The Death of Website Visitors (Here’s What Comes Next)

A few months ago, I made a video about why your website won't matter in the next 3 years, and I was predicting that AI won't just be a place where you go and get answers, but it will actually be agents doing things on your behalf. And now it's happening. Meta just released Muse, which is their personal AI agent that can do the research for you, it can go to your website, it can fill out forms, and it can do pretty much everything on a person's behalf. And Google Gemini rolled out that it's actually able to start calling businesses on behalf of customers. I've been doing digital marketing since 2015, and this is the biggest shift. that I've ever seen because your customers may not even be the ones researching you anymore, let alone scheduling service with you anymore. Their agents are gonna be doing this. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how these agents actually work, how they recommend businesses, and exactly what you need to do for your business to make sure that you're found, trusted, and ultimately booked by AI agents. First thing we have to get on the same page about is that every person is gonna go from not having a personal assistant to having a personal agent assistant in their pocket. And we've seen this happen before. When we think about 20 years ago, 10 years ago, if someone wanted a personal driver sitting there, they had to be rich. Well, Uber came along and made that available to every single person where you have a personal driver in your pocket. Now, when we think about if you wanted to have vacation homes all around the world, you had to be rich. Well, Airbnb came along and said, no, you can actually have a vacation home in any city in the world that you want to. Now, when we think about personal assistants and personal agents, These platforms, Gemini, Muse, Instinct, that we're going to talk about, I'm going to show you, are making this easy for every single person to have a personal assistant in their pocket. Now you might say, well, no one's going to do that. You know, they got to go and find these assistants. Here's the thing is that Google, Gemini, Meta, Muse, they are ushering people into this new normal. Google changed on their Google homepage to AI mode and it goes to Gemini and it starts talking to it. This is going to slowly switch over to their agent. They say in 2027, Muse, which is Meta's agent, is the exact same way. They are slowly herding and ushering people into the agent. And here's the crazy thing. Do you think that people are going to go to Google and say, hey, HVAC repair near me, or are they going to use their agent that knows their calendar, that knows their Gmail, that, that has access to all of their stuff? Are they going to say, hey, my HVAC's not working, can you find a company that can come tomorrow and have them and schedule the call with them? Of course they are. So let me pop open Muse and I'm going to just show you how this works. So I literally just set this up for this video on my desktop. I was using it on my phone before. So you can see, I'm your personal agent, not just a regular assistant. I can help take things off your plate. Before we get started, what's your name? Blah, blah, blah. Do you want me to connect all your stuff? Cool. No. And then I just gave it a simple prompt that a normal customer would ask. My thermostat is on, but no air is coming out of the vents. It tried to help me diagnose it a little bit. And then I said, hey, I think I need an HVAC company. It's like, yeah, it sounds like it. So I gave it my location, it picked a couple companies based off of a map here, and then I said, can you reach out to them? Now on my desktop, I don't have calling enabled for this account, but it can call businesses and do things for you by calling them. So I said, okay, no worries, can you submit a form on their website to do online booking? Now it's going to go and check, and it actually went through. I'm going to do an example here for you and show you. But it asked me, okay, cool, well, you know, what is your email and phone number? And I didn't put that in here, but it would go through and do it. And the way that I know this is I actually did a test before, a week ago when I was testing this out on my personal house. I have a 2-car garage and I was like, hey, can you go and do the research for me and fill out these forms and reach out to these businesses? And it literally did it. Let me go down here and I'm going to show you. So it's going to go to a website and it's going to— so it's going to open up a browser. You see that it's working. It's on it. I'm going through Tucker Scheduler now. It's going to open up their homepage and it's actually going to go through. They have online scheduling through ServiceTitan. It's going to go through and do online scheduling for you. It's going to pop open a browser. What's the best number to reach you at? I'm going to say, ask me, ask me when you get to that part. All right. So you see here, it's popping it open. It's going to their website and it's— I could open the browser and take it over, but it popped open their scheduler right here. And now it's going through and filling out the form and diagnosing the thing. It's saying, okay, here's my scheduler. It has this issue. It has that issue, right? It's going all the way through. Will do. I'll ping you for the number the moment the scheduler asks for it. And it's going through the scheduler and doing this. Now, what I just showed you is going to fundamentally change how customers are finding businesses. More importantly, it's going to hurt attribution. It's going to be like, okay, well, what do I need on my website to make sure that this happens, right? And I'm showing you this to show you what just came out last week and is a very normal thing now that people are going to get pushed down their heads to get. You can see it's waiting for you. It's asking me some questions. Okay, Quick One Scheduler, before we go to this, how old is your system? It's asking me questions to fill this stuff out, right? And what I would imagine is it's going to learn as I tell things. And the reason is because I actually started another chat as I was making this video. I was like, hey, let me just start another chat so I can have this all clean. And it literally said, my thermostat's on but no air's coming out, because I was trying to redo what I, what I did when I was prepping for this. And it's like, hey, is it the same dead blower the other night? 2 quick things. If none of that air is moving, the Tucker's booking is still one message away. And it's like recalling from what it knows before. So these things are going to get smarter and smarter and do things. And now imagine if it was tied to my Google Calendar, my Gmail, right? And it could call businesses and do things for me and schedule services. Like, this is what the personal agent is. All right. Now there's another tool as well. It's called Instinct. What Instinct is, it allows you to text back and forth on the phone. And then you don't have to use a browser like Amuse would, which I think is pretty cool. We'll see which one wins. I mean, Meta is really blitzing this thing. Instinct is a very small startup and they do have like billions of dollars in funding, but obviously we all know Meta. And then Google said, hey, hold on one second, we can do something similar. So you can actually ask Gemini to handle your everyday phone calls for you. So look at this. You can ask Gemini mobile app to make phone calls to complete everyday tasks. It can get business hours. Product availability, service quotes, and other information. It can book, confirm, and manage appointments and reservations, navigate phone menus, and wait on hold. So imagine you say, hey, can you call this business, get to the point of whenever you need me, and then switch it over to me? This brings up a very important thing. If you have customer service representatives or people answering your phones— at my home service business, we have 4 CSRs, and every single time that we got a call that was like, sounded spammy or sounded like it was from a Google Autobot or whatever, we would just hang up because it was spam. What I'm telling you is that that's no more. Your business is going to be getting calls from Gemini. It's going to be getting calls from Muse. It's going to be getting calls from these personal agents, and you do not want to hang up because these are leads. And this is why it gets a little murky and you're trying to figure out, well, what's real and what's not. This is, as of a couple weeks ago, this is a very normal thing that's starting to happen. Now, when we talk about Muse or any platform recommending businesses or going and buying things on your behalf, Amazon came out and said, hey, wait a sec. Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping. And it raises a very big question, which you might be feeling this way. If these platforms can do these things on my behalf, will it create some type of a monopoly? Right? Does Amazon have to pay Meta to be shown in here if it's buying things on people's behalf? Or how does it pick? So Amazon's like, wait a sec, I need to— I don't want Muse to be able to go onto my platform and choose whatever it wants to buy. I want people to go on my platform and use, you know, my tools. And there's this really big shift of, well, how does Muse make decisions? And do I want to allow it to go onto Amazon and do things? It's a huge standoff. What I'll tell you is that there's not really an answer right now, but more importantly, you know, small businesses, home service business owners like us is like, okay, well, we need to make sure that we are being shown on these platforms, being trusted, and ultimately being able to be booked. All right, so as I just showed you, new reality: your next customer might never visit your website. They might not even call your business, right? Let alone actually doing the research on their own. It might just be all handled through their personal agent, which I believe this is the case. So how does this change everything? Well, we all know the old journey, which is a homeowner has an issue, they go to Google, they find a business, whether that ranks number one or whatever. However, they make a decision, they do some research. They contact the business, they purchase it. Everything revolved around the click, being ranked on certain things, and showing as if you're the best company. And the way that you would show that is by ranking higher on certain keywords. That's the old journey. The new journey is that they have intent, they talk to their agent, whether that's a text, whether that's a voice note, whatever. The agent does the research, gives them some recommendations, and then takes action on their behalf. It's a shift from the browsing economy, you know, homeowners used to do to now the intention economy, which is intention economy, which is intent all the way through handled by AI assistants. I gave you the example of my garage. That process literally took me 5 minutes. I downloaded the app. I said, hey, can you design my garage storage? I have a 2-car garage. Can you find the best, the 3 best local companies? Can you fill out forms for me? It went all the way through, filled out the forms, and then these people started calling me from these businesses because I filled out these forms. And Now, I really do need this service, but I never went to their websites. I never read their reviews. I never did anything. My agent did all of those things for me in 5 minutes. I never— I don't even remember the websites. I don't even remember the business names, to be honest with you. I just said, hey, Muse, can you go do this stuff? Wow. So you now have 2 customers, and this is a part that is shifting. Before, it was just all human. Human did the research, human reached out to the business. You know, you give them an estimate, they do work with you. Now it's the human side of it, which is actually making the decision to buy things at a certain point, right? Especially in like if they show up to your house and they're going to give you a service and charge you something, but the agent is helping them decide. They may upload your, whatever you give them, your estimate into their agent and say, hey, is this good? As a matter of fact, on Muse, when I filled out my thing on my garage storage, the next thing literally Muse gave me was when they reach out to you, here's 5 questions to ask them. When you get the estimate, if you want me to look over it, upload it here and I'll look over it for you. It's literally having a copilot with them to do all of this stuff. It changes fundamentally how we are interacting with our clients and how they're making decisions. It's a wild time, wild time. So the question changed. Old question, how do I rank number 1 to try to show that I was the best company so that humans said, oh, well, they rank number 1, I got to go check them out, to now, how do I become the recommendation by these agents? How do I make them find me, trust me, and then ultimately book me? Those are the big things that we need them to do. So when I asked Muse, I say, hey, what are you looking for when you're finding a home service business? And what I know about what Google has put out from Gemini with their Gemini Spark, it's these couple things. Can it verify this company? When we talk about verify, there's specific things you have to do to be verified. Do customers trust them? This is a very important part. As we change to these new technologies, just like when you shift from, you know, Yahoo Search or Ask Jeeves to Google, there was a big, a big, they were searching for trust. Every single person wanted trust. If you didn't trust Google, you would not go to Google. If you didn't trust ChatGPT, you would not go to ChatGPT. If you did not trust Claude, you would not go to Claude. The trust is the thing that these new platforms, when they come on the market, they have to have trust. So they never want to give a business that's going to make them look bad is essentially what it is. So if your business is going to make them look bad, they will not recommend you. So they have to do their due diligence to say, do other customers trust this business? Do they do good work? Like, do they— do I have verifiable evidence that they actually do good work and know what they're doing? Do they serve this area? Do they say that they serve this area? And then can I act on it? Do they have a form that's easy for me to use? Do they have a booking widget that's easy for me to use? Can I go and actually use their stuff and interact with their business? Agents don't care how pretty your website is. Matter of fact, they don't even care that you have an agent on your website that's a chat widget and all this stuff, right? They just want to go there and take action based off of what they found. A very big paradigm shift right now is that these platforms, Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever, they want to keep people on their platform. Muse never wants me to leave their platform. They just want me to let them take care of it and then come back to me if they need me, which is why it said open my browser. If I want to, I can go and open the browser and take over, or I can just let it cook and do its thing. They want you to do that. All right, so the new framework is this: trust, authority, accessibility. And I'm gonna give you some real examples of this for your business of what you need to do, but I have to lay it all out there so that way you understand why it's so important that we do things the right way and not the old way. So first, when we talk about trust, how do you show trust? You prove real people had great experiences. So naturally, of course, you can get reviews and you should get reviews. But can you have customer video testimonials about their experience? Can you share before and after pictures? Can you share real stories that happen every single day? Can you talk about real customer problems that are going on? The real side of things is how you build trust with these platforms. It's just like if you were going to go and trust a babysitter or something with your kid, it's like, how do you trust them? Maybe they've been doing this for years. Maybe they have over 20 reviews of people around you. Maybe they have real stories of people that they babysat and did things for, and they have pictures and videos of it. Maybe they have real problems or questions that you didn't even think of, that you're answering the questions before they even ask you. This is how you build trust. When you think about authority, authority is a very important part of this because, OK, cool, they trust me, but do they see me as the authority? Do they see me as the go-to company? And this is why it's all about creating what only you can create, because if every single business is talking about the same stuff, then the only denominator is reviews and review count. And in-home service, there's a behemoth that's been around for 30 years that has 10,000 Google reviews, especially in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical, that is like— they're going to dominate the authority and trust space. So what is the other thing that I can do for authority? It's to demonstrate that you are the expert in the space by creating content. I'm Obviously you need to get reviews, but the only other way really to demonstrate authority is by being a pillar in the community, creating content, being on different platforms in the area, in news stations, sponsoring events, like being in the space, in the local area, what these big guys can't do. And then accessibility, it's got to be easy for agents to act on your behalf. So let's break each one of these down a little bit more. Trust, Google reviews matter more, not less. I think we all can agree on that. Proof has to live off your website, and social platforms. When you create social content, it's not just for likes and shares. It's not even for customers to find you. It's because it's another signal back to these platforms, these trust signals that you actually do real work with before and after pictures on other platforms. It's another signal back to them. Who owns claims aren't enough. Your own claims aren't enough. Just because you claim that you're the best on your website and you've been doing this for 30 years, that doesn't matter. Anyone can say that. Anyone can go to Claude and say, write the best SEO website for me and make it trust me. They know that, right? They don't want that. So the old SEO and new SEO agree on this one thing, which is trust. And this is how you did it in the old way and the new way. It's just more amplified now. Authority. When we think about how you demonstrated authority before, it was through like this type of commodity content. Here's 10 benefits of garage cabinets. What is HVAC maintenance? 5 reasons to remodel. This is deemed as commodity content. If anyone can say these things, it's not proving evidence or authority. So how do you do that? You share real projects and before and afters. You talk about pricing and honest trade-offs of certain things. You get your team on video or your projects on video. Those things cannot be commoditized. No one can show a project that you did. No one can tell the story that you did. No one can break down pricing in your market like you do, right? This is how you build real evidence. And this is the hardest part is because You might be doing this and you never may see like the payoff. You might not ever see the views. You might not ever see people liking your stuff, but these are all trust signals back to these platforms. The goal isn't more content, it's more evidence. Building evidence builds authority. And then the last one is accessibility. Agents will reach you in 3 ways. They will schedule you online as the example that I gave. They will call your business as the example that I showed with Gemini, and they will submit forms on your website. You need to make it easy to understand and act on. Imagine you have an AI agent that answers the phone, but they can't book you and it's all confusing and stuff. Do you think that this agent and that agent is going to make sense? Maybe, maybe not. If you don't have online booking, and like in my example, those 3 platforms, those 3 companies that I reach out to, they did not have online booking. I would have had it book an appointment for me if they could. So I had to submit a form. But then what happens? The business calls me back. I don't answer. They text me, blah, blah, blah. I don't answer. And it's gone. This is why online booking is so important because these agents, they just want to get things done and scheduled and on calendars and all that stuff. Online booking is very important. If you're listening to this and you're like, okay, well, I know I should do online booking, but I don't want it booking me all over God's green earth. What I would recommend is just set up virtual estimating or a virtual call and just have that as your only online booking thing that it can do. Then you capture the lead, capture the call, have the conversation, and then you move it into your sales pipeline. So if I think about this as a dashboard of how I would evaluate marketing going forward, before you would look at, is my traffic going up? Are my keyword rankings going up? Is my click-through rate going up? Is my conversion rate on my website going up? What I just showed you is that your traffic, right? How are you going to identify that Muse came to your website, you know, via their browser? Like, you know, that might be from China. Who knows if it's even a local browser? Your keyword rankings, there was no keywords in the example that I just showed you because it's all in AI platforms. The click-through rate is like, okay, well, there's no click-through rate because they didn't click on anything, right? Muse went directly to that website based off of going through the website. They didn't click on any content or anything. And then the conversion rate is like they came to our website and they filled out a form. So, you know, they're going to do that anyways. The new question is, is AI mentioning us and how do we evaluate that? How do I know that ChatGPT is mentioning me in these things? How do I know that Gemini is showing me these things? How do I know if Claude is doing these things? If you're working with a marketing company, they should be at least fighting for this or figuring this out because in 2027, this is going to be the number one question that you want to ask is, are these AI platforms, do they know about me? Are they showing me these things? Where am I at? What's going on? Who gets recommended instead, right? Is it, can I track my competitors? Are they showing my competitors over me? Like these are very important things that are going to be happening in 2027. That's going to be the new normal. Is our information accurate? Is the information that we're putting out real and accurate? Is it just fluffy things like Happy Earth Day or foo-foo stuff, or is it real things happening in my business that's accurate to real things? And then can agents act on it? Do I have online scheduling set up? Do I have— did I train my call center not to hang up on these agents? Are my forms easily accessible by agents and being able to use? Tracking hasn't caught up yet, and that's your window, is that If you shift what you're doing from the old playbook of just like creating non-commodity junk content to this new stuff, you will have a huge advantage come 2027, 2028 to be recommended. Now, if you don't believe me just yet, what I have said is that the interface has changed. Imagine we had Yellow Pages and the only way to manufacture results on that was either your AAA carpet cleaners or you take out a full-page ad in the Yellow Pages. Then we said, okay, well, now there's this Google search thing, and the ways that you manipulate that is you run ads like Google Ads, or you do some SEO and you rank number 1 on that thing, or you get reviews and you show up number 1. That's really the only way to manipulate who is shown inside of Google search. Now we're into AI. What I just showed you has nothing to do with those old playbooks. It's all about now is being the trusted authority in your space. And the way that you demonstrate trust and the way you demonstrate authority is by building those things, the trust, authority, accessibility, and what we just talked about. It's a huge shift. Google didn't disappear overnight. The interface has changed in how people are interacting and finding businesses. All right, so if I was to summarize the takeaway, your next customer might never visit your website. Their agent probably will. And if you're working with a marketing company that's not talking to you about these things, or you're own a home service business and you're like, wow, things are really about to change. This is exactly how I'm preparing our clients and how I'm preparing our business to serve our clients to make sure that we show up, that we're found, that we're trusted, and that we're booked. Because I don't want going into 2027 leads to start dropping off of websites and then we're like, what's going on? There's a huge change happening. This is literally why I'm making this content to make people aware of what's coming and also how we prepare our clients for the future. So if you'd like the opportunity to discuss your business and see if we might be able to help you, I'll put a link down below. Love the opportunity to at least talk to you and see if we might be able to help. So if I was to side-by-side these, the old playbook, the goal is to rank number 1. The new one is to obviously be the recommendation from these platforms. The old one, the audience was humans browsing, finding information. The new playbook is humans are still going to do that, but their agents are now going to do that on top of it. And some people are going to be straight agents. Some people are going to be agents and then the human in the loop, right? There's this whole shift that's happening. I'm not saying this every single person's going to have an using only agents next year, but over the next couple years, I see this as a very real possibility. Content. Before, it was about do some keyword research, jam some content, some keywords in your content, and try to rank and then track your rankings. What I just showed you is that there's no rankings, right? It's about being the source of truth and the recommendation by building non-commodity evidence and real stuff. Trust. You can make claims on your website all day. You can make claims out into the universe all day, but what these platforms care about is reviews, And outside proof. Do you have actual pictures of before and afters? Do you have videos on job sites or real things happening? Do you have real stories that you're sharing that no one else can say? You can make claims all day, but those are not verifiable. This is why you need real stuff. Conversion. Before it was like, okay, I need a website visitor to go to my website and then fill out a form. Now, as I showed you, agents can book, call, and submit forms all on your behalf. It changes conversions. Don't even get me started on attribution and how do I know which agent did this stuff and all these things. It's a huge black box. There's going to be a lot of misunderstandings and new things that we are learning as we go. The metric of the old playbook was, can I get traffic to my website? Can I get rankings that are producing more traffic? And now it's about mentions of my brand and then share a voice. And then ultimately, are people going— is the agents going and booking people? All right, so I'm going to give you a quick checklist. As a reminder, if you own a home service business and you're like, I really want to prepare my business for this. You're looking for a marketing partner. I'll put a link down below. We work with $1 million to $10 million home service businesses. Love the opportunity to talk with you. I'm going to give you 7 on your checklist here. Number 1, get more Google reviews. Okay. Not surprising. This is still very important. Number 2, replace your commodity content with evidence. If you're paying for SEO or you're doing content on your own, don't create the same thing that every other person can create. If your SEO company is pumping out generic stuff and AI slop, That's not going to build authority and evidence. You have to change what you're doing in order to make sure that you are the authority in your specific market. Number 3, clean up services and service area info. You want to make sure that you have the service area that you serve on your website, on your Google Business Profile. You're talking about it in your content. Same thing with your services. You don't want to just, you know, have all these services that you do and then never talk about them because these platforms are not going to know what you do. And you might say, the human, oh, they'll just call us whenever they need us. But these agents don't know what you do. And if humans don't know what you do, then agents definitely don't know what you do because you never talked about it before. So you got to talk about your stuff. Number 4, add online scheduling. If you don't do this, you got to do this. Like, this is the new normal. And even with agents, like, the new normal for people to book you, especially if they have access to your calendar. Why not? It's the easiest way. Number 5, prepare your phones for agent calls. Agents are going to be calling businesses. Agents are going to be acting on behalf of customers. And if your CSR team is not ready, they're just going to answer the phone and hang up on it because they're going to think that it's spam. It's not spam. These are agents calling on behalf of customers. 6, simplify your website forms. If you have forms that you got to click through all these things and fill out all these forms, kind of like the one that stopped me on the example that I gave, I'm not saying that it's bad, but the quicker that you can get the booking in, the better, because then you can switch it over to a human. And I think that it's okay to have a lot of information on your forms for them to fill out, but if there's a lot of questions, They may not want to use that website or that form. The agent might not want to because there's so much stuff that they have to ask back and forth. And then number 7 is start tracking your AI mentions and share of voice. By the end of 2027, if you don't know this data and you're not looking at it, then you're going to be behind the 8-ball. It's something that's a big push for us as a marketing company for home service businesses is to make sure we have the best data that's accurate so that way we know going into 2027 when these agents, in my opinion, are going to be in full effect. That we're ready to roll. All right, I appreciate you hanging out with me. If you like content about this, drop a comment, give me a like, hit me with a subscribe. If you're like, Phil, you're cuckoo, or you have a thought on this, drop a comment. I'm curious to get your thoughts because we're in the Wild West, and all I can do is look at the breadcrumbs of what's actually happening and try to identify where things are going based off of what I see. So I'm curious to get your thoughts. Drop a comment. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.