all I wanted in that moment was a human. Yeah. Just wanted a human. And when you advertise open 24/7 for all emergencies, you think a human is gonna answer, even if it's a call center. That's okay.

Yeah.

At least I got a human. And that was, so yeah, I agree with you there. It is not there yet. I wonder if at some point there's gonna be, I mean, I presume the AI's gonna get so good where people won't mind that they're talking to the AI because it gets everything done faster. But where do you see AI going with just the human, the instinctual need to connect with humans? I mean, we're doing a lot of connecting with computers these days.

Yeah.

Where do you see that going as far as it, especially with home service businesses.

Yeah, I think there's going to be this big swing that we see. And like, even us talking about it, people probably listen to this and like, oh my gosh, like, this sounds way overwhelming. What happened to good old, I'm from here, I help people fix their stuff, you know? I believe that there's going to be a big swing to these private equity guys coming in and doing these phantom companies that's all AI agents and sub it out and AI stuff. And I think like your experience of feeling burned or feeling fooled and duped is going to be a lot of normal people are going to feel that way. And they're going to swing way back to the personalized piece of it. And I think that the companies that still focus on the true customer experience while layering in the things that are important for AI, that those are the companies that are going to win. Because like I've seen it, like private equity comes in, buys these companies, tries to automate this stuff, it loses the heart and soul of the business, and then it closes down in 2 years. Like literal example for us. So I think what you're saying, and I agree with, is like there needs to be a healthy balance with almost going back to the automate what you can, but then also have the personal side. One thing that we do with our clients, which is like an automation type of human feel to it, is inside of their sales process, right when someone fills out a form on their website, we have the owner record a video that says, hey, my name is Phil. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. I'm local here. I was born here, raised here. My kids go to school here. I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to work with you. And we include that in the response right from the form, basically building some human interaction and connection. That's an automated way. Same thing when we send out an estimate, we have a video that says, hey, Phil here, just, you know, here's some common questions that we get. Here's what to expect when you sign it. Again, just building it into the actual process. It's still automated. Like someone sees and says, okay, this might be automated, probably is, but like it still feels so organic and real. I think there's going to be a lot more of that, Brian, like a nice balance, but also not too much AI avatar. Like, yeah, I'm an owner, you know.

Right, right. Well, and I think it's going to come down to communication. I think this has always been true, but I think a lot of businesses, especially bigger can get away with not being expert communicators just because they're big enough and people think they're the ones they need to call or they spend the most on search ads, yada yada. But to the businesses that can go the extra mile when it comes to communication. So, you know, with the SMS, say, hey, your technician, his name is this, they're coming out in the next 10 minutes, da da da. Or having the follow-up call after, you know, we had our whole home system replaced and the next day I got a follow-up call. Hey, we just wanna make sure everything's working well. Da da, it was a human, it was not an AI agent. And they were just checking on us, right? Like that type of communication and that type of personal touch is— it's not gonna die in my opinion ever. And that type of experience goes so far for a home service business. And so many of them ignore it that even doing that small 1% thing can make you that 80, 90% better than the rest of your competition. Maybe 100% better because it feels like it's getting rarer and rarer these days. Yeah, that's right.

And even in my business, like we do these end of month reports and we could easily AI report it and automate that report. But we don't because so many home service businesses are burnt from these reports that they don't even know what it means. So we literally handwrite them and it takes the consultants a while to handwrite them, but they do it because I need them to know the knowledge. And also it's the human to human, like real stuff. It's not just go and interpretate this thing. And I think to your point, it's picking and choosing what are those high leverage things, like a thank you call that can stand out, maybe cross-sell an opportunity, but give you that warm and fuzzy feeling that needs to be a human touch and Business owners have to figure out what makes the most sense inside of their customer journey.

Yeah. Yeah. And to take a left turn there, communication is the key, especially in a business like yours and mine. We do Loom video reports with the clients that we're really, really high touch with. I'm talking to them weekly, so they don't necessarily need a report all the time because they're getting one every week. But for the ones where we're slightly less touch, we're still hitting them once a month with a Loom video where we'll go through and describe, hey, Hey, here's what we're seeing this month, you know, da da da da da. But that, it keeps that line of communication open for, hey, is there anything new in your business we need to be aware of? Is there anything that you want to do? Or, you know, how is business going? You know, keep it, keep us posted on what you're doing. But even for any home service business, that is, it's a solid tactic to use. Keep it personal and personalized and stay in contact with your people.

Yeah, man. I agree. 100%.

Yeah. So Phil, I'm curious when it comes to ads and AI, so the, you know, the traditional platform for most businesses is like, oh, I gotta go spend tons of money on Google Ads, right? Or Facebook Ads. Where does the whole sponsored ad platform fall into place when it comes to AI and the completely different search landscape that we have?

Yeah, for sure. And I can speak to right now and then maybe my take in the future. So like right now it's dwindled down to 80% of people still go to Google. And if you go to Google search engine results page, it's literally the organic stuff just keeps getting pushed down further and further and further. But you have LSAs, you have Google search ads, you have the Map Pack extension. And then you have your map pack, which is organic, and then your organic rankings for your website, which is way down. So any normal person who has no idea what they're doing goes to Google and most likely clicks on LSAs, maybe a search ad. And then if they know what they're doing and they want to read reviews, they go to the map pack. So I still believe that those ads are good because they're bottom of the funnel people that are still starting their search there. They probably are the homeowners. The other piece of this is people ask about like, well, ChatGPT ads or these other ad platforms for AI. What I've seen is that if you were to go to someone's Google Analytics, this is what we do. We go to Google Analytics and you can see where the traffic is coming from. Is it coming from Google? Is it coming from ChatGPT? And we know that the traffic is not necessarily coming from these AI platforms. So people might be searching there and then they might be going to read reviews or clicking on to go read reviews or whatever. They're still somehow finding their way to your business. So right now I would say it's still going to be Google Ads and then Yelp ads. For like bottom of the funnel people. One big caveat on this with Meta ads, there's a huge shift going on in the Meta landscape with the ability to target. This is literally like the past couple of months has been really, really shifting. Like they purchased Manus, they have Anthropic built in, they have like probably the most extensive LLM on the backend of running ads because Mark Zuckerberg literally said this, he wants to kill all ad platforms. This is his words. So basically we're nerds, so we probably know this, but if you were to go onto Meta, you're going to see a lot of ads that are just words, right? Like right now that are just words that say like, if you own an HVAC business over $1 million and you want to grow, you know, click here. And then they'll make like tons of these ads because Meta is serving up such targeted ads to the right people that it doesn't matter. It's not about trying to get your Facebook audiences correct. It's just create the ads and they're gonna put them in front of the right people. Mm-hmm. So I believe that this is gonna be continuing to shift as content becomes the way the, the place that people are searching for. And as AI mode or whatever, you know, that ends up happening, there's gonna be a big shift in the ad landscape, to say the least. Right now I can't speak to what it's gonna look like, but that's just my observation of what's going on.

Oh yeah. So for sure, the last 2 years the Meta ad platform has been getting so targeted where We haven't even touched detailed targeting in over 2 years on Facebook. Like, it's not needed because it's going to do it better than you can.

So can I just call this out? If you're a business owner hearing this, like, we both run marketing agencies and like to go in and build a whole targeted audience. You don't have to do that anymore.

Mm-mm.

Okay.

No, not at all. Not at all. But that places the onus on you as the ad writer and the ad creator to make sure that your copy is spot on. That's right. Telling essentially the AI who it is that you want to target.

That's right.

And that your image or your video is perfectly pertinent along with the headline because AI's gonna sift through your ad and be like, oh, they're looking for this type of person and then they're just gonna go find 'em. And it, here's a perfect example of this. Speaking of the cracked heat exchanger we had just yesterday, I don't get on Facebook often, but I was on there yesterday and the first ad that pops up is this incredibly long-form ad from a, it looked like a personal page of a firefighter. It could be real, could be not.

I don't know.

I know there's a lot of bots too. But it was telling a story about how you need the proper carbon monoxide detector in your home, right? And it was for this company, I forget the name, but it was for this like the perfect carbon monoxide detector. And I'm sitting here thinking, first of all, I know that Facebook got this information because I have Hey Siri turned on and my microphone's always open, right? I know that's a thing. Hot tip, people, if you Hey Siri is turned on, your microphone is always open and they're selling that data to Facebook. That's how Uncle Zuck knew that I probably needed a carbon monoxide detector because I was talking with the technician about carbon monoxide that can come from a cracked heat exchanger while my phone was in my pocket. Not a few days later, I'm hopping on there and what am I seeing ads for? Carbon monoxide detectors. So that's a perfect example of how targeted Facebook is gonna be.

That's right.

Um, and I find it impressive. Some people find it super creepy, but I know how the platform works, so that's— I'm like, wow, that's really good for businesses. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's crazy how that works.

The one thing that I will say is if you're a business owner listening to this, I'm not saying run out and run Meta ads for your business. I think that they're good, but I think that if you are, if you haven't filled out the bottom of the funnel yet and you don't have a good sales process, right? Because they are colder leads on Meta and you have to have a better sales process. I think that it's going to get there more and more as search shifts, but like it's still, in my opinion, dominated on Google and then Yelp as like super hot leads.

Absolutely. Yeah. And there's like Facebook, in my opinion, the Meta ads are for businesses that have that well-established infrastructure. They got the sales team and they're ready to be like, I just need the volume. I don't care if they're tippy top of the funnel leads. We want those 'cause we got, we have the ability to go after 'em.

Exactly.

And that's when you mix in the Meta ads so that I agree with you. It's not one size fits all. There's a lot of things you need in place because that lead, call it lead quality or call it, the leadability is not quite as high on Facebook as opposed to somebody who is actively searching for the problem they have and need help right now.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Phil, as we start to wrap it up here, in the next year or two, if you are a business owner right now and you're listening to us today and you're kind of freaking out, you're like, oh my gosh, like Phil just shared so much information. I'm way behind the eight ball. How do I catch it? How could I possibly do this? It's moving at the speed of light every single day. How do I even stay on top of it? What do you say to a business owner like that in this crazy new age of AI?

Yeah, the number one thing you can do right now is go to ChatGPT, say, give me 52 content topics about whatever your thing is, and give it a little context about your business. And then it's going to give you one video per week that you need to do. You can say like, you know, pricing, good versus bad, the type of services that you do. You can do like reviewing different things, like different products that you offer. Basically get some type of a weekly content rhythm going. You may not even post the content, okay? It might just live in your avatar or on a transcript or something like that. But what you want to do is get everything out of your head onto some type of paper because I'm sure if you're a business owner and you want to grow, you know that you need to buy back your time and you know that everyone comes to you to ask you questions and you're the bottleneck because it's all in your brain. You need to take that and get it out of your brain so that way you can buy back your time and give it to your digital twin so that way it can do this stuff. That's the sum synopsis of this whole thing.

Yeah, absolutely. It's just get out there, create your content, get every piece of information outta your brain. And I like your hot tip of just literally go use the AI today. Go use ChatGPT and prompt it for the X number of things that have to do with your business and it'll spit out topics. And then that's the great thing about ChatGPT is it's the antidote to the white paper syndrome, right? Like I, I've got a blank page and I don't know what to put on here.

Yes.

Literally just go prompt it. And I do that all the time. It's like, oh, okay, that's right. How, you know, how could I not think of that? I know it's in my head, but I can't spit out 10 of 'em, you know, with a gun to my head.

Right. That's right.

But ChatGPT will do that for you.

That's right.

I love that. I love that. Well, Phil, man, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for stopping by the show again. And it's crazy how much things have changed in just the almost not even a year since we last spoke. It's changing at an incredibly rapid pace. That is accurate when people say, oh, it's changing every day. No, it is. It's changing every every day.

Yeah.

And that's where there's a massive benefit to having someone like you on the side of the local business owner to help them see around those corners. Because as a local business owner, just admit it, you don't have the time, desire, or knowledge. And why should you? Because you are the craftsman. You are the one dealing with the day-to-day, managing your people, serving your customers, providing that excellent experience. You need to have someone like Phil on your side to help you manage that. So Phil, again, thank you for joining me. I wanna make sure everybody out there listening today, if they want to get in contact with you, if they want to learn from you, if they want to check out all the awesome content you have, Or maybe if they even see a possibility of working with Flash Consulting, what are all the best ways to catch up with you?

Yeah. So if you own a business, home service business between $1 and $10 million, that's like our bread and butter. So you can go to flashconsulting.com and click discuss your business. If you're like, hey, got a lot of cool content, we have a YouTube channel, Flash Consulting, P-H-L-A-S-H Consulting, and we have tons of content on there about all of this stuff. So you can go there as well. And I usually hang out on LinkedIn or Instagram, Phil Risher, happy to be a resource there.

Well, Phil Risher, this guy cooks. Thanks again, man.

That's right. Thanks, man.