The Private AI Strategy We Sent Our Clients

This wasn't originally meant for YouTube. This is a strategy video that we sent to our home service clients about how we're preparing their business for the biggest shifts in AI. But I'm all about give the recipe, sell the cooking, and I want to show you what a good marketing company is doing to prepare home service businesses for the big shift. Since 2019, we've helped home service companies generate over $47 million in revenue, and we've invested heavily into these tools and automations and strategies that I'm going to show you in this video. To help prepare our clients for the next shift in AI search. And the feedback was so strong from our clients on this video that I decided to share this publicly so that you can see how to prepare your home service business for the next 2 to 3 years. Right now we're in phase 1. This is the website era. This is the classic thing that's been going on for the past 10 to 15 years from a digital marketing perspective. And that is people used to search something online, they go to a website and they turn into a lead. And right now this is still relevant. It's still why we're optimizing for conversion rate. We're looking at how many people come to your website versus how many turn into a lead. We're optimizing your mobile, like adding sticky headers, specific call to actions, like 7-second forms, chat widgets, pop-ups, landing pages, and driving things to form submissions. Like all these things are still relevant right now because this is what's happening. But what I can tell you is that over the next 2 to 3 years, this is going to be a dying game plan. This is good, but it's not going to be the future. This is at the peak. And so right now we really need to focus on phase 2, which is what I'm gonna be walking you through today. And then I'll walk you through also phase 3 after I do this one. So phase 2 is the shift to AI search era. This is that these AI platforms, ChatGPT, Claude, and now Gemini are becoming the agents that people are interacting with. And it, it's specifically the shift from keywords to conversations and the shift from people going to websites and converting to people going to websites and just asking questions and communicating and not actually going to websites, but just communicating. So what does this mean? Keywords HVAC repair near me. Now people are searching in conversations. My thermostat is on, the fan is running, but, but no cold air is coming out. Why? And it's because people are searching here first. They're searching for solutions, they're searching for maybe troubleshooting options, and then they're going to be asking these agents to help them on their behalf find these companies. And it's not even that they're doing this, it's that they're actually being forced into it. And I'm going to show you what that means and why. So let me walk you through the stages of what's been happening. So first, Sundar Pichai, he's the CEO of Google. He literally says that 2027 is an inflection point for Google, specifically when we talk about agents and agentic search. And as a business that does marketing for home service businesses, we have to listen to what they say so that we can prepare your business. Because what we don't want to do is put our head in the sand and say, oh, it's all the same, right? The Google CEO, billion-dollar company, is literally saying things are changing, right? He would not do that if he didn't want to, if he just, because he wants to shake things up. Like there's a lot of money on the line for them. And he says that I definitely expect in some of these areas, 2027 is to be an important inflection point for certain things. And he was talking about agents and agentic search. And lo and behold, literally a month or two ago, Google just rolled out the biggest change that they've ever made in search in 25 years. And what they changed was on Google, the actual search, search results right here. When you type something in now, you see AI mode right here. It does not go to the 10 blue links that you were getting before. It goes to AI mode. And that AI mode is Gemini interacting with it. And the reason that Google's doing this is because people tell me all the time, they're like, okay, well, are boomers just magically gonna go to ChatGPT and Claude and start searching that way? Or Gemini? No. Google is slowly rolling this out over time so that way instead of ripping the bandaid off, they're saying, okay, let me add this new feature, this new feature. And this has been going on for the past about 4 or 5 months with new things coming out specifically from an agentic perspective and shifting people over from the old way of search to the new way of search. So who actually says, Sundar Pichai, he in another interview says Google CEO Sundar Pichai is okay with AI mode replacing classic search. And before they rolled this out, he, you know, he can't let the cat out of the bag. He says, I think a lot of people expect that at some point the kind of normal Google sort of classic search interface goes away. The 10 blue links maybe go away and you just kind of have this AI mode as a default, which hello, we already have that now 'cause they just rolled this out. So what does that mean? What that means, this is a Google blog, how AI mode is changing the way people search in the US. They put this out and it says a couple big important things. Searching beyond text. More than 1 in 6 searches in the US use voice or images, with image searches growing over 40% month over month. People probably 5 years ago were like, voice search is the big wave. Voice search is the big wave. Now when we think about search, think about how many times you hit that microphone and you start talking to it. That is voice search. And more than 1 in 6 searches in the US now use voice or images, with images search growing over 40% month over month. And this is very big for home service. Imagine someone takes a picture of their gutters. Takes a picture of their kitchen, takes a picture of their furnace, whatever it is, and they're taking pictures and asking questions. This is the biggest shift in search that's ever happened. From Yellow Pages to Google, now Google to AI search. Also on top of that, they found that people are asking longer questions. While we're seeing growth in both short and long queries in AI mode, the average AI mode search is triple the length of a traditional search query. Traditional search queries is HVAC repair near me, like 4 words. If we take triple, that's 12. Keywords. This is a very big thing because when there's 12 keywords, the results are a lot different. I'm going to show you that in a second. On top of that, people are looking to get things done. So trends data shows that AI mode queries related to planning have grown faster than AI mode queries. So people are trying to get things done. They're asking questions like, hey, how do I do this? What should I do here? Right? More conversational in nature than just like, hey, I need a company to come and do this. And then according to trends data, brainstorming queries AI mode has grown 30% faster than queries overall since launch. Searches starting with where to, where should I, and ideas are growing. Think about how you use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude about asking for ideas and working with it more as a personal assistant. That's what this is all shifting to in phase 3. But I'm going to get to that in a sec. Now, Neil Patel, he's probably like the number 1 SEO person in the world. He put this study out, which is Frequency of AI Overview by Search Query Length. So if there's 6 or more phrase, word phrases, 77% of the time an AI overview pops up and you probably see these on traditional Google search where the AI overview happens and it's answering the question. And this is the whole shift that's happening here is the biggest shift from keywords to conversations. And I'm going to talk about how we're preparing your business. I'm just trying to lay the land here so you can see that this is not just like some fad of AI search. It's, I mean, billions of dollars being changed in the way people interact because it's that big of a deal. And marketing companies have to be on top of it to make sure that they're positioning their clients the right way. And that's why I'm sharing how we're helping you prepare your business. Last piece on this, Google's Zero Click Search hit 68% in early 2026. What does this mean? 68% of Google searches end with no clicks, zero clicks. So that means people are going there, searching, asking questions, and not clicking on anything. They're not going to your website anymore. They're asking questions, they're finding the information, and then they're either calling straight from there, they're booking from there, they're getting the information, but they're not clicking to go through. And you could say, okay, well maybe this is just a fad, but you can see 2019, 49%, 2020, 64%, 2024, 58%. And I'm not saying every single home service search is not going to a click. What I am saying is that the shift is happening from keywords to conversations, and we have to prepare your business. So let's talk about this. One of the biggest ways that we prepare a business from keywords to conversations is how we do content. And this is why we built this tool called Turner. There's two main features of Turner that we're gonna talk about. The first one is the shift for content. So Turner takes in your customer calls, analyzes the calls for top signals, looks for new topics, FAQs, frequently asked questions, and then trending topics. So to give you context, let's take this call. This call comes in, Turner analyzes it, gets the summary, puts tags on it, and then creates an optimized blog post. So why is water backing up in my kitchen sink and washing machine at the same time? This would be a question that someone would search in a conversation. And then we want to give the answer as the subject matter expert so that Gemini, whatever platform, says, hey, here's the answer, and they cite us and mention us. Same thing with social posts and video hooks. We want to be creating content across the board. Here's what Google says. This is one of the biggest reasons why we shifted to this model. So Google actually tells us in Google Search Central, they have these developer fundamentals that come out and they come out like usually like 2 or 3 a month. And this one in particular is optimizing for generative AI. Generative AI is AI search, AI mode. And what they say right here is creating non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first. So be sure that you're writing non-commodity content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. Commodity content, for example, is something like 7 tips for first-time home buyers, 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 save money, or the one that I just showed you, provides unique expert or experienced takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary. So as a marketing company, we have to position ourselves to know as much about your business and what your customers are actually saying in order to create very, very unique content with— this is the most important piece— with the actual questions that they're asking. Because if we're shifting from keywords to conversations, we need to know what those conversational pieces are so that we can create content. And the number one way to get that is on the phones. And so that's why Turner, he listens to calls over 3 minutes. He, if there's some, you know, for crazy customers that are annoying, he obviously doesn't turn that into content. Or for people that are asking about jobs that happened before or later, like he's looking for real good conversational content pieces and then turning that into content. So this is phase 2, is the shift from keywords to conversations. Last piece on this is, okay, Phil, well, everything's going away. How are we tracking performance? So a couple of ways. One, Google just rolled out in Google Search Console where we're going to be able to track AI overviews and AI mode conversations, which again, this is not out yet, but it's going to be something that's rolling out. And then the other thing is BrightLocal. Which BrightLocal right now we use for keyword tracking and things like that. BrightLocal in their labs, we have access to actual AI search results based off of prompts. So think like share of voice, mention rate, and these are going to get rolled out over the next couple of months, but we're, we're building this. But more importantly right now, even though all of these tools are not rolled out from even Google or these other platforms, we still know that the shift from keywords to conversation is happening, which is why we have to be building content like this. And this is not just, okay, I put some more blog posts up there. It's unique content, it's social posts, it's videos, it's all the stuff. Like we need as much content out there so that way AI trusts us and indexes. And its reason is, is because of phase 3. So phase 3 is the shift from agents to agents. And this is probably the one that's like mind-blowing, but it, it is what it is. So Google just launched their personal AI agent. They call it Gemini Spark. And Gemini Spark is a 24/7 personal AI agent, and it's coming soon. So when I talk about the next 2 to 3 years, imagine there's a personal AI agent, not just Gemini, right, that you ask questions to, but an agent that works on your behalf. And the biggest, the biggest piece to this is this: 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. Like, imagine for home service, like, this is the biggest shift. And we have to prepare businesses to make this happen, right? Because if we know that people are shifting the conversations, we know it's going to AI mode, and then they're rolling out a personal AI agent on that people can use to do all that, we have to make sure we're prepared. So here's what we're doing. So I mentioned about Turner. So Turner has two parts. Yes, it's cool. We can get the calls, turn them into content to make sure that we're creating conversational style content. And that is important. And we're gonna continue to do that. But the bigger piece of this is the second part, and that is what Google calls a knowledge catalog. So before I go in to show you what Turner does on your behalf, I want to show you what that means for your business. So imagine right now these businesses are investing millions of dollars into building agents for their business. Imagine Target and UPS. They have agents that can help inside of their business. Well, Google, just at their Google Next conference, just came out. They released what's called A2A protocol, agent-to-agent protocol, which is— and they didn't hide behind a paywall or anything. They released it to what's called Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation is open-source code. And why they're doing this is because they want people to build agents to communicate with their agents. They want agents that are out there to communicate with Gemini Spark, and they want to have a protocol so that everyone can communicate agent to agent. And this is the shift that's happening over the next 3 years. So imagine you ask your agent, hey, I ordered a package from Target, where's it at? Then your agent goes and queries Target's agent and asks Target, hey, we did this, and then Target's agent can go and figure out what happened. Then it also goes and queries UPS's agent. So Target goes to UPS and says, hey, where's this at? Then it comes back to your agent and answers it and comes back instantly. No search, no website, nothing. It's just agent to agent protocol, agent to agent communicate. The business that wins won't have the prettiest websites. They'll have the best data. And Google has been saying this is that this A2A protocol, agent to agent protocol, is the shift from crawling websites and information on websites to agent-to-agent protocols and knowledge catalogs and knowledge base. So Turner is actually built on Google Cloud. The reason is, is because each of our clients, you, have a knowledge catalog that we're building on your behalf. And the reason that we're building this knowledge catalog is because we need to make sure that we're preparing your business for when agent-to-agent protocol, Gemini Spark, Gemini, whatever platforms, are not going to crawl websites anymore. They're going to be looking for verified knowledge catalogs and pairing it together. And this is exactly what we're setting up. So we have these knowledge catalogs. Essentially, the phone calls come in, your Fathom meetings, conversations with us. And I would say with Fathom meetings, this is not necessarily to go into the cloud. This is more to edify the conversation that we're having on here. Any documents that we want to upload into the knowledge base, our website that's crawled, and then if we're creating YouTube content, it's going to have YouTube feed coming in. Now this, Right here, this has been rolled out. I would say for us to be fully rolled out on this is gonna be another month or two, but it's built and the knowledge base is building on your behalf. Now inside of this, when we talk about knowledge catalogs and information that's going back and forth, we have, you know, to make sure that we have our knowledge gaps filled, we have questions that are answered. So essentially what we're going through is like, okay, what's the most asked questions? And then, okay, how much does this cost? Let's answer this question to make sure that it's in our knowledge catalog. Because once we roll this out for agent-to-agent protocol, we need to make sure that we are being found. So let me just tee this up for you. Bring this baby home. Old internet versus new internet. What drives traffic? SEO keywords and backlinks. New approach: AI trusted content and data. How customers find you? Search websites and leads. New approach: AI answers and agent action. What your content is for? Rankings and engagement. New approach: training AI to trust you. Core digital asset: your website. New approach: knowledge catalog. How transaction happen: customer fills out a form. New approach: AI agents act for them. Competitive advantage: best looking website, most complete data. I'm not saying websites are irrelevant right now. What I am saying is that they're slowly going to be less and less relevant as we slowly shift to A2A protocol and agent-to-agent protocol. And that's why we're positioning our clients to be successful. I wanted to make this video so that way you can feel confident in working with Flash to to make sure that we are on the cutting edge of the next and the future and what's happening for businesses. And that's why we're building out these tools. And I'm excited about the future because there's so much opportunity for us and I can't wait to crush it. If you have any questions, obviously, you know, reach out to your consultant. We're happy to be a resource on this stuff. I know it can be confusing. I just want you to feel confident that you have a partner that's working with you to scale. Thanks again for partnering with us and I can't wait to crush the rest of the year.