The Biggest Shift in Search Since Google Itself

Humans not doing the research, AI platforms doing the research. 2027 is the year of the agent. If people are not going to your website, that's not going to work. People that are not doing this, you need to start today. That is the number one business asset that you have that no one else can have. The new SEO playbook. Before I even talk about SEO, AI search, all the cool stuff, I like to just give you a quick how the heck do I know about this stuff? Because we all know there's like AI gurus and all these people that they they know AI, but they don't. And so I actually used to work at a home service business. I started as director of business development at a $3 million home service business, helped them go to $5 million and then sell to private equity. And I had 28 technicians, 4 CSRs. I was doing marketing and sales and growing the business. Before that, I started doing SEO in 2015 and I built a blog. I had 30,000, 40,000 readers every single month. On my podcast, I've interviewed Neil Patel, the SEO GOAT, Marcus Sheridan, who's a big SEO guy for home service businesses. And fundamentally, after we sold the company, I actually started Flash Consulting, which is a company— we all know there's black magic and voodoo with marketing and stuff. So I'm like, what if there's an actual company that actually does the right stuff? And we have 24 team members. And what I can say is that over the last 12 months, our strategy for SEO has changed extremely different than the old SEO playbook. So the purpose of this talk is first I'm going to break down the old SEO playbook of what we knew, and then I'm going to show you how it's changed based off of what Google is changing in these other platforms, and then we're actually going to show you how you can use some tools in your Jobber to help prepare you to be shown, to be found, to be trusted, and to be booked inside of AI search. All right, my promise is that you're going to know all that stuff by the end of this conversation. It might get a little bit weird, tinfoil hat stuff, right? And you might be like, this AI thing is crazy. My intention is that you leave this knowing the new strategy for SEO and you feel confident. All right, so I know I talked to some of you earlier, but who's got calls from ChatGPT, Claude? You know, hey, I found you on ChatGPT. Are people finding your businesses and you're like, oh, so cool, how'd you find us? I don't know, I just use ChatGPT. Right. This is going to become more and more normal for all of us. And it's like, great that they found you, but how do I get more of these people, especially as they're using this platform? So what I can say is that for marketing home service businesses, there was Yellow Pages, there was Google search, now there's AI. These are huge milestone moments of how customers find home service businesses. For the last 20 years, the strategy on Google was you got to be found. You go to Google search, you try to rank for some keywords, people find your business, they go to your website, they turn into a lead. I think we all know, probably all use AI of some sorts. We ask questions, we use the Copilot, we throw the voice thing on, we start talking to it, we're asking questions and then helping it make decisions and recommendations. This is the new journey. Questions, AI answer recommendations, and then ultimately taking action from there. So that's all cool, but what has Google changed? Because when I talk about this, it's like, okay, yeah, some people are doing this, some people are not. When a trillion-dollar business, Google, where 87% of people go to find home service businesses, change 3 things in the last 6 months, as a marketing person and as a business owner, we have to pay attention. So those three things, I call them the three A's. We're going to talk about them right now. So the first huge change, y'all may have noticed this or not, is on actual Google. If you were to go to Google homepage, it used to say right there search, and you go to that nice ten blue links. You get the Google Business Profile, all that stuff. Now, while you see, it says AI mode. So before, you get ten blue links, clicks, websites. Now it's like AI mode. You know, my mom, she's 60. She's like, now I can ask these questions. They ask me to upload pictures. You know, I can find things. It's a whole different ballgame. Why is this so important? People say, oh well, boomers are never going to use this. You know, no one's ever actually using this. Google is herding people into the new normal. They are literally saying, we are risking trillions of dollars moving from the old legacy 20-year game plan to this. And people that don't know, right, they're just clicking the next thing and going through the prompts. Oh, it asked me to ask a question. Oh, it's giving me more things. This is the new normal, and they are literally changing their entire playbook to do this. All right, so what that means— Google put out a study on AI mode as of the big change that they made. What they found is 2 things. Number one, the average search in AI mode is 3 times longer. Before, people would search for HVAC near me, you know, whatever service you did near me, and then they would make the decision on their own. They would read the reviews, they'd say, oh, this person ranks number one, let me go to their website and look at their pictures, whatever. Now people are asking it questions and uploading a picture of their thermostat saying like, hey, my HVAC unit's on but there's no cold air coming out, what the heck should I do? Help me, right? They're trying to use this to make decisions. The other thing that they found was that 63% of AI mode users Use voice. About like 3 or 4 years ago, there was this whole big boom of like voice search and like Alexas and all the Siri and everything. And everyone's like, oh, this is going to be the new thing. What you don't realize is that that is right now. Who here uses voice? Like, you know, Claude, ChatGPT, we all talk to it, right? Like, this is the normal thing. This is what they found. Half— more than half the people use voice and they're talking to it, making decisions as a copilot. All right, so if a customer— this is a big part— if a customer is no longer searching for things, do rankings still matter? Does ranking on keywords, paying for SEO to find some keywords, make some content, and rank you on things, does that still matter? I would say that the goal now is to be the recommendation inside of these AI platforms. It's a huge change. From the old SEO system. All right, second thing is agents. Okay, we just saw Jobber Teammate. That's an agent. Uses your data, custom-built for you, makes decisions. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, he said 2027 is the year of the agent. That's a big thing, guys. 2027 is the year of the agent. If you don't start using agents now, you're going to be left behind. It's literally what he said. What does this even mean? Okay. Google rolled out a personal AI agent called Gemini Spark. Gemini Spark can work for you 24/7. Imagine that AI mode button that I showed you. Imagine that is your agent that knows everything about you. It has access to your Gmail, your Google Calendar, all the other Google platform things that you would ever use, your YouTube searches, anything. And now it can act on your behalf. Here's the really, really crazy thing that's a little woo woo, but it's true. Here's what it says: The goal of the agent is to browse it, book it, buy it. Gemini can do all the time-consuming research and live web browsing to gather information across multiple sites, compare options, and even help you complete bookings. If the human is not doing the research and now an agent is, how do I build trust with an agent? Right? How do I make sure that this agent recommends me? How does it find me? How does it trust me? How does it book me? I didn't even have this in my deck, but last week Meta rolled out Muse. You might have seen Muse, this weird-looking squiggly thing on your Instagram or Facebook. It's a big push for them. Muse is their AI agent. So I was literally on the couch with my wife and I'm like, hey, she's been bugging me to put shelving in our garage. So I was like, let me just try Muse and see what it does. So I was like, hey Muse, I want a garage shelf company. I have a 2-car garage. It said, cool, if you wanna upload a picture you can, or I can just kinda draft up what it would look like. You know, you'd have some hanging things over here, hanging things over there. Then it says, do you want me to research for you a couple companies to reach out? I said, yeah, sure. It came back with some companies. The craziest thing though is that it says, cool, I'll actually reach out to them on your behalf. What's your phone number? What's your email? It did, like literally in the browser, it went to the websites, went to the contact forms, filled out the contact forms with all my information, and put the picture that it created with the information and hit submit. Like in 5 minutes, it did all of this. And then the next day, I get some calls, some texts, some emails, some contractors like, hey, you know, you want to do this? Like, I didn't even go to Google. I literally was using this Muse thing that I just downloaded. This is what agents are. It's literally acting on behalf of people. 2027 is the year of the agent. And right now we're in this time of like humans not doing the research, AI platforms doing the research. Every single person here is going to have an agent. We just talked about the jobber agent. Imagine you have a personal agent AI assistant. And then the third thing, well, if a customer— I just said if the customer delegates finding contractors from an AI agent, does the agent find you? We're going to talk about this whole playbook, but I'm kind of breaking down the old system so that way you can see the new system. When people hear this, they say, Phil, you're ridiculous. Google would never do that. Their number one moneymaker is ads. So if no one's going to the old blue links, how am I going to run Google Ads? How am I going to actually make sure that people find me? And why would Google do this? They're going to jeopardize their number one moneymaker and shift everything to this AI mode. What does that even mean? It's a valid question, and Google had to answer. So Google actually rolled out what they call business lead agents. So let me see if this will play. Oh, it's actually on your computer. No worries. Business lead agents is essentially your knowledge base being— oh, here we go. All right, so you go and ask a question. This is inside of a Google search, like AI mode. You go and ask a question. What is a business lead agent? And then you go down here and you can click, hey, I got a question for this business. It pulls up the answers from a knowledge base that it's built around your business, and it's going to answer it. And now you can reach out to the business. But notice you never ever left the platform. You never left ChatGPT, you never left Claude, you never left AI Mode Gemini. It's all happening on their platform. They're controlling the whole user intent, right? Ask a question, pulls in your information. It's wild. All right, so we're just talking about the visibility. The way that I frame this is the goalpost has moved. The old SEO strategy was trying to get people to click. It was literally like, how do I rank on these keywords and get people to click to my website so that way they can turn into a lead? I just showed you, you actually want AI to recommend your business You want them to trust you, and then you ultimately want them to book you. This raises a really big question that Google had to answer. Does SEO still matter? Does it matter? Here's what Google says. Before I show you that, the old SEO playbook, as I mentioned, was keyword research, content, ranking, traffic, leads. We can all agree that's how it used to be. Here's what Google said. This is the new SEO playbook. The most important part of this— I'm going to get down here so I can read it. Is this right here, which is creating non-commodity content. Okay, the reason is, is because right now today, I'm sure people have done this because we did this as a marketing company. You can go to Claude and say, Claude, write me a blog post about 1,500 words for, you know, how much does something cost, and make it SEO optimized so that I show up number 1, right? We probably all tried this or done this. What Google is saying here is that Creating non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first. And I want to call this out. There's a lot of people right now that are talking about these listicles or building content using AI platforms, and Google literally says commodity content, for example, is something like 7 tips for first-time homebuyers, is often based on common knowledge which could originate from anyone and typically adds little unique insight for readers. In contrast, non-commodity content such as Why We Waived Inspection and Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line provides unique expert experience takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary. What does this mean? We all need to create non-commodity content. And when you think about SEO and, for example, a company like mine paying a company to do SEO for you, how are they going to create non-commodity content? Because if it's not about ranking and doing all this technical stuff, how are they going to create non-commodity content? The old SEO scorecard that everyone would look at is, hey, rank on some keywords, you're winning. The new one measures authority based off of the content that you create. So if every contractor can just go to ChatGPT and pump out 1,500 blog posts, what is the unique qualifier for your business? What do you do? All right, so before I show you the new playbook, who here is creating content like on a weekly basis? What do you say? And it's like video, social posts. Okay. And then who has a marketing company that's doing this for them? Okay. Okay, good. We got a good mix. All right. The crux of the whole conversation, if you do not— if you take this question and if you're creating it yourself, if you have a marketing person, a marketing company, ask them this question. Because we all have to ask this question in the new age of SEO. How do you create non-commodity content that creates authority? How do you create non-commodity content that creates authority? Because if these platforms— let's say someone is now searching for, my thermostat's on but there's no air coming out— how do we have these platforms trust us that we're the expert by answering these questions? How do we know the questions that our customers are asking? How do we make sure that we have actual real stories that we put inside of our content that is real, that no one else can say? As a marketing company, we had to ask these questions. This is how we came up with the call to content system. Now on your tables, they'll have some playbooks there that you can download, and it goes more in depth, but I'm going to give you the actual call to content system. The reason that this crushes for our clients, and y'all should do this too, is because it starts with real. So here's how it works. A call comes into your business. Who here uses like call tracking software or like any like call answering service that give you transcripts? Any of that, like, like Quo or any of this stuff? Yeah. Okay. Who here uses like Claude or something to record sales calls or any of that stuff? Anyone recording any sales? Okay. Got a handful. People that are not doing this, you need to start today because that is the number one business asset that you have that no one else can have. Today, someone can go to Claude and say, create the best SEO website in the world that's number one ranks. Tomorrow they can have it up online. Do you think that they're just gonna magically game Google to say like, yeah, now I have the best SEO website, so they're gonna rank me and I'm getting all these customers? No, because anyone can do that. The number one asset that you have is what happens in your business every single day, and that's why the call-to-content system works. So basically the way that you do this is you have this side of the equation, which is you get real customer questions. So you have calls coming into your CSRs. You get real sales calls happening in your business. You have all those things in your brains, all the stories that are up here, and you need to get them into something. This could be a Google Drive. This could be a NotebookLM Gemini Notebook. This could be into Claude. This could be into a Google Doc. Anything out of your brain into this. It could be a video on your phone. It could be a voice memo. Anything that centralizes everything that's happening in your business. Why is this so important? Well, I had 28 technicians. Trying to even get them to send me pictures, let alone tell me the stories, like, come on. I had 4 CSRs. Getting them to tell me the questions that they got that day, like, what? This is not happening. So this is why we use the call-to-content system. If we can get the call transcripts, now we have a starter for the questions people ask. Okay, so once you identify the questions that people ask, you can say, Here's all my call transcripts. 7 people asked this question, so I should probably create some content on that. That's a good starting point. Now it's like, how do I actually make this non-commodity content? And what you do is you create a knowledge base around your business. Now you might say, tinfoil hat, woo-woo, AI, this is over my head. I don't want you to feel that way. All that a knowledge base is, is all those things that happen in your business Call transcripts, sales call transcripts, SOP and brand docs, your website content, your social media content, customer reviews, anything that's happening in your business. You can go to Claude and just like literally take a picture of this and say, can you build this for me? Can you just tell me where I need to upload the stuff? You could use a tool like NotebookLM, which is free, and you can literally just upload your stuff in there and you'll have a simple knowledge base. Now I'll give you some pro tips on this because this is not even like just a marketing thing. Number one, imagine you have a new team member who starts. We all know they got tons of questions, right? They're blowing you up. What if you had a knowledge base and you could say, just go ask this thing, it's gonna give you an answer or a story about it? What if you hired a marketing company and they said, hey, let's get on a call for 30 minutes and you tell me about your business? What if you just gave them your knowledge base and said, hey, can you create content? Can you create ads with the way my customers really ask these questions? There's a lot of use cases for this. Now, remember that ad thing that I showed you where it pulls from the knowledge and it knows about your business? Now you have a knowledge base. I believe, and again, woo-woo tinfoil hat, every single person here is going to have a personal agent and every business here is going to have an agent around their business that's going to be built on knowledge. So to summarize this, you need to get real customer calls so that way you know the real questions. A lot of people just go to ChatGPT or Claude and say like, what's the 10 questions people ask about plumbers? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, we all know here there's that one neighborhood in your service area where the builder put in these terrible toilets or whatever it is, and they all break after 5 years when they should last for 10 years. Those are the stories that create authority. Those are the stories that happen every day that no other person can make up. That's what we want to build content off of, the real questions with the real stories that's happening. Those 2 things create real content. The missing piece of all this and the unique thing about every single person's business is the real stories. Every single person here has stories in their head. Your salespeople have stories, your technicians have stories, your CSRs have stories that they're telling. Those stories are the unique things about your business that need to be shared online. That is how you build trust and that's how you build non-commodity content. So we actually, we work with a ton of home service businesses, right? So it's like, how do we do this at mass scale so that way we can create non-commodity content? What we did is we built an agent that ingests all of those things for the knowledge base, builds the knowledge base, and then creates content up top. What I'm telling you is you can just do that on your own. We built an agent to do it on the mass, but you can do that on your own. Take the call transcripts, plug in some stories, and create content up. The one big thing that I'll tell you about this, if you are paying for marketing or you have a marketing person doing this and they're not getting real stories, they're just, you know, paying $1,500 to do some SEO for you, it's like what I just showed you, I don't believe that that's going to cut it in the future. Like creating some content to try to rank on some keywords and get people to your website, if people are not going to your website That's not going to work. All right, so the next part of this is we're going to walk you through find you, trust you, and book you. I'm going to walk through exactly those things, and then Max is going to show you from a Jobber perspective how you can do that inside of your Jobber using some of these strategies that I just talked about. It's going to be important. So the first thing is, can it find you? A lot of times when I do this talk, people say, okay, Cool, Phil, you need to make content. Where do I make content? Do I have to be an influencer on video and all this stuff? Like, I'm not a video person. Whatever, I get it. What I would say is that SEO is no longer search engine optimization, it's search everywhere optimization. It's not search engine optimization, it's search everywhere optimization. And Google doubled down on this, and I'll show you when we talk about trusting you of how they prove this and why it's so important. But what I'll say right now is when you think about content, I'm sure if you've ever done a search, they pull in video content, they pull in short-form Facebook posts and all this stuff. Here's my recommendation. You should be creating content on as many platforms as you can in as many different forms as you can and as many as you feel comfortable with. All the YouTube videos, YouTube's the number 2 search engine in the world. It owns Google, Google owns it. I believe that video is probably the most unique qualifier for real content. Like, I can't be— like, I'm not an AI avatar up here, right? Like, I'm real. I know this stuff. I have the conviction. Usually on video, it's sometimes people are reading off a script, but for the most part, it's like real. Like, I'm on a job site, I'm at this builder, this is an issue. It's real, real. Anyone can write some content and put some stories in there. So I am more of an advocate for video. But can it find you? You got to have content all over the place, not just your website, and you got to have real stuff. The next thing is, does it trust you? Now, you created the content, cool, but how do we actually make sure that these platforms trust our content? Phil, I hear you, we need to make non-commodity content, but how do we make sure that they're actually showing our content and that they actually trust us? Obviously, I mentioned you need to use real stuff. But okay, that's cool, but how do we actually know that the real stuff is good? So some of the new terms that you're gonna be hearing from like SEO people and marketing is share of voice. So share of voice is this, when you do a search online, anyone got like an AI overview thing and then there's like this knowledge panel over there? Has anyone seen that? Yeah. Okay, basically what share of voice is, is all the content that you created, it's pulling in that content. So it might pull in a YouTube video, it might pull in a blog post, it might pull in a social post. It's saying based off of this actual prompt or query someone asked, how many times is it sharing your voice, sharing something that you said? That's the first thing. So a lot of tools right now, when you think about like SEO and the old rankings factors, now people are looking at, okay, when I type in a question like what Sam— well, Max mentioned, Is like, okay, what is my share of voice for this prompt? Is it 50%? 60% of the time do they share my stuff? 20%? This is how you would evaluate if you're getting shared or not. The next one, which obviously is most important, is mention rate. Cool, you shared my stuff, you put my stuff there, but does it mention you as the company to work with? Mention rate is a really important one because then it says, okay, you asked this question, here's the answer. By the way, if you want a company, here you go. Mention rate. You can do this by building a knowledge base for your content. Then Google had to answer this one question, and this is an important piece. It's like, okay, we know about share of voice, we know about mention rate, but Google has all these marketing people that are doing all this SEO work, and they use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, all these tools that's all focused on the website. But we talked about if people are not going to websites anymore, how do we evaluate content being created inside of AI mode? That's why they had to roll out this new report in Google Search Console. They have a report called Generative AI Features, and it's in beta. About half of our clients have it. The other half it's getting rolled out for. It's very new. But essentially what it should— this is one of our clients. Essentially what it shows you is these blog posts right here, like how do I convert a bathtub into a walk-in shower— this is from the Call to Content system— you see the impressions over there? It's now showing that inside of generative AI. So like AI Overviews, Gemini, how many times is it pulling in our content from an impression perspective? So in this example, how do you know if your shower pan is leaking is showing up 3 times, 4 times more than the other blog post. Google doubled down on this even more, and they now allow you to add social platforms into this. You can add YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X into Google Search Console, into generative AI features to be able to see how your content is performing inside of generative AI. You know, people— what a lot of people ask me is like, Well, should I use Claude? Should I do ChatGPT? Should I do Gemini? Like, which one's the best? I made a video about this, and what I believe is that right now, as I mentioned, 80-87% of people go to Google to find a local service business, and they're all getting herded into this new normal. ChatGPT and Claude do not have anything like this where you can see the content that it's pulling in. It's literally just in their woo-woo brain. Google and Gemini realized that if they want to be able to compete with marketing people and people creating content, they have to show some information. So with everything getting funneled into Gemini and having the visibility into what's working or not, I believe that Gemini is going to slowly win. One other note on this. This report just came out last month. ChatGPT started at 83% of the market. People used it. 83% of the people that were using AI were using ChatGPT in 2023. As of May, it's now 46% of people use ChatGPT. 24% of people use Gemini, and it's only growing. And it's because of the shift to AI mode in Gemini. And only 10% of people actually use Claude. I'm sure most business owners, like YouTube podcasts and everyone's Claude, Claude, Claude. And I don't disagree with you. But when we think about the average homeowner, are they on Claude doing research? Maybe. But what the research tells us is that Gemini is the one that's growing. And we already know home service business owners, customers are on there. ChatGPT is another one, but I think that Gemini is going to ultimately win for our target market. I'm not saying that Claude is not a good tool. I love Claude. But I think for our target market, Gemini is where we want to be. Cool. And then the last one is, can it book you? So can it find you? Are you in all the places? Can it trust you? Are you the authority in the space? Number 3, can it book you? As I mentioned, inside of AI mode, if they— the trajectory of no clicks over the last 3 years went from 48% of searches ended with 0 clicks. Last year, 54% of searches ended with 0 clicks. Right now, 68% of searches on Google end with 0 clicks. Like, they're not going to your website. They're just searching and then making engagement. Ultimately, I don't care about impressions, likes, clicks, even leads. I want people to book appointments on the calendar to get into the sales process, right? So when we think about this agent, browse it, book it, buy it, the agent that I did the Muse thing, it would have been way better if it just booked it for me, opposed to filling out a form, then they have to call me and do all these things. This is the new part, which is, can it actually go to my Google Calendar or go into my phone, find an availability, and book it for me? Even if it's a virtual estimate. A lot of times when I get pushback on online booking, it's because of route density. It's like, I don't want to drive over God's green earth. Is this job a $500 job or a $5,000 job? How do I vet these things out? You meant you— if you read the last session, you heard Corey talk about virtual estimating. You set up virtual estimating, even if it's just FaceTime. You put that as your online booking. The only thing someone can book is a virtual estimate or a callback or whatever. Now you have online booking. I'm not saying you got to have all your routes and all these things up there. What I am saying is that you need to make it available to people. and to agents to book you. Last thing on this, a lot of these booking tools— I'm sure probably Jabber at some point, Calendly, all these booking tools that we all know about— they are going to have AI-native booking tools inside of ChatGPT, inside of Claude, inside of Gemini. And one way is to add it to your Google Business Profile, because Google Gemini is pulling in your Google Business Profile. They can call you, they can go to your website, or they can just click the button from your Google Business Can it book you? The first thing is find you, then trust you. Can it book you? Who here does online booking? I'm just curious. All right. Everyone else, if you— even if you do estimates, like even if you do callbacks, think of it just like a form. When someone fills out a form, then you got to call them back and track them down and do all the stuff. Just set that up as your one thing for online booking, and now everyone could do online booking. Like You should do online booking. All right, red flags for SEO in 2027. So if you are doing SEO or you're paying someone or you get on a call with someone, I would say that these are red flags. Is we publish 4 AI-written blog posts every single month. And even if it's like, oh, we clean up some stuff and we make it look nice, how are you getting the real stories and non-commodity content? That is really the crux of it. Like, anyone— we can all make an AI blog post. Like, it's not— there's nothing unique about it. Number 2, your traffic increased 17%. I believe that traffic is going to continue to go down, down, down, because if we're truly optimizing for SEO, the traffic is really being on these platforms. It's not about just gaining more traffic to your website. You're ranking for 300 more keywords. Again, do rankings really matter? I would argue that they don't matter as much, and it's slowly going to get less and less a matter of rankings, especially with agents. We just need more backlinks. I'm sure we've all heard the backlinks saga with, you know, build these backlinks and all that stuff. I think backlinks for citations and name, address, and phone number and making sure you have clean data is important. But like going and getting backlinks so that way they build authority and all these things, this is still gaming the system. It's not true trust-building stuff. We publish 50 city pages, so service area pages in your area, like SEO service area pages. These These are still important and they're still good to show that you do work in these areas, but they have to be non-commodity. Anyone can go to Claude and say, write 50 service area pages for every single city that I serve and put it up there. Do you think that's going to fit the thing that I just told you? No, it's got to be real. All right, so if I was to give you like a rundown of the 2027 SEO playbook, it's number 1, find your customers' most asked questions and rank them by frequency. A lot of people say— the question is, how much does it cost? When can you do it? I'm not talking about those. We all know people ask that question. I was talking about the real, real ones. And if you can get the questions from transcripts and then identify the frequency of questions, now you have a good starting point for like, what do I need to actually create? Number 2, create some type of knowledge base with your business info and generate content, and you can use it in Jobber. I would also say that you need to get the stories out of your brain. That happened 10 years ago. You know, you did this job at this house. You know, y'all know the stories. You got them. We all got them. You fell into a crawl space or something silly like those are the stories that you want to hear. Publish real answers to those questions everywhere. The new way that you build trust is by being the authority. The only way you can be the authority is if you tell real stories and create real content. Show up on video and social in every format: long form, short form, words, pictures. I'm not saying be an influencer. You might not feel comfortable with that. Someone on your team may. You might have a technician who's really into it. You might have a CSR who's really into it. All I'm saying is you got to make real stuff. Track performance with Search Console or other AI search tools. This is going to get more and more relevant of like people are going to start asking those questions, which is, I'm making this content, but how do I know that I'm actually being shown? Which is the question that we all started the thing with is like customers found my ChatGPT. I don't know how, but like I'm doing something right. Which is good. Those tools, and specifically Google Search Console, is going to slowly show us what is actually working. And then the last thing is SEO is now search everywhere optimization, and Max showed you some tools how you can use Jobber to help you with that. All right, so we're going to open up to questions, and I would love to have the questions because I'm sure y'all are like, what about that? What about that? So feel free to ask the questions. I appreciate the hand, and yeah, you can raise the hands. On your tables, I actually— we have 7 playbooks that we run. One of them is a call to content system. So if you want that, you can scan the QR code and get the playbooks. Obviously, if you're interested in talking about your business, we have a link there. And then we'll get the questions. I actually just came out with a book. If y'all know Marcus Sheridan, he wrote They Ask, You Answer. He endorsed my book, specifically like $1 million to $10 million home service businesses. It's the growth system that I implemented at my home service business to help it scale and sell. I have copies over there. I'll be over there after this, so feel free to head over there. You can get a copy there free. Just happy to be a resource. All right. Do we have any— OK, let's go back to questions. Cool. So you had a question. Yeah. There should be a microphone. Yeah, there's a microphone right there. All right, go ahead.

So great presentation. Thank you. Would you talk— would you spend just a couple minutes talking about the barrier to entry for people when they're trying to build knowledge bases? Because I think they're like, well, how do I make all this happen? But technically, like, how do I pull all this stuff together? Yeah. Could you spend a couple minutes just talking about, like, practically how they actually connect all that stuff so they can start getting that information?

For sure. So I can actually— oh, I'm sorry to cut you off.

Because what you're talking about is incredibly important.

Absolutely.

It is the future. I agree with you 100%. Just spend a few minutes talking about that.

Yeah, for sure. I can talk about— I'll talk about, like, the DIY way, and then I'll kind of get more technical from there. Even more DIY is in your notes, in your Jobber, all those stories you just saw where you can actually talk to it and put the stuff in there. And now you have a teammate that can actually access some of the stuff. So like, it's pretty much there, right there. The way we started doing this about, this was like a year and a half ago, we used a tool called NotebookLM. Now it's called Gemini Notebook. It's free. And essentially what you can do is you can sync up different sources of information into this NotebookLM. And what it allows you to do is then to create an LM, a language model for your business. So think about it. You take all your transcripts, you download them out, you put them into a Google Doc or a Google Sheet, and you connect that thing to your NotebookLM. This is what we were doing. You take your website, NotebookLM, your YouTube, NotebookLM, any other SOPs in a Drive, NotebookLM. Now you have this knowledge base around your business and it's free and you can do it. What we didn't have was like the actual questions that were automatically getting put in. It was a manual process. We had to download the stuff over here, put them over there. But you know, you have an admin person, you can get the bones of it. You kind of have— I'm sure everyone's like, oh, I have stuff over here, I have stuff over here. NotebookLM is free, you can use it. The other thing is you can actually build this in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, kind of. What we did after that was in ChatGPT, we built different projects and skills and agents. If you were to go to Claude and say, hey, I want to build a knowledge base for my business, can you create a knowledge base for me? It would build an MCP or some type of knowledge graph for you. And then it would help you connect some of the dots. What we did as a company was, okay, we have a bunch of home service businesses. How do we deploy this for them? Because a lot of business owners, it's like woo woo, over my head, like, can you help me with this? And that's why we built an agent that does it and syncs all this stuff up. But you can do it on your own. I'm not trying to sell you my thing. It's like, you can do that on your own. Cool. Yeah.

So ChatGPT is always sending me emails about ads, but I've never met anyone who's done any ads in there. So just wondering what the thoughts are.

Yeah, great question on this. So there's a really big divide right now that's happening in the space. Uh, ChatGPT was pulling all the stuff from Gemini, right? Google Business Profile information and everything. And then, uh, Google said you can actually only scrape the first 10 pages of content. A really big shift happened 2 months, 2 months ago. ChatGPT partnered with Yelp. And the reason that's such a big thing is because before they were trying to pull in Google stuff, but they're competing directly with Gemini. So now they are actually licensing all of Yelp reviews, Yelp request a quote information, everything Yelp related is now going to be in ChatGPT. Literally over the next 3 to 6 months, you're going to see it rolled out. Now, y'all could hate Yelp. You know, I've been there, done that, and I get it. What I am telling you is that all these platforms are trying to figure out what their angle is going to be. When it comes to the ads in ChatGPT, there was a study that came out that literally less than 1% of home service businesses are using ChatGPT ads. And the reason is, is because they're not productive. They're not performing correctly. There's a guy, John Torrey. He puts out a report for home service businesses. And what he found is like, it's much, much better to be recommended in ChatGPT than it is to run some type of ads and try to game that system. So I would say that the data is there, but I would still recommend Gemini is better, like running Google Ads and figuring that out. Yeah.

What do you recommend for like brand new companies or really small companies to try to start with that?

Yeah. And this is the hardest part of this is like, I could go to Claude and write the best SEO website, but how do you actually build trust with these platforms? And I think I would say that there's a huge land grab opportunity that's happening because like at my home service business, we had 28 techs. The owner was not going to be on video making content. But when you're a smaller shop, it's like I'm out on the job site, I'm making real stuff. I'm the real in the grass roots. I think that there's a real big opportunity to be that type of business. Especially when you're smaller. The harder thing is like, how do I make the knowledge base? How do I get the questions if there's no customers asking me questions? So you should stick for the next session because I'm going to show you what to do. But yes, that's it. Cool. Last question here and then we're going to wrap.

What is your opinion on Google reviews? We always get like, oh, you need more reviews. You'll get more seen if you get more reviews.

All right, great. This is a great question to wrap with, which is because this question comes up. I'm surprised no one asked me. What if every single question is answered? And how do I make a question— answer a question that's different? What it's all going to come back to is brand. I think that in the next 2 to 3 years, there's going to be a whole wave of brand because what beats an AI search, an SEO search, what beats HVAC repair near me is Phil's HVAC business phone number. That will always beat any type of SEO that you ever do. So when you think about brand authority, reputation, trust, All of those things, for sure, get reviews, 100%.

On the Jobber side, is there a way to link the Jobber with the Google reviews to use those?

Perfect setup for next session. We're gonna talk about that. All right, thanks guys. I appreciate you coming out. I'm gonna be over there hanging out. Feel free to ask some questions. Thank you.