Phil Risher says businesses obsess over Google ranking when AI now gives customers a short list of options instead. A gutter-cleaning company's blog post about downspouts got pulled by ChatGPT, landing them a $1,000 job. The move: capture real customer questions and turn them into authentic content so AI recommends you.
Ranking number 1 on Google used to be the whole game. Now your customer asks AI and AI already made its choice, and the game isn't about ranking anymore. It's about becoming recommended. Your basement floods, it's 2 AM, nobody's opening Google and scrolling through a bunch of links. They're asking ChatGPT, who's the best emergency plumber near me? And AI gives them a couple names. That's it. There's no page 2, there's no see more results. You are on the shortlist or you don't exist. So we had a gutter cleaning client. where someone went to ChatGPT, asked why their gutters were still overflowing after a cleaning, and ChatGPT pulled a blog post that we wrote about how downspouts need to be cleaned too, not just the gutters themselves. And that person read it, trusted the company, and it turned into a $1,000 job. That's how this all works now. So here's what you do today. You need to take your real customer calls and take the questions that people are asking and answer them. And here's the most important part. Don't just take the questions and go to ChatGPT or Gemini and ask it to write a post about this. You need to use your real brain and your real stories to create content.
