Phil Risher explains how AI lead-generation platforms rank businesses. They scrape review counts from Google and Yelp, check if you respond to reviews, and track whether new reviews keep coming in. A one-time surge doesn't work because the AI needs fresh data to trust your reputation.
these AI platforms, what they do is they're looking for 3 things. They are going and scraping your Google reviews, your Yelp reviews, your Angie reviews, all these review platforms, and they're saying, do you have a lot of reviews or not compared to other companies? The second thing, which a lot of people miss this— Google puts this in their criteria for ranking— is you got to respond to your reviews. Because if you don't respond to reviews, it doesn't show that you care about customer service, and they don't trust you. Because if you get a bad review, are you going to respond or not? And they don't want to show someone that they're not going to trust. And then the last one is you have to make sure you're getting consistent reviews. Don't just get 100 and say, okay, I need to go focus on something else. You have to have a consistent flow of reviews so that way you're training these algorithms to be like, yeah, they do a good job, they have great reviews, they respond to reviews, those things.
