Google Just Made the Biggest Change to Search in 25 Years

Google just made the biggest change to search in over 25 years, and I've been doing local SEO since 2017. This is by far the biggest change that's ever happened. Search is moving from blue links and keywords to AI-powered answers, recommendations, and agents, and most home service businesses are still marketing on Google like it's 2015. As a growth partner for home service businesses, we've generated over $47 million in revenue for home service companies, and in this video, I'm gonna break down exactly how we're positioning our clients for AI search. What you should be doing to position your home services for AI search and the overall shift that's happening with Google so you can prepare your business. Okay, so what actually changed? This is a brief that Google put out, A New Era for AI Search. You can see this came out a couple weeks ago, and this is Elizabeth Reid, VP Search. And there's 4 specific sections that we're going to go through on this video, which is Powerful AI, Search Agents, Agent Decoding, and Personal Intelligence. But let's start with Powerful AI. So Powerful AI right in search. So what does this actually mean? If you go to Google right now, it looks different. And what looks different is this AI mode right here. It does not say search like it used to say Google search or search. It says AI mode. So what does that mean? When you do HVAC repair near me and you click AI mode, notice where it takes you. It does not take you to the typical Google search results. It takes you to AI mode. And they are saying that this is Gemini 3.5 that they rolled out. And Gemini 3.5 Flash, our newest Flash model, is delivering this. So what does this mean? What this means is that now people are actually interacting with an AI platform opposed to what you typically see here, which is your traditional search results, which is Google Local Service Ads, Google Search Ads, your Map Pack, and then the actual on-site SEO rankings. Now they're getting some Google Business Profiles, some links over here, and, you know, some conversations happening, and you got to scroll through all this stuff to get to the point, and then some ads at the bottom. Essentially, everything is shifting from the traditional search to now AI conversations. So before, you type a keyword into Google, Google would show you the websites, LSAs, you click through the links to figure out, and you would find your answer on your own. The new way is that you ask a question naturally, AI answers it directly, and there's no clicking required. The problem is solved instantly like you saw with that AI search function underneath. Now, the shift is already happening and Google isn't asking users to learn a new tool. This is a very important piece 'cause when I talk to people on podcasts, or webinars, they say, well, are people really just going to switch to start using AI search? The problem is that they don't even know that they're using AI search. They're slowly adding new features every single week to get people to transition. And the CEO, I made a video about it a couple weeks ago, is telling people that by 2027 you're going to be using agents and AI search. So their strategy is embed AI into the existing habits. Instead of Google Search, now it says AI mode and wow, okay, there's this new tool, but let me start seeing how this works. The method, search by search, feature by feature, are slowly getting integrated into how people use their tool. The result is that AI becomes the default experience. This is how search is shifting, whether you like it or not, whether you believe that people are going to start using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini or not, it's happening and they're forcing people to do it. So the major changes from Google is AI mode in search, which I just showed you, that users ask questions and get answers directly, no click through websites. And we're going to talk more about that and how that shift plays into what you should be doing for a home service business. But before I do that, I want to go through the other core updates that they made. So the second one is search agents. So what are search agents? Let me pop over here and I'm going to show you what this means for your business. So search agents are essentially— we're ending the era of search agents where you can easily create, customize, and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks right in search. We're starting with information agents, which is you asking questions, operating in the background 24/7. These agents intelligently reason across information to find exactly what you need. At exactly the right moment. So they're introducing agents that are searching for you, that are finding information based off what you want. Now, this is the part that's more important, is right down here talks about the actual agentic booking capabilities, because in Home Service, this is what I've been preaching for the last 12 months, is that we're also expanding agentic booking capabilities in search to a wide range of new tasks, including local experiences and services. Just share your specific criteria, like finding a private karaoke room for 6 on a Friday night that serves food late. And Search brings together the latest pricing availability with direct links to finish booking through the provider of your choice. And for select categories like home repair, beauty, or pet care, you can ask Google to call businesses on your behalf. Okay, if this is not alarm bells ringing for you, this is exactly what is shifting in 2027 is search agents. What's going to happen is people are going to ask it a question. Hey, I have this issue. It's going to provide them with the first part, which is the intelligence, like, hey, okay, it sounds like you have this issue. Would you like me to contact the company to help you? Yes. Then it's either going to call the business on their behalf or it's going to provide them with a pricing page and online booking tool. This is all right here. It hasn't come to fruition just yet, but in the next 6 to 12 months, there's no way that it's not going to happen because they're already talking about it. This is what I mean when I talk about search agents and how they're going to fundamentally change search in general. It's not going to be people clicking and deciding on their own. It's going to be their agents doing it on their behalf. All right, the next one is Agentic Coding, which I'm going to kind of breeze through that one because essentially it's building tools for you right in search, like data graphs and usable widgets. This is going to be more for like a professional use case. It's not going to be for a B2C, direct-to-consumer home service search, but people can code things inside of search and ask it to build different tables and things that look like that. And then the fourth one, very important, this one just rolled out as well, which is Personal Intelligence. This is the missing piece to this whole equation that is going to separate Google, in my opinion, from anything else. And that is that these agents are gonna know all of your information. Search answers are gonna be tailored to each person's situation, history, and intent. And how's this gonna happen? This one's pretty mind-blowing for a lot of people when they hear this. And that is, finally, for AI to be most helpful, it shouldn't just know the world's information, it should understand your context too. So today we're expanding Personal Intelligence and AMO to more people in nearly 200 countries. Here's the part. You can still securely connect apps like Gmail, Photos, and soon Google Calendar. Personal intelligence was designed with transparency, choice, and control at its core, and you're always in control. Of course they say that because they don't want you to think that robots are taking over the world, but what I'm telling you is imagine you connect your Gmail, your Photos, and your Calendar. It knows that you have a date night coming up with your wife on Friday. Hey, do you want me to schedule a dinner for you? Let me go out and find a reservation for you. It knows that you just got an email from Sally who needs a new roof because this thing's leaking and the adjuster just emailed her. Proposal for all the stuff. Okay, do you want me to find a roofing contractor for you? The agents are going to be working on your behalf based off what's happening inside of your already— you're already inside of your ecosystem, your Gmails, your calendars, your phones, like everything. It's going to know everything. So this is what I'm saying is that the personal intelligence piece is the missing layer that Google has an advantage over all these other platforms because all these other platforms do not have it. The only one would be Apple that would have your iPhone. But Google has way more information because they're literally using Google Chrome. You're literally using your Gmail. I mean, all these things. So this is the missing piece. This is why this is such a huge shift for a lot of people. And most home service businesses are going to get crushed. So when we talk about that, what does this mean for home service businesses and why is this such alarm bells ringing? And it's because there's the shift that's happening from keywords to conversations. And you might know this if you've used AI platforms. You don't just say HVAC repair near me. You actually ask it questions to help you diagnose the problem. Or to find solutions. So you might say, and these are real questions from our clients because we actually do a unique system that we're going to talk about in a second to help with this, but my AC is not working, but the fan is still blowing. Yes, they need HVAC repair, but they are no longer diagnosing that they need HVAC repair and let me go find the right person. They're asking Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, my AC is not working, but the fan is still blowing. What should I do? Oh, it sounds like you're condenser coil, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff's broken. Would you like me to contact someone for you? That's the next step. This is why things are shifting from the actual homeowner diagnosing their problem to the AI conversation helping them diagnose and then find the solution. Emergency plumber: black water is coming out of my shower and toilet is slow to flush. It sounds like you might have a septic backup or something like that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you like me to reach out to an emergency plumber for you? Because this is an emergency issue. Roofing company: "do I need to replace my whole roof or just part of it?" Again, these are real conversations from AI from our clients that I pulled in, and this is the old keyword search. This is the new AI conversational side of it, and this is how you need to start positioning your business. And there's a big shift with this, and the big shift is in search engine optimization, search everywhere optimization, AEO, answer engine optimization. It's in the content that you're creating because I mentioned at the top, the old SEO strategy, local SEO strategy is slowly dying. And it's a commodity. And I made a video last week about commodity content and how Google just put out their AI rules and fundamentals that commodity content is dead. You need unique content. So here's the shift. What businesses are doing is generic blog posts. What they need to be doing is— and why it won't work anymore is because AI does not need more generic content. They said this specifically in their help docs about AI search. They do not need more generic content. They need real content. What businesses are doing, keyword-stuffed articles. AI rewards specific useful answers. Going to ChatGPT and starting your creation on ChatGPT and stuffing it with keywords like emergency plumber and this and that, it's not going to help you. It's commodity content. Content copied from competitors. AI can't differentiate you because you're just like everyone else. It literally says in their help doc, if the competitor can copy it in under 10 minutes, then this is not unique content and it's not going to be helpful or help you. Guessing what customers want, very important. You're missing real customer intent signals. This is the whole premise around how we're positioning our clients, and I'm going to give you the playbook on this, but this is the whole premise about how we're shifting from keywords, old school SEO to new search so that way they can get found in AI search, and then also the agent can recommend them based off of the credibility and the trustworthiness of their information. And here's exactly how we do it. The new content advantage. Every single person listening to this right now has this advantage. You have sales calls happening, What are your customers worried about before they buy? You have service calls happening. What questions come up repeatedly in the field? You have estimate appointments. What objections do customers raise at the table? And you have customer feedback. What outcomes do customers say that they want on calls when they come in? All of these things are happening inside of your business and you need to take those real questions and you need to pull them out and use them inside of your content. So here's what we built. We literally built an AI agent around this. We call him Turner. He helps turn call transcripts and calls into content. So what Turner does and what you can do is analyze your calls. So ingest all of your calls, take the transcripts from your business, figure out what people are asking over and over again. And also, if you have the expert side of it, your CSRs, your salespeople have the real information that they're saying. Take all that information, like the real questions. That's how I got those real questions that I showed you before. And then identify the surface of recurring questions, objections, and buying triggers. So not just take the information, but also figure out what's getting people to move the needle and what the actual question is, and then create the content. So turn insights into content that matches how customers search and decide. This is the entire shift that's happening, and if you're not on top of this with your SEO strategy, you're going to get left in the dust in the next 6 to 12 months, which is why we built an AI agent specifically to do this for our clients. You can do it manually. You can take your call transcripts, you can analyze them and turn them into content, but But ideally you need this to happen all the time in your business, not just once or twice a month. You need that funnel, which is real customer questions from your real customers, turn it into content so that AI search trusts you. It's not commodity content, and then it can pull that information when people are asking Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude that specific question. The companies closest to customer conversations will win in AI search. And this is why most SEO marketing companies are not going to be able to help you as much in SEO and AEO because they do not have the real transcripts and they're not starting at that point. They're starting with ChatGPT or fluff things outside of this. So the big shift in search, this is a holistic shift. To summarize all these things, the content strategy, the old way is keyword-focused articles. You'd research the keywords people are searching, you'd stuff the blog post with good information, the EEAT principles, and, and that's okay. But the new way is answer real customer questions and start with customer call transcripts. Content source, Before, it would be guessing, it would be competitor analysis, it would be keyword research on Google Ads, all that stuff. Now, it's just take your call transcripts and real conversations and turn that into content. Search behavior used to be typing keywords, HVAC repair near me. Now, it's user describes their situation to AI. Ranking signals, it used to be backlinks and keyword density and all the black magic and voodoo that you're probably frustrated with. The new way is, specificity, depth, and usefulness inside of content so that way conversations can show you in the AI. Competitive edge, who published most. It used to be just like publish a bunch of content and just throw it out there and just let Google know, you know, that I'm, uh, posting new content. Now it's no, who knows the customer best, who's showing up with the most unique, valuable content that is trustworthy. That's the people that are going to win in the big shift in AI search. If you want help with this, this is exactly what my business is doing and positioning ourselves to help our clients. Specifically, like we built the AI agent. We are on the forefront of AEO, AI search. Like we are the thought leaders on this. And if you are trying to shift in your business and you feel like you're not on top of the ball, I would love the opportunity to talk to you. I'll put a link down below. But before I do that, let me give you this readiness checklist. So your AI search readiness checklist. Understand that Google's shifting to AI-powered conversational search. Hopefully after you see this, like there's no way you can question that. And you can't question that. Search is literally shifting whether people like it or not, and I just showed you how that's happening. Recognize that keyword-only content strategies will lose effectiveness. I'm sure if you use AI, you already know this, but people are not just searching for HVAC repair near me. They are asking questions to diagnose, and then they're getting the result. Before, they would do that, and then they would figure out the issue, and then they would go and try to do their research. All that's happening in one thing with agents. Stop guessing what your customers want and mine your own call transcripts. If you're still starting with ChatGPT or your agency is just creating fluff out there on ChatGPT, there's a problem. You need to use your own call transcripts to make content. Number 4, identify the top 5 recurring questions and objections from your sales calls. You probably know them sitting here. You need to get them out of your brain and into content so that way you can rank on those, those different questions. Great content directly answers real customer questions. Ensure your business info is clear, who you help, what problem you solve. This is why still some of the old school SEO tactics are important, like Making sure that you tell the platforms where are you located? Like what cities do you serve? Also talking about specific things inside of those areas, like inside of homes in Dallas, Texas, we have da da da da da. In homes in Florida, we do not have gutters, so da da da da da. Like specific things like that is very trustworthy and it's not commodity content. Use an AI agent or tool to systematically analyze customer conversations. We literally built a tool that does this. And obviously you could use our tool or you could, you know, figure it out and do this manually or do it yourself. Track which content topics drive inquiries, double down on what works. So like our Turner, our AI tool plugs directly into Google Analytics, Google Search Console. So then we have this flywheel to know what works and what doesn't work. And then it gets better and better over time. But either way, you need to know what's working, what people are searching, create the content, and then double down and keep doing more of that. So I'll put some links down below. I hope this video was helpful. Be sure to hit like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.