Phil Risher says home-service businesses need two things to compete with AI agents: a pricing guide AI can scrape, and an online booking widget. They should also publish FAQ-style content that answers real customer questions, so AI learns from their expertise instead of generic ChatGPT answers.
Okay, there's two things that you need to have on your website to prepare for the AI shift. One is you have to have a pricing guide on your website that lists out all the prices, up or down. It doesn't have to be your exact pricing, but it could say the typical pricing for gutter cleaning is this. The price goes up because of this, the price goes down because of this. Sometimes people charge this, sometimes people charge that, but an overall pricing guide. Why? Because these AI agents are going to be going and scraping websites and making recommendations to people based off of your pricing page to give them a ballpark price. The second thing is to have a booking widget on your website so people could do online booking. Again, the agents are going to get the pricing, they're going to give recommendations, and then they're going to Do you want me to schedule service for you with this company based off of their reviews, based off all these things? Those are the two main things. Now, as far as like authoritative content, traditionally in home service, we think of content as not really going to get you a bunch of customers because it's like, it goes on Facebook, but is anyone going to see this? And then they're going to reach out to me. Is it just branding? Blah, blah, blah. That is the old way of thinking. The new way of thinking is that the content trains large language models because large language models are built on content. You should be having content that's like all of your customer questions. Every single piece should be a content piece that you're making. How much does something cost? How long does something last? Ask for. Should I get this gutter size or that gutter size? Can I do this over here? Like, all of the things that your customers are asking, you need to be creating content about it. Because what happens right now is that there's this world of AI slop. Marketing companies know that they should do this, but they're asking ChatGPT for the answers when they need to be asking the businesses for the answers instead of relying on ChatGPT for regurgitated junk.
