Your Website Won’t Matter in 3 Years. Google Just Proved Why.

Last month, I made a video called Your Website Won't Matter in 3 Years, and it got over 300,000 views and thousands of comments telling me why I was wrong. But since then, Google has given us 3 massive signals that this shift is happening even faster than I thought. I've been building websites since 2015 and doing local SEO for the past 8 years, and what's happening right now is the biggest shift I've ever seen. So in this video, I'm going to show you those 3 signals, break down the arguments against the prediction, and then show you what the future of getting found online actually looks like. Because the worst time to realize that your website stops producing leads is when the traffic All right, the first signal from Google is that 2027 is the year of the agent. Google is moving towards agents, and this is a direct quote from Sundar Pichai: if you don't learn how to orchestrate agents now, you'll spend 2027 catching up to people who started today. Agents don't just answer questions. They can research on your behalf, they can decide on your behalf, they can schedule on your behalf, and they can take action. If you go to Google right now and you ask it to find flights for you, It can reserve them for you. If you ask it to find a restaurant for you, it can do that for you. It can do all the research and make decisions and schedule and take action on your behalf. And Google literally launched Gemini Spark, which is their agent. So when AI can act on behalf of the customer, the website becomes optional. And we're going to talk a lot more about this shift. So this is what happens when agents are replacing the old customer journey. Search happens on Google, then you go and you research and you go to a website. and you read some pages, and then you compare options on your behalf. Then you might call the business, then you might book, or you might fill out a form. The website was the center of the journey. This is why it's such a big paradigm shift. The new journey is this. You ask AI, Google AI mode, ChatGPT, whatever it is, and it researches options for you. Then it can compare businesses side by side for you based off of the questions that you ask. And AI answers those questions. And helps you take action the best way to reach out to this business or to communicate with them. And that could literally be online scheduling, opening a chatbot on the business, and communicating with them right there. The AI interface becomes the center of the journey. They never actually go out to your website. Signal number 2 is actual AI mode. So Google changed on their Google search engine results. They don't have it go to the traditional search engine results. They have it go to AI mode now. So for decades, Search was a list of links and now it becomes a conversation. The old, here are 10 websites, click through, read the reviews and, you know, figure out what you want to do, is now tell me what you need and I'll help you decide. And then the third one is the change in ads inside of AI. Google doesn't need the website click to make money. It needs to monetize intent. And this is the biggest shift that everyone's always been trying to figure out, which is how is ChatGPT, How is Gemini? How are they going to monetize inside of AI mode? And Google rolled this out. And so the old way is you search, you see the ads, you go to the website, and you convert. The new way is search intent, AI conversation, business interaction, conversion. And I made a video about the new way that they're running ads, but it's basically business agent leads, which is you build a knowledge base around your business, and then inside of AI mode, you can open up a conversation and turn into a lead directly inside of AI mode based off of what AI mode knows about your business. So Google doesn't make money because you have a website. Let's just be clear. Google makes money because someone wants something and they want the intent. And that is really what this is coming down to is where do people go when they want something? Do they go to ChatGPT? Do they go to Google? Do they go to TikTok, Instagram, whatever it is? And then how do we monetize that piece of it? It doesn't need a website. So here's the big shift. The website isn't going away. The click is. The website is not going away. The click is. And that's the most important part is that if the website is not necessarily just falling off a cliff, it's just if people are not going there, then the website doesn't become as important. It becomes a data layer as opposed to the actual hub of everything that you drive traffic to. And here's 3 signals. The one direction customers get answers, compare options, take action without visiting your site. That's the hub-to-spoke shift. Now let's deal with why people don't believe it. Now, This is the biggest part that was frustrating for me because I made this video and, you know, thousands of comments, and I'm going to break down these objections and talk through them. Like, you know, I'm going to try to give you my honest opinion on what this means. So websites make Google money. A lot of people feel like, well, Google needs websites because that's how they get clicks. That's how they get people to go there. Well, websites make Google money, so they'll always matter. Google doesn't need to protect website traffic because if we just talked about it, is that it's all about the intent. Google doesn't care about websites. They, to be honest, they care that your business can help solve a problem, but they don't need your website to make money. It needs to protect intent-based search and trust with users. So before, where it was pay-per-click, and then they drive traffic over here to your conversion page, and then you pay so that people can go to your website, that's done. I just showed you all the signals. It needs to protect intent-based search, so it needs people to trust it to go there and ask it questions, and then more importantly, to serve up something that the user can trust. And so if Google can monetize intent inside of AI mode, the website click becomes less necessary. All right, let's talk about, well, I'll just add some type of a chatbot to my website or an agent to my website so that way it can communicate with Google. Well, this is still the old thinking because the bigger shift isn't just putting an agent on your website or making your website agent-ready or any of this stuff. It's making your business understandable to other agents. And this is the big part of building these knowledge catalogs and making sure that you have content that's training these platforms because We have the shift from keywords to conversations. Before, you would be jamming keywords into blog posts trying to get Google to surface your blog post or your website in the top ranking. Now that doesn't really matter. What you need is to build trust with these platforms by answering real customer questions because people are asking these platforms questions and they want the real answers to serve, and that's what it all comes down to. Just by adding a chatbot or something to your website, it doesn't matter because It's all about building trust with these platforms, not having some type of agent on your website that it can interact with. So an agent-ready business, this is what Sundar Pichai is talking about, is the next version of your website isn't just a smarter website. It's not, you know, having some type of specific files or anything. It's a business that machines, agents can trust, number one, understand, number two, and interact with, number three. It's not just about having keywords jammed into something. The trust factor is the most important piece. And the way that you do that is you create real content from real customer questions so that way they believe that you are the number one go-to source for this specific thing. AI needs to know who you serve, what you do, where you operate, what makes you different, and how customers should take action. I want to really drive into this is on what you do, because a lot of times people just have like a services page and they just list out a bunch of services. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what you do on a day-to-day basis. The calls that you get, the questions that you answer, the customer interactions that you do. Obviously, if you're an HVAC contractor, it's like, yeah, I'll come out and repair stuff, I'll install new things. What I'm talking about here is get a lot deeper than that. What are your customers actually saying? What are they doing? Where are you going? Where are you operating? Because a lot of times people don't put that information online. And the problem is that as we get farther and farther with these agents answering questions, if you don't answer those real things online, Whether it's through content on your website, whether it's through social media content, whether it's literally by building some type of knowledge catalog that knows everything about your business. Like, this is what they want. So what I'm getting at is you need to be creating content that can eventually turn into your agent, an agent that can interact with other agents. Your website just becomes a data layer for a knowledge catalog or an agent. So you want to— don't just build a website with an agent on it. You want to Build an agent that agents can talk to. Build a knowledge catalog so that you can train an agent on your behalf. So people still want to just browse things. This was a really big one. Like, well, I just like to browse. I just like to go and look around and see what I like. That is the old internet. You search, you click, you compare, you decide. And I'm not saying that every single person is like this. What I am saying is that the vast majority of people are getting herded into this new normal of search. And if 80% of people go to Google to find a local service business, Then we have to believe that they're getting herded into this new normal, which is you ask, AI researches, AI compares, and AI recommends. You don't have to do any of those things. And people are saying, oh wow, this is so convenient. This is so nice. This is the new normal. So the old internet made you find the answer. The new internet gives you the answer. And as a business, it's your job to be the answer, to create the content so that way they service you up as the answer. It's a whole shift where people don't have to make the decision anymore. These platforms make the decision for them based off how much they trust you, based off of the content that you create. All right, so we don't know what AI will look like. Okay, this was another big one, which is like, we're in an AI bubble. We don't know what AI is going to look like in the future. We can't tell this. So how can you project this out that AI is going to be the future? AI is going to kill humanity, all those things. So here's what I can tell you. You don't need to know exactly what AI is going to look like in 3 years to predict these types of things. You just need to follow the signals that Google is changing. They are changing search. Google is a billion-dollar business, right? Their honey hole of money is in search ads. They, for the first time in 25 years, stopped going to search the 10 blue links and now go to AI mode. Do you think that they're going to bet billions of dollars on this? And this might be the downfall of Google, but an outside perspective that helps home service businesses do marketing. All I can say is they made this huge shift. I have to believe that what they're doing is going to be what's going to be the best way to get customers in the future for our clients. Ads. They know that ads is most important. So if they're shifting ads inside of AI mode, then I have to believe that this is what AI is going to look like in the future, and I have to prepare our clients for that. Gemini. They rolled out Gemini, and I'm not saying you have to use Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. But they're using Gemini across the board in Gmail, Google Workspace, Android, right? They're leveraging their AI tool inside of everything that people are already connected to that literally runs their entire life. And they're building agents like Spark that can do things on people's behalf. And the CEO of Google is saying 2027 is the year of the agents. So all of these things with billion-dollar companies where every You know, 80% of people go to find local service businesses. How can we not look at these things and say, okay, well, AI is— we don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but we can see the breadcrumbs that they're dropping. And then ultimately, like, local business discovery is significantly changing from what it used to look like, where you hunt down blue links, you go to Google Business Profiles, you read reviews, all these things. Now these agents are doing the decision-making for you, so you don't have to predict the destination to see the road changing. That's what it all comes down to. And I mentioned this at the top, which is this is the biggest shift that I've seen in, you know, the past 10, 15 years that I've been doing marketing. And ultimately in the 25 years of Google's history, this is Yellow Pages to Google, Google to AI. And every major discovery shift feels uncertain at first. When people were on Yellow Pages, they were still doing AAA cleaners because they thought they wanted to rank number 1 on Yellow Pages. They were still skeptical of people going online and doing research and not calling businesses. These are not new shifts for people's mindset. All we can do is look at the breadcrumbs. Yellow Pages were once the default, and then Google became the default, and now AI is becoming the new interface. The business that waits for certainty usually adapts too late. And that's really what I'm trying to get at, is that there's this whole land grab happening over there. And you might be saying, okay, Phil, well, what, what should I do? What do I need to do to prepare my business? And if I were to summarize this, like we have a lot of videos on our channel about this, but if I was to summarize this, it would be you need to be creating real content from your real customer calls and interactions that's happening from your business, taking that content and using a knowledge base about your business to make it the best non-commodity content possible. Google is telling us they did a whole white paper on what you need to do, and it's don't create commodity content. Commodity content is like 7 reasons why you need to replace your HVAC unit in this, this, and this. They want real content from real customer questions that no one else can answer. And so that's the first step that I would recommend for you. If you're interested in having that happen, we actually built an agent that does this for businesses. I'll put a link down below. Let's go to objection number 5. I don't like depending on Google. Okay, this was a really another one, which is, okay, here comes another monopoly coming in here to run the world. You know, I don't want to depend on Google. I hear you loud and clear. And this isn't about whether we like Google having power over us or, you know, you know, Meta and Zucks and all these people. Like, I get it, trust me. It's about understanding where customers make decisions. And when we look at the local search landscape, right, we do marketing for home service businesses. It's like 87% of people go to Google to find a local service business. I need a plumber, I go to Google. I need an HVAC company, I go to Google. And that is why if we're looking at this, it's not like, oh my gosh, Google saved me. It's, this is where people are already going to search and now They're funneling them into a new normal. So if customers use AI to decide who to call, how does my business show up there? That is really the question is, it's not like, do we want these people to find us on this platform? It's like, this is the game. This is the playing field that we have. So how do we make sure that we're playing at the best of our abilities? Like the rules are changing. So how do we make sure that the rules, we can play in those rules? You don't have to like the rules of the game, but you should know what game you're playing. And that's what I'm trying to educate you on is that The actual game that we were playing for the last 15 years is changing. And as a business, for me, I have to make sure that we're changing to support our clients in the best way possible moving forward. Okay, information is still king. This was another one that was like, okay, well, what about my intellectual property? And I want to make sure that Google doesn't just steal all my stuff. And then why do they need my business if they have all these things? Information is still king. AI makes answers easy to access. Basic information is losing value. I mentioned this with the non-commodity content thing, is that if this HVAC business can write the same blog post as this HVAC business, like, that's slop. This is why information is still king, and even more importantly, it's building trust with real, real stuff, like real stuff. And judgment becomes more valuable. Just because you can jam keywords into a blog post that doesn't mean anything about, you know, nothing unique about your business, like That's why this is dying, and that's why, like, marketing companies in general, if they're not changing their strategy from an SEO, search engine optimization, perspective, a lot of these businesses are going to get left behind because they're doing old tactics, and it's fundamentally information is king right now, and a lot of people haven't been creating content. They've just been trying to game the system. So, the old value is I know the answer. The new value is I know which questions that you should ask next. So hear me out on this. When we talk about intellectual property, like I have a book coming out in a month. I still believe that intellectual property is important. Books are still important. Content is still important. And the reason is, is because just because these AI platforms can give answers doesn't mean that the user, us, knows the right question to ask. And if we don't know the questions to ask, then these AI platforms can't give us those answers. So, I believe that intellectual property, books, and other content that you would create is not just about giving answers to these platforms and just feeding them all of our information. It's more so about creating the questions that people should be asking and walking them through the actual cycle of how to get to using us as a business. So, I know which question you should ask next is what it's really all about. And that's why if you create content, it's like, Okay, like, let's just think about this for home service businesses. My thermostat is on and there's no air coming out of my vents. That is the question that they ask. Well, they don't know the next question to ask, so you would provide an answer and then give them those next questions, which then shows trust because you know how to solve the customer's problem better than they do. And that's what this comes down to. So answers versus questions. Answers are cheap. Answers are out all the way out there. The right questions are what's valuable now. And that's why we have to be building content that leads people into some type of a conversation and the question and leads them to the next questions. A great expert, book, business doesn't just provide information, it guides someone through the right sequence of thinking. AI commoditizes information, we can all agree with that. It doesn't commoditize experience. And this is why you need to layer that into what you're talking about. Okay, AI hallucinates and no one trusts it. AI, you know, they always gimme the wrong things and da da da da da. I get those things. AI often gets things wrong and they piece information together from all these different things, your website, Google Business Profile reviews, and they say all these crazy things. They go to directories and social media, outdated pages on websites. They read third-party sources. If AI can misunderstand your business, your job is to make your business easier to understand. And the way that you do this is you have to build a verified knowledge base and your website is going to become a data layer. So a lot of people in the comments, AI hallucinates and I never trusted because it says all these things. And the reason is because up until this point in the history of most companies, they have been treating content as an ugly redhead stepchild. Like, I just want to make a viral video so that way maybe I get some likes and shares and business coming in. They were not looking at it as I need to create content so that way these platforms have knowledge about my business and that way there's not random things out there that's jammed with keywords that hallucinates about things. So if you feel like AI hallucinates about your business or doesn't have information, then you should be creating the content to educate these platforms. Now, I mentioned the agent that we built where you can actually create content. What we did with that agent is we actually identify what are called knowledge gaps. So we take the customer questions that happen in phone calls for our clients, and then we scrape the entire internet, YouTube, their website, the FAQs, what they answer on the phones, anything else that they want to upload. And then we find knowledge gaps in their information. So, hey, this question got asked 6 times, but there's nowhere online that we've ever answered it. Let's go and answer this question as a knowledge gap. And then now we have an answer online that these platforms can service. This is what I'm talking about when if you feel like AI hallucinates and no one trusts it, it's because you haven't identified the knowledge gaps for your business. So you don't know what's out there and what's not. You just think, oh, it's going to pull all these random things and give some magical answers for my business. And this is fundamentally what we call the crawl era versus the knowledge era. And so the crawl era is AI finds random information about you and then it tries to interpret it best of its ability. And I believe that this is one of the biggest shifts that's going to happen over the next 3 years is the knowledge era where your business has a structured, verified source of truth knowledge that you can present and say, hey, here's all my Google Business Profile, here's my knowledge base. Hey, AgentSpark, here's my verified knowledge base with real information. Don't go and hallucinate with all these things online. Here's the truth. And the future is not more pages. It's clearer business knowledge that's verified by the business that these platforms can pull from. So what this means for business owners, one, you got to stop asking, how do I get more people to my website? Because you need to start asking, how do I make sure that AI understands, trusts, and recommends my business? The website traffic and all that, it's going down. If you look at any of these metrics, they're all going down. And the reason is, is because people are asking questions. So you need to start thinking about how can I get these platforms to trust me? And that's the new strategic question. And this is the website reframe, is that your website isn't the hub anymore. It's not where everything is going to. Your website becomes a data layer. It's a spoke, one input feeding a bigger wheel. AI turns for your customer. And the business that wins will be the ones AI can understand. Trust and act on. The website isn't going away; the click is. All right, so before I go through the summary checklist, if you own a home service business between one million and ten million dollars, that's exactly what who we work with, and I'll put a link down below if you want to see our playbooks and how we help you grow. You can click the link there if you're interested in the agent. The link is also down there. You can check it out. His name is Turner. He's awesome. Pretty cool. We plug it into your business, creates content, knowledge gaps, knowledge catalogs, all that stuff. All right, so let's go through the summary checklist. Know that the click, not the website, is what's disappearing. The click part of it is what's disappearing. So that's why your website's not going to matter as much as it does right now, because you're not going to get as many clicks to your website. It becomes a data layer. And start watching Google signals. Look at the agents, the AI mode, ads inside of AI, and use the platforms that your customers are using so that way you can understand what's actually happening. Stop building a smarter website and build a business AI can understand. What this means is you need to diversify the content that you're creating. If you've only just relied on an SEO company to pump out some blog posts to your website and you think that that is going to help you, I would say that you need content all over because now it's not search engine optimization, it's really search everywhere optimization. And these platforms are pulling from everywhere. So you have to create content that they trust. Give AI a structured, verified source of truth about your business. This is why I believe that that knowledge catalog is going to be the hub of what you need in the future. Even if it's just downloading that knowledge catalog and putting it into an agent of your own, having a verified knowledge source is going to be very, very important. Separate where your information lives from where customers go. A lot of people think, okay, well, in home service, they're not going to TikTok, they're not going to YouTube to find a plumber or, you know, wherever, Instagram. And what I'm going to— what I'm telling you is that you might— they might not— they might not be going there. And I agree with that. However, these platforms, these AI models are pulling content from everywhere, knowledge from everywhere. So just because your clients don't go there doesn't mean that you don't need to be present there with information that these platforms can pull from because there's a word called share of voice and it's how much content do you have from all over the place that they can feel confident in this information. Number 6, shift the strategic question from traffic to trust and recommendation. The hard part about this one is that when we think about traffic, it's a very tangible number. We can see website traffic going up, so must be good. Trust and recommendations is hard to verify. Like, how do I know that my trust is going up? How do I know that my recommendations are going up? And this is why you should be working with a marketing company that actually wants to pull that number and figure out what that number is. And there's 2 things, share of voice and mention rate, and some other qualifiers in there. But if your marketing company hasn't talked to you about trust and recommendations and share of voice and mention rate, you might be playing with an old playbook, and, and that's the big shift that I'm trying to get to. And the last thing is treat your website as a spoke, one input, not the hub. Your website is not the hub anymore. It's a spoke, it's a data layer, and there is importance to putting content on there. But if you rely on that as your sole source of leads in the future, you might be let down. All right, so if you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. I post content on how to grow home service businesses, marketing strategies, AI, and I'll see you in the next video.