Chat GPT now under 50% market share in ai search race (Live Q&A)

And we're live, and we are taking real home service business owners' questions, doing live Q&A. I also got some really cool stuff for us about ChatGPT and how it's dropping 50% now. It's under 50% of uses, and some other cool things with Reddit and ChatGPT stuff that we're going to go through as well. But as we're going live, I am live, so please in the comments feel free to drop Q&A, Instagram and YouTube, and then let's get right into this. So Let me share my screen and I'm going to show you this new report. It literally just came out and it's talking about the shift of these AI platforms. So on Instagram, obviously you can't see this, but I'm just going to talk through the shift that's happening. So the state of AI in 2026, and basically what it's showing us is that ChatGPT is now under 50%. So right here, true audience market share for top AI assistants. And when ChatGPT came out, it was 80% of the market. And there was, you know, some little bit of Claude, a little bit of Gemini, other stuff, Perplexity, all these things. Now fast forward from 2023 to 2026, May 2026, we have ChatGPT is now under 50% of the platforms that people use for AI search. Gemini is now around 20-ish, uh, 26%. Claude is around 14% is what it's showing. And basically the biggest fall-offs that's happening is from ChatGPT. So if you're thinking about, okay, well, where do I optimize? What do I do? Are people, everyone's still going to ChatGPT. Gemini also just rolled out that they crossed a billion users for Gemini every single month. And ChatGPT was already at a billion users. And so I think that ChatGPT is losing a lot of foothold here. And I have another stat that I'm going to show in a sec, which is the Reddit citations on ChatGPT. But when we look at this right here, ChatGPT ads, it actually showing the top genres and subgenres for ChatGPT ads from February 11th to May 27th, 2026. And obviously we do home service marketing. And so I was looking on here like, where does home service or even just like services or consumer services stack up? And on here, Right now, ChatGPT ads in particular is not even on this page. So it's less than 1% of the ads that are being run, or probably even less than that for home service businesses. So that was pretty cool. And then there was one other stat on here. Let me just pull this up. So this was a post that Darren Shaw did about this exact thing. So as of May 2026, the AI assistant market looks like this. ChatGPT is at 46%, Gemini is at 27%, and Claude is at 10.3%. This is obviously changing and ChatGPT is losing foothold. I want to share this also because this just came out, which is the Reddit citations are dropping in ChatGPT. So there's this big gold rush of like, oh my gosh, I need to get on ChatGPT and I need to make sure that I'm on Reddit so that way I'm shown on ChatGPT. Well, it's slowly dying. So PromptWatch, they do this report every single day and they're looking at the prompts that are happening on ChatGPT and then where the citing is coming from. And you can see on this graph that August 8th, there was a drop. August 14th, there was a drop. And as of August 17th, so just a couple days ago, it's literally now less than 1%, where it was at over 3% of the citations from ChatGPT were from Reddit. So over the past 7 days, literally cut in half. Really big shift here. Now also Reddit's slow decline in AI overviews. And you can see that this is in July, it was at like 2.5%, and now it's 2.1%, slowly declining. Reddit slow decline in AI mode. It's dropping. So basically what we're seeing with ChatGPT is that they're trying to find their foothold. I did a, um, a video about the new algorithm that's coming out from ChatGPT, and it's essentially their partnership with Yelp. And it's looking at, okay, well, yeah, uh, ChatGPT is trying to figure out where do we actually fit in here and how do we make sure that people are being found. Let's see, we got a question here. I would think— first off, what's up, Andre? Thanks for hopping on, man. Thanks for the question. I would think Gemini would be the most used for local, just out of habit of many that just automatically go to Google. I would completely agree with you. And that's correct, because with the shift from traditional search to now going on to Gemini or AI mode, this is— I shared this with my leadership team and they said the exact, literally the exact same thing that you just said. And I believe that over the next 3 months that there's going to be this much bigger gap, which is Gemini is going to be taking over a lot more of this. It's going to be a lot more relevant from an AI search perspective in that example that I just showed compared to ChatGPT as far as like they just crossed a billion users, probably going to be way more, especially to the— to your point, Andre, I would agree. Cool guys, I'm live. So yeah, feel free to drop your comments. I got some Q&A that we're going to hop into. I always love just talking about AI search and the shift that's happening because it's a wild time and there's a huge land grab that's happening right now for businesses to be able to take advantage of this AI platforms because it's not just spend more on ads and you're going to magically grow your business. All right. Let me hop into Q&A and let's hit the first one here. So this was from a business. He said, I know I'm spending money on Google Ads, but my CRM doesn't talk to my ad platform. How do I actually prove whether my ads are making me money or just burning cash? Okay, this is the age-old question of return on ad spend. And when we think about throwing money at the Google gods or just spending money to grow, there's a couple numbers that we need to know. And, and this is what we do for people, but also I would coach people on, is there's really like 4 numbers you need to know. 1, how much money did you spend on ads? Spent $2,000. 2, how many leads did you get? I got 10 leads. So if you spent $2,000 and you got 10 leads, that's $200 cost per lead. Most people can get this. Then how many of those actually generated estimates? And what is that estimate amount? So let's say that you got 10 leads, but you— and you wrote 3 estimates and those 3 estimates was like $20,000. Okay. So I got $2,000 spent and I wrote $20,000 in estimates. I would say that's pretty good. And then the last thing is how much money did I actually make? If you spent $2,000 and you made $10,000, that's a 5x return on ad spend. The question that he asked was, okay, well, it's not in my CRM, so how do I do that? We had this exact issue where we work with people that have different CRMs or they have no CRM or the, you know, a janky one. So what we recommend is take all your leads and then just go into your CRM and use the phone number and figure out what happened to that lead. It is a manual process, but usually if you don't have a CRM, you don't have it dialed in, it's going to be like 10 to 20 leads and you could do this or you could have an AI agent do this for you like Victor or something else. This is eventually like kind of like what we build into, but basically you need those numbers and this is how you're going to know if you're actually making money. All right. Question number 2, everyone keeps talking about AI search and agents. Am I already too late? And what do I actually need to do right now to get— so I do not get left behind? This is a remodeling company. Okay. Obviously we started off the top with AI search and, you know, how do you do agents? And I'm going to break it into 2 separate sections here of how I answer this. One, AI search, and 2, agents. No, you're not already too late. And what do you actually need to do right now so that you don't get left behind? Let's start with AI search. First thing with AI search, AI search is not about clicks anymore. It's about being the recommendation. So from an AI search perspective, what we recommend doing is creating real content with real questions so that way you are shown as a subject matter expert. It's not about buying backlinks to build trust. It's about creating content to build trust. And so the businesses that are going to win in AI search are going to be the ones that have the most robust knowledge catalog or answers that are out on the internet. And if you want to be relevant in AI search, then you need to be creating content for that. Now, that's not the only thing. Obviously, the traditional SEO strategies, whether that's onsite SEO or offsite SEO, is still relevant. Like get reviews, make sure that you share, you know, all the credibility that you have on your website, build a pricing page for your website. Make sure that you have pillar pages of services on your website. Like you have to have the fundamentals down, but if you have the fundamentals down, then you can go and build on top of that with content so that way you can be surfaced in AI overviews and AI search when people are asking questions. Now, the second part to this, which is agents, and the agents one has a little bit of a different answer in my opinion, which is like, you're not too late. Yeah, I got you. I'll, I'll, we'll talk through that in a sec. I'll pop it on the screen and we'll talk through that. The agents thing, every— there's a whole scramble right now for agents and everyone wants agents. And a lot of times business owners, we work with $1 million to $10 million home service businesses. Business owners can get distracted as the CTO or Chief Technology Officer trying to build agents and do all of this stuff. And I'm not saying don't go and do AI stuff. What I am saying is you can go down a rabbit hole and build agents for things and not have the full context and lose track of actually growing your business just by doing all this AI stuff. So when we talk about agents, I think there's two things. One is if if you're going to work with a company, like for example, we build agents for our business that then we deploy for clients. So it essentially allows you to use agents in your business without you having to manage them, build them, keep track of them, and deploy them. You can work with companies that are building agents that then can deploy them inside of your business, so you can still use agents without building agents. That's the first thing. The second thing is that there are some off-the-shelf agents out there like a Victor, for example, or even like Claude agents where you can just talk to it and build something very basic to get stuff going. So, uh, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he said that 2027 is the year of the agents. So you can either start using the agents now or figure it out and be behind the 8-ball in 2027. So I would recommend 2 things. One, if you're working with any type of companies, it could be your CFO, it could be your bookkeeper, it could Anything, ask them, hey, how are you using AI? And do you have any agents that you deploy inside of my business? First. Second is maybe do some light work of like, what is a redundant task that you do over and over again? And then ask Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, hey, could you help me make, make this better? That's exactly how I would recommend it. No, you're not too late. Now is the exact time where there's a land grab happening for both AI search and agents, and you should be taking advantage of it. All right. Explain the new website architecture for the update. Update Google and AI algorithms. So basically, this is my, this is my opinion. You've probably seen my videos about this, is that the breadcrumbs that Google is laying out is that websites in particular are not going to be built for humans, and also they're not going to be built for clicks. Whereas the past, you know, 20 years, it's been like jam keywords, rank on certain keywords, and then have people go to your website. So what I believe and what Google has said is that your website now becomes a data layer for your business. And I actually, I have a video coming out on this and the video is about how to build this knowledge catalog. And essentially there's 6 parts, one of them being your website, but there's 5 other parts. And those 5 other parts are things that happen inside of your business that happen outside of your business and your website now just becomes a data layer. When we talk about the actual architecture and what you need to do on your website, and this is my opinion, is that you need to make sure that you have all of your content bases covered. And the way that you know that is what is called knowledge gaps. And knowledge gaps is essentially what are people asking? So you could use Google Search Console, you could use your phone calls, you could use Google Analytics. What are people asking online in AI search versus what if I shared digitally about my business? This is what we call knowledge gaps. So essentially what I would recommend and what we do for businesses is we figure out what those knowledge gaps are and then we create content to fill the gaps. Because if Google AI platforms want that information and we haven't shown it, then we haven't been able to show them that we're the expert. So I believe when I answer this question, as far as website architecture, is that it's not for humans to read. It's more so to coach these AI platforms on your business. But it's not just about jamming keywords or figure— it's about figuring out where your gaps are and then making sure that you have content on your website, content across the board on YouTube, long-form, short-form content on social platforms, talking about it on podcasts, other places that's happening inside of your business than just your website. Curious, Extreme Digital Solutions, if you have any other thoughts on that or any other feedback, because I love hearing, talking about this stuff. Let's see, I'm also live on Instagram. Jack, give me life-changing advice. I got you, bro. Hopefully that was life-changing for you. All right, I got some more Q&As. Let me pop a couple more up and I'm live, so feel free to hit them in the chat. Let's see. I'm spending on a lead aggregator, an SEO company, and now Google Ads. How do I track return on ad spend across all of them when they each have their own dashboard? And this was an exterior lighting company. Okay. So when we talk about spending money on these different platforms, now I'm going to, I'm going to break this up. When you're running paid ads, like a lead aggregator or Google ad spend, it's pretty simple. I laid it out above. It's like, you know, figure out all the leads that you got, figure out who those leads are, go to your CRM, figure them out, and like run that simple playbook. You can have an agent do it. You can do it by hand. If you have a CRM, you could just put in lead source into your, into every single lead that comes in. And then at the end of the month, just pull a report. It just takes someone dedicated to data integrity to do that. However, I want to answer this part of the question, which is the SEO company, because we've got this question probably 3 or 4 times now in sales calls, and it's about, okay, well, Phil, I hear you talking about these knowledge gaps and creating content. So if I create a blog post for my website, that's a knowledge gap. Am I going to be able to see that AI search showed this blog post? Someone came to my website and then turned into a lead. Or I'm going to create all this content. Am I going to be able to see that this actually helped me get customers? And this is where it's going to get very, very murky. And the reason is, is because in AI search, AI search is not saying, hey, here's the answer. By the way, click on this blog post and go and read it. That's not it. What it's doing is it's taking the information and then it's showing it inside of AI mode. And then it's saying, do you want to reach out to this business? Here's their phone number. Here's their form. Here's how you schedule online. They're not actually ever driving traffic back to that page. And so this is a very important distinction because if someone's doing SEO or AI search or any of these services for you and you're trying to track a return on ad spend from SEO, it's going to be a lot murkier than what it used to be, which was my rankings are going up, people are coming from these pages and they're clicking on this form from this page because AI search is just using that as their knowledge base to give answers and then ultimately citing your business. as the end result. So very important distinction, especially in the next 6 to 12 months of SEO and performance and how to track your, your, what you're doing. Now with that, what I would recommend is those knowledge gaps, obviously important, but then also tracking what we call share of voice and mention rate. And share of voice is, okay, based off of these prompts, which are the top 10 things that people ask, how am I showing up? What is my share of voice? How many times do I show up? And then what's my mention rate? How many times does it mention me? Based off of this prompt, and once you know that, then you can have a better baseline of like okay AI search platforms trust me AI search platforms reference me here, and then you have these prompt lists. But again, tracking ROAS or return on ad spend or return or ROI from SEO is going to get a lot more murky in my opinion because of this. All right, let's hit the next question. I'm live. You got a question? Okay, what's the best way to find those search result gaps? Kojo asks this on Instagram. All right. So the best way to find those search results gaps, uh, we actually, we built an agent for this named Turner, but you don't have to build an agent necessarily. What I would recommend is take, if you, if you use call recording software or anything that's like, you know, your phone, um, or if you record your calls, your sales calls, I would take that and build some type of like a knowledge base or something for it. And then what you want to do is you want to, like, you can use Claude and just say like, hey, Here, what are the questions that this person asked? And then go through my online presence and do I answer those questions online? If you don't, if it can't surface your answers online, then that is a knowledge gap. The agent that we built does this automatically, but you could do it just like that. Figure out your call recordings or even your top questions. If you don't have call recordings, just take your top questions and then say, hey, here's a question that most of my customers ask based off of my brand and my business. Can you find where I answer this online or if I could do a better job answering it online? And it's going to show you a knowledge gap on that exact question. That's how I would do it. You could obviously work with, you know, use a tool that does this automatically, or you could just do it just like that. But great question there, Kojo. Thanks, man. All right, cool. Feel free to drop a comment if you got a question or you just, you know, just want to talk. It's all good. Let's see, we got, we are a $1.5 million landscape business running 14-hour days in peak season. and the ball gets completely dropped on follow-up. Do I automate the nurture or just hire a CSR? All right. If you're a $1.5 million business and you don't have a CSR, absolutely first hire, get a CSR. And the reason that I say that is Dan Martell, he's an author. He wrote a book, Buy Back Your Time. He creates content on YouTube and online. He has this Buy Back Your Time replacement ladder is what he calls it. And essentially, the rungs of the replacement ladder are number 1 is admin. So if you're busy, you as a business owner, your lever— like your highest leverage activity is not answering the phones, answering emails, or sending out, you know, invoices and stuff like that. It's sales or management or delivery of the service or something more than just the admin stuff. So he says, hire admin, get that off your plate. Then go to delivery, which is your technicians are doing the work. Then go to marketing, which is get a marketing company or a marketing person that can help you. Then go to sales, get a salesperson, build a sales process, then go to management. As you buy back your time, your time is getting more valuable, and then you can spend more time on the next rungs. And a lot of people get this wrong, especially in home service where they don't buy back that admin time. They hire for delivery so that way they can do more work. And it's backwards because you need to buy back the time so then you can do more work and then you can ultimately level up from there. So first, hire a CSR, customer service representative. Also, yes, automate the nurture sequence. Basically, if you're missing calls and you're missing opportunities and you're getting back to people a day or two later, I see this all the time, especially at 1.5. A lot of people think, oh, well, I'm just going to grow my business if I spend more on ads or get more leads, and they start running ads. The problem is that when you run ads, that is to a cold audience. That cold audience does not know you, like you, or trust you, and the way that cold audience See trust is in speed. They see that they filled something out and you got back to them right away, professionally and on time. When you have a warm audience, like if you're built on referrals, word of mouth, that kind of stuff, they're a little bit more lenient because they already kind of trust you from this person's word. And they can give you a day or 2 or 3 to get back to them because they already trust you. When you go to cold audiences, the only way to build trust is speed. They're not going to wait around 3 days and get back to you because they don't know you. They don't trust you. So yes, get the CSR, build the automation, the nurture sequence, you know, the text and email. The one that we like is when someone fills out a form on your website, automatically text them, ask them for pictures and information. That way you get the ball rolling and you get some information on your end and they feel like they moved the ball down the field a little bit. Um, but, but great question. You're like, you know, you're at a perfect spot to go from like 1.5, you do some stuff and then you get bumped up from there. Um, let's see, Andre. You're really informed and quite brilliant. Thanks for inviting, man. Appreciate you. Thanks. Thanks so much, man. I appreciate that. Um, this is why I like to do these live Q&As, just to answer questions, but also just like, you know, share the wealth, whole squad eats kind of thing. So appreciate that. Um, all right, let's hop to the next question. I'm spending on search ads and LSA, local service ads, but search ads are expensive. Should I dump everything into LSA since the cost per lead is lower? And this is an HVAC plumbing business. Okay, spending on search ads, but it's not working. Okay, this is very common. So when you run search ads, yes, they're going to be more expensive than LSA. And the reason is because LSA is cost per lead. So you don't actually spend any money until you get a lead. And usually with LSA, it's at the top of Google and it's much, much higher intent. Like search ads, they got to go to a landing page, they got to fill out a form or call your business, where LSA is just like, I needed something. I want to work with this business, call them right now. Boom. It's done. The problem with LSAs, and we had a, they're like a $10 million HVAC business that we work with. They, a year ago, they were spending on LSA, like literally like $25,000 a month on LSA. And he would have spent $1 million if he could, because he was crushing it and nothing changed in his business. He had the most reviews dominating. And then this summer he could only spend like $4,000 a month on LSA, even though he wanted to spend $1 million. And the reason is, is because maybe there's more competition. Maybe Google LSA is getting way more competitive. Maybe they're saying, hey, you know, we're trying to branch out and do other types of ads, like a million different things. The problem with LSA is that you don't know. So you could say, I'm going to spend $10,000 and they only give you $1,000 of spend and you don't actually get that scale like what you want. So There's 2 things on this. One, cost per lead, in my opinion, is a vanity metric because cost per lead is— it's nice and easy to say, right? You could say, okay, my cost per lead is $100. That seems high. My cost per lead is $300. That seems high. But if you don't know what your average ticket is and you don't know what your close rate is and your return on ad spend on those specific leads, then it's a little bit irrelevant because hear me out on this. If you spend $100 and you actually Won a $10,000 job, you're going to say, let me do that again. But if you were saying, oh, $100 is too expensive, it should be getting $20 cost per lead, then you don't know that that actually turned into a $10,000 job. So this is what I'm saying is like, we see this a lot in HVAC, which is a service job is like $300. An install job is like $10,000. So cost per lead, it's variable depending on what the outcome is. So I wouldn't get too hung up on cost per lead. The beauty of search ads that you can ramp up and ramp down. There are some variables there, but you can mostly ramp up and ramp down. And if you have a good system that tracks return on ad spend every single month, you can make a lot better decisions. So the summary of the answer is run LSAs and try to max it out as much as possible. So yeah, for sure. Like if you can double it, then double it. And if it fulfills, then great. Do that. Like keep going as much as you can, but don't bank on that being the outcome because a lot of times people would spend millions of dollars on there if they could, and they can't because they're not getting fulfilled. So that would be my recommendation there. All right. Got a couple more questions. I'm live, guys. So if you got a question, feel free to drop it, drop it Instagram or on YouTube. Let's see. We're about to launch a new service line, water mitigation. When do I start spending on marketing for it versus waiting until the team is built? Okay. This is a great question. So I actually had this, one of my first clients, they were a $3 million HVAC business and they had just brought on an electrician. And they were like, okay, the electrician needs to get up to speed. We need to market. Like, what is the first thing that we should do? So the first thing that we did was we used email marketing. We retargeted their past prospects and customers with an offer for their electrical offer. And that was when we had someone in place. And ultimately that business spent $0 on ads and they went from $3 million to $8 million and then sold to private equity within 3 years because they used that strategy. They got the electrician. they got a plumber, and they basically just built out their lifetime value through their initial client base. So first thing is you got to make sure that you have the people in place. You don't want to market something and then not have the team in place. I would say like, you know, adding things on your website, start talking about content, I think is fine, but direct like offers, you know, emails, that kind of stuff, don't do that until you have the team in place. And definitely don't start running ads until you have a really good system in place. A lot of times people say, well, I'm gonna go and run ads and then I'm gonna get these leads coming in and I'm gonna, you know, sell this thing. But if you don't have an actual sales process built out for this new service, if you don't know the pricing is correct, like ads is the last thing in my opinion that you should do. Um, one other like really, really, you know, secret tip on this is build out a referral partnership before you do any of this. So for example, like it's water mitigation. So let's say that there was a plumbing, like you go and find some plumbers and you say, hey, offering a new line of service for water mitigation. Do you all do that service? No. Would you be interested in referring us that type of business whenever you get the opportunities and then we can give you a cut of it? Yes. Because now you're going to build like this web of, you know, 10, 20 businesses that are going to refer you for these jobs. And then you don't have to spend any money on ads. You're in the local community and you already have like this back burner of opportunities coming in whenever you can fulfill it. So that's a really good pro tip before you do that. Um, awesome. Let's see. All right, Instagram, we're good. Um, all right guys, I'm live. Feel free to drop a question. Let's see. I know, okay, I know I need more people, but do I hire the CSR to answer phones first or the technician to do the work first? This is electrical business. All right, we kind of talked about this before, which is that buy back your time loop, you know, admin first, then delivery with the technician, because the worst thing you can do is hire another technician and then y'all both have work. And now you have double the admin tasks that you're trying to do to keep afloat. It's just like doesn't work. So hire the admin first to free you up to do more work, then hire someone to do work, and now you have the admin covered. It's a beautiful thing. Um, all right guys, uh, that's all the questions that I got. I'm live. I'll hang out for a couple more minutes. Uh, feel free to drop a comment below. Uh, what I will say is that I have a couple cool things coming up. Um, we built this agent to Turner, T-U-R-N-E-R. It's getturner.io if you're interested in checking it out. We also have a video coming out next week on the knowledge catalog, which a lot of people have been asking us about from the videos that we've been making. It's like, how do I make the knowledge catalog? What goes into the knowledge catalog? All those things is going to be answered in that video and it's going to be nice, clean, and concise and give you a game plan to build out a knowledge catalog for your business. So be sure to check that one out when it comes out. If you're not on our email list, like, we send out a ton of stuff. We have a lot of free resources. Um, so that's in any of our videos. It says, like, join our email list. It's a