Speaker A [00:00:00]:
The, the, the, the window of, of the Overton page. Talk about the fact that you grew up in the local area and that funny little story I always tell is your dog went down by the creek and got the red clay and the red clay came in on the carpet and you as a kid used to get in trouble by your mom because you had red clay on the carpet. And then you found out as a carpet cleaner, that’s a pH of a 6 and you needed a different kind of enzyme to clean that and you know how to do that. And that’s your carpet cleaning page in the middle of it about carpet cleaning. AI is going to love that. Humans are going to love that. All of that’s getting eaten up because that’s real.
Speaker B [00:00:34]:
This is AI Marketing Experts, where bold marketers and next-gen AI collide. Each week, join us as we decode trends, test tools, and share real wins from the AI-powered front lines. No fluff, no hype, just straight talk and smarter marketing. Tap subscribe and let’s geek out on AI.
Brad Killgore [00:01:04]:
Your next customer might not be a human. It might be an AI browser agent clicking through your site, reading your pages, and deciding in about 4 seconds whether you’re worth recommending to the actual human who’s waiting on the other end. No click-through, no scrolling, no second chance. Right now, the browser wars are here, whether that’s Chrome, Comet, Atlas through ChatGPT, which is just coming out. They’ve quietly changed who your website actually has to convince. And today we’re breaking down what that means for your business right now. So let’s get into it. My name is Brad Kilgore.
Brad Killgore [00:01:39]:
I’m here with my trusted associates on the AI Marketing Expert Show. Super stoked to be here. We meet every Friday and we break it down, jam out, and dig deep into how AI is changing, how it applies to your business, and what it can do to be epic or what it can do if you don’t know what you’re doing. So with that, I’m going to open up the floor to my, to my, my friends here and let’s get started.
Speaker A [00:02:04]:
Yeah, I’m just going to jump in right away as I do, that we’re only like, let’s, let’s think, go back, back how fast this is. 18 months ago, 18 months ago, 1% of, they estimated about 1% of the consuming public used AI to search, find anything. Now the guesstimate’s 18 months later is that AI chat, like asking your AI, getting information, zero-click search. the fact that web traffic is down as much as 80% on some enterprise sites and things like that, all that kind of stuff, because people are getting answers before ever having to go to the website, blah, blah, blah. We’re sitting at like somewhere in the north of 50%, 60% of people are starting with conversational AI first. So what we’re talking about today is that next iteration, sort of, it’s all in the same bucket. Have you updated your entire web marketing strategy to not just be in the AI recommendations, but as Brad mentioned, next is That AI won’t just be the recommendation. Hey, I’m thinking about hiring a carpet cleaner or a roofer, or I need my brakes done on my car or whatever.
Speaker A [00:03:09]:
And, you know, as a conversation, it’s like you have the conversation, hey, I need to call, or I, I’m going to use ABC Roofing to do my roof. Can, that’s what I’m thinking. Can you go check everything out, make sure they’re legitimate and book a job for me sort of idea. And so the human never makes it to the website at all. But right now we’re in the transition. So we’re straddling.
Brad Killgore [00:03:27]:
Right? We’re right.
Speaker A [00:03:28]:
We have to make sure that our websites are on point and human friendly because most websites only convert about 1% of traffic and you want to try and get 4 or 5% of traffic. So you, you know, better. And then you also want to make sure that on the backend, everything that AI needs credibility, you can’t just cite claims that, you know, that are illegitimate, like, oh, we have 552 reviews until you realize you don’t. AI can go proof all of that as well. So is it personalized? Is it provable? Is it localized? Is it schema’d? Does it have the right coding? Like all of these things are now on the, on the table for the fact that you may get less and less and less eyeballs to it by like a lot, by like 80% a lot.
Speaker B [00:04:10]:
Yeah, 100%. And I think that, you know, it’s, it’s already there, but it’s the infrastructure is already there, at least in the Google platform. We were shown that today. So, you know, all 4 of us were in, in the same kind of mastermind group that they were showing us these kinds of things. But basically they’re inside of Google. There’s a way to set, you know, go get me a quote. Right. And Google, as we know, is still the big dog out there for search intent.
Speaker B [00:04:36]:
Okay. ChatGPT is gonna be coming up second on that pretty soon here. Right. And, but there’s a way now that you can just say, hey, go get me an estimate. I need, I need help with my roof.
Speaker D [00:04:47]:
Right.
Speaker B [00:04:47]:
And if you don’t have a way to get an online estimate on your website, you’re gonna be, you’re, you’re just, you, you won’t even be in the conversation whatsoever. Right. If you’ve got 3 or 4 competitors in your market that do have ways to get that, and the agent can go out and get those estimates and type in your, your address, you’re never gonna know that you completely missed a sale whatsoever. Right. And I, I think that’s really the, as we’re starting to look into and, and we’re always talking about looking into the future, it’s agentic. It’s already here. It’s already working. It’s already working for lots and lots of folks.
Speaker B [00:05:22]:
And we have to know that if you’ve got a roofing company, if you’ve got a carpet cleaning company, if whatever, you wanna make sure that you have that, that way to get that estimate from the very beginning. Otherwise you’re just gonna be left outta the conversation.
Brad Killgore [00:05:35]:
Yeah.
Speaker A [00:05:35]:
And we gotta be careful about that. Marcus Sheridan talked about that in his, uh, what’s that new book he’s got? I can’t remember the name. I always forget the name of it. I got it on my shelf, but just not within eyeshot. But how do you do that while being the premium provider? Right? Because estimates and all that commoditize, right? So you, there’s, there’s, you If what, what Chris didn’t say is now every roofing company is a commodity and you just want to get the job at the lowest possible price and hopefully you can run a good business and stay in business. There is still a discount provider, average provider, and premium provider. You know, think of the ice cream shop. You’ll go buy premium ice cream for $12, $15 a cone, or you go down to McDonald’s to get it for what, what is it, $2 now for a cone, right? There’s different levels of ice cream.
Speaker A [00:06:14]:
There’s different levels of coffee. There’s different levels of carpet cleaning. How do you, how do you deal with AI with that? And that, that becomes the conversation, not a topic for another day, but that is also part of it is you have to be having all this agentic stuff and still being able to have the market position of your company and the brand that you built represented well as well. And that’s, it’s a two-pronged problem.
Speaker D [00:06:37]:
I, I think too that we’re focusing a little bit on price, but we have to kind of take a little bit more of a, uh, A higher view than that, because really it’s a matter of making sure that our, our, our websites are— they, they need to be set up for AI to get those things done. So maybe a website has pricing, maybe it doesn’t, but are the tracks laid so that it knows where to go to get the information that it can get from your website, whether that is—
Brad Killgore [00:07:08]:
Yeah.
Speaker D [00:07:09]:
You know, or for example, clarity on your services. I mean, it needs to be very clear. We already know that for humans, but now we need to be very clear for AI agents too. Is it, uh, do you have structured FAQs? Do you have schema? Do you have these things that are, they’re really the tracks underneath the, the, the train to go on through and the, and the AI to pick up the information that it needs to?
Brad Killgore [00:07:35]:
I would totally agree. I mean, You know, you hear these things lately, I have, of websites are dead and you don’t need a website anymore. And just, you could just build one easily in AI. And so some of those to me are, they’re kind of myths in a lot of ways, a lot of ways, because yes, you definitely need a professional website. Who knows a year or 3 years from now, I think you will still need one. But what everybody was just sharing is most websites need a tune-up. They need an overhaul. They need to be built now, not just for humans, but for AI agents like we were describing, because there are tools now that literally are going in, comparing, scraping the information, putting together, hey, here’s the top 4 guys for roofing.
Brad Killgore [00:08:20]:
In fact, here’s, you know, their general idea for a quote. So it’s very important that you have a professional site. And then the other piece of could AI build your site and do it all for you? Well, we actually just remodeled one website or rebuilt it using AI tools. And we’re in the process of doing a second one. So it can leverage a lot of things when you’re using the correct AI tools to rebuild things. But I can tell you from experience, we’ve been building websites for over 20 years. It doesn’t mean, oh, you just hit a button and you got a new website. There’s still a lot that goes on behind the scenes.
Brad Killgore [00:08:54]:
And even if an AI tool produces something, you know, wow, it shows me a mockup and everything. It looks so pretty. And Yeah. Well then what do you do? Most people don’t know what to do with that. They don’t know how they would take that and go into their current platform and make it come to life. And then the next piece of it is even if they could, then you have to know how to preserve your SEO settings. You need to fix it for mobile. I mean, there’s a lot of layers that go into that, that most cases you’re going to need a professional to do it right.
Brad Killgore [00:09:24]:
Otherwise you might as well just go out and use a a do-it-yourself Wix builder or something and just rebuild a website there, which I wouldn’t recommend. So there’s a lot of things that are happening, but I think that the key point is, is it’s not just humans reading your site anymore. It’s going to continue to evolve with the, you know, having these, these robots, for lack of a better word, go in there and look at the top 5 in your— of what you’re searching for, whether that’s travel or whether it’s a service or whatever it is. And then from there, pull on the information. So having those FAQs on there, having maybe some sort of a quoting system on there, all these things are not only important now, they’re only going to get more important.
Speaker A [00:10:06]:
Yeah. So we got into, in our niche, like I did an emergency session with Cleanfax Magazine, March of 2025. I cannot believe it’s that long ago. I do believe time is speeding up anyways. Totally different conversation for another day as well. But And we talked, it was the emergency, AI’s coming to get you, right?
Brad Killgore [00:10:24]:
Literally.
Speaker A [00:10:24]:
And it was, it wasn’t hyperbole. It came across like it probably a little bit, but we had a couple hundred carpet cleaning and cleaning business owners at 295 join a 2-day from 9 o’clock in the morning, 5 o’clock at night. Jeff Cross and I, we had Frankie Finn and John Braun and a bunch of guys on all having conversations about exactly this, right? And we were hosting it. And our company started saying, you know what, I don’t see AI as a separate lane. A lot of SEO companies, stuff like that. Well, Google Maps is one lane, organic rankings, add that on later. And AI recommendation mentions, that’s a whole new revenue layer for them, a whole new bunch of work. And it is, but it’s also become a 3-body problem because AI is the takeover and AI uses all 3, right? So AI is not its own lane.
Speaker A [00:11:11]:
We built an AI an AI ranking strategy with 3 phases, right? So out of this, your foundation is still your Google Business Profile and everything that it means done well, products, services, everything deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. Then you need to make sure that, you know, the normal stuff, your NAP consistency, 150 citations around just to create credibility. AI will use a bit of that. Rankings will use a bit of that. So you’re still hitting old world, new world, stuff like that, but you’re aiming at the new world with more authenticity. And review velocity is the most important— is in reviews, velocity is the most important. So if your niche averages 30 reviews a month on Google, another 20 on Facebook, some on Yelp, there’s your game. It’s not just Google anymore, right? It never was, but now it isn’t because AI doesn’t care about just Google reviews.
Speaker A [00:11:59]:
It’s going to look at all of this for you in context with your website that we’re talking about here. Phase 2 is your authority building. Press releases are amazing for AI, but because AI has a short-term memory, so a press release going out regularly. Creates a whole bunch of signals right now about real, like real authentic signals done well in the news sphere that AI can pick up. So, and then, and then you’ve got your listicles and articles like that. Um, hey, I really loved compare this to this, compare that to that on your site. Sure. Those are great.
Speaker A [00:12:30]:
Like how, how, like what is the pricing range in the local Madison, Wisconsin market for carpet cleaning? If you’ve got that on your website, that is a great blog post or article or supporting piece. And that gives the, that, that, that pricing conversation without giving a quote. And then local backlinks and all of this, that’s phase 1 and phase 2, local backlinks, like actual localized links from local authorities, join your chamber of commerce, get a link, like all that, because that’s a credibility layer for, for AI. And why are we doing all this when I just need more leads, John, becomes the question I get every day. And it’s because organic SEO AI recommendations have always been like, organic’s always been the cheapest at scale. Once you get to there, the The volume growth asset of your business. Paid will always cost you the most amount of money per inquiry. You better have a good backend to get the lifetime value out of them.
Speaker A [00:13:22]:
And as soon as you stop it one day, it stops. SEO is the long game, organic, long, long, long game. You get it right, you dominate the entire market for years and decades. AI is going to be that new war again. And then the last one is you definitely want to have social mentions. Again, we talked about multi-platform reviews and brand and city signals, brand plus city signals. Your brand in the city. AI is really good at picking up your brand without needing backlinks, without needing a link, you know, link text and stuff like that.
Speaker A [00:13:52]:
So brand mentions with city name, all of that just ingests into AI and you get those 3 layers, right? If you’re, if you’re running with a marketing company right now and they don’t even know what I just said, you’re with the wrong marketing company. You are light years behind where you need to be heading right now because that’s already here.
Speaker B [00:14:08]:
So one thing, and I would just want to back up a tiny bit here. You know, when I wrote my book, okay, I went through an exercise of looking through 1,000 different roofing companies’ marketing, what they were doing, their website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, all that, right? What I found, what stuck out the most to me in that exercise was how horrible that those websites were.
Speaker A [00:14:32]:
Hmm.
Speaker B [00:14:33]:
So let’s backtrack a tiny bit based on all this stuff that we’ve been talking about. Update your site. Okay. If you haven’t updated your site in the past 6 years, you’re already behind the curve.
Speaker D [00:14:45]:
Okay.
Speaker B [00:14:45]:
It needs to be a living document that you’re constantly adding to on a regular basis. Some of these things that we’re talking about here, yes, you need to be adding, but you need other things like frequently asked questions. You need things, you need a whole page of all of your reviews and dumb it down. For your, for all of the LLMs, all, all the agents out there, all the bots. Okay. Dumb it down for them and gather every single review from every single place and put it onto one page. And guess what? Update it periodically. Right.
Speaker B [00:15:19]:
Keep it up to date. So, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of things that go into it and things change constantly. AI is changing constantly. We all know this, right? Is your website changing? I’m just going to leave it right at that. Make sure you change your website, update it on a regular basis.
Brad Killgore [00:15:34]:
Yeah.
Speaker D [00:15:36]:
Yeah.
Brad Killgore [00:15:36]:
I mean, can you guys still hear me clearly or am I dropping out? You sound good. Good. I look good too, right?
Speaker D [00:15:43]:
Yes, absolutely.
Brad Killgore [00:15:45]:
Friday, looking good.
Speaker D [00:15:47]:
On point.
Brad Killgore [00:15:48]:
That’s right. So, I mean, I, you know, we could go over this and over this, but I mean, it’s just so crucial because I see it all the time of people have compelling websites, but like Chris just said, they haven’t put one bit of sauce on there in 6 years. I mean, that’s just crazy, but it It’s so common because, you know, everybody’s busy. You know, if you’re running a business, you’re looking at 4 business owners here. Some of us have multiple businesses. It’s a never-ending cycle, right? I mean, there’s always something, but you just really need to stop and think of, okay, if I can’t handle it, then I need to hire somebody to help me with this because you need to have blog content and it’s gotta be something that makes sense. And you gotta have the frequently asked questions and all the other behind the scenes stuff, whether that’s schema, which a lot of people don’t even know what that is. There’s a lot of pieces that go into it, but the social pieces, the Google Business Profile pieces, you can post on Google Business Profile.
Brad Killgore [00:16:41]:
All these different things are going to all pull together into one big soup, for lack of a better word, that now not only humans can read it, but the AI agents or the bots or whatever can now pull in more data about what you offer, possibly what your pricing is, or at least ballpark stuff. So now’s the time, you know, if your website looks like it was built in 1999, I see a lot of them out there. Uh, it’s time for, it’s time for a revamp. Like literally our corporate site, we just relaunched it today because I was like, wow, we’re putting blog posts up and it was hurting. Right. So if I, if mine’s hurting, think about, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of small businesses out there that have not had a facelift, have not had a revamp. It’s old content. It’s a static site.
Brad Killgore [00:17:29]:
They’re not doing anything on there. Now’s the time. Let’s kick it into high gear because It’s going to make a difference now, and it’s going to make even more of a difference later. I know brand and brand mentions and some of these other things were discussed. These are all crucial factors that if you’re listening or watching, um, you, you, it’s really a good idea that you pay attention to these things. It’s not going to go away.
Speaker D [00:17:51]:
No.
Brad Killgore [00:17:51]:
And one other thing—
Speaker A [00:17:51]:
Content piece is the big one.
Brad Killgore [00:17:53]:
Sorry, go ahead, Jen.
Speaker D [00:17:55]:
Well, I just wanted to mention that we’re talking about like updating a website and improving it and making it better. And we also need to look at the other side a little bit for The, we’ve all had those clients that they, they, they want the, they want everything in the website. They want it like, they want the logo to pop, you know? They want, I’m, I’m doing my—
Brad Killgore [00:18:19]:
Bigger.
Speaker D [00:18:20]:
Quote unquote.
Speaker A [00:18:20]:
Make it bigger.
Speaker D [00:18:21]:
We’ve all heard that.
Brad Killgore [00:18:22]:
Yeah.
Speaker D [00:18:22]:
And so the clients who it’s like, okay, I want it this way and that way and this way and that way. But so I’ve had to tell clients many times over the years in a very nice way. The website is not for you. The website is for your audience. And so we’re really just saying that, that same thing. We’re still saying that, but now your audience is, is changing. It’s not only your ideal customer profile. It’s also bots or AI agents who are doing that, those reviews, the, the, the shopping, the browsing, the gathering of data.
Speaker A [00:19:01]:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker D [00:19:02]:
for your audience. And when we’re talking AI, the more order you can give it, the more structure you can give it, the better, as far as when it comes to data. So think, think, you like, give, think, give, maybe you don’t need all the bells and whistles that we were doing 5, 6 years ago. You know, just a thought.
Brad Killgore [00:19:25]:
Yeah.
Speaker A [00:19:25]:
And I think you teed me up better. I’m glad I let you go first because What you did, like where I was going with content is exactly that is so the content needs to be for the human and for the AI. And on May 8th, Google changed their rules. Like they changed their algorithm yet again, pretty much wholesale in that if your website has generic, say you go to one of your service pages and it’s got 2 paragraphs, 300 words at the most, and you could go to any website and find those exact same words that used to be, well, maybe you get a little bit of signals from it or whatever.
Brad Killgore [00:19:59]:
Nope.
Speaker A [00:19:59]:
That in the new, the new ecosystem, you’re not, it’s not that you’re deindexed or demoted. You’re, you’re not even shown anymore. That’s considered not even lightweight content. It’s considered not relevant to be brought up at all. So he’s like, holy crap. So if you’re talking about refreshing your website as of May 8th, everybody should have been chatting about, is, does my website actually have on the pillar pages? So your core pages, not every page, but your, your core page, your contact page can say your contact page straight up. But if your homepage, your service pages, Your About Us entity page, things like that, your service area pages, all of those need to be, have, have content that is adding to the knowledge of you in the area that you are, the consumer that you target and helping benefit all of that. That’s the AI thought process.
Speaker A [00:20:50]:
That’s the algorithm thought process now. So if you have a page and it doesn’t matter if you write it with AI, that wasn’t never the point, but if you pump out 100 ChatGPT articles a day and go, I’m going to rank higher. That is no different than 10,000 backlinks from Russia in 2002. It might’ve worked, you know, 6 months ago. It is not working anymore at all. The window of the Overton page— talk about the fact that you grew up in the local area and that funny little story I always tell is your dog went down by the creek and got the red clay and the red clay came in on the carpet and you were as a kid used to get in trouble by your mom because you had red clay on the carpet. And then you found out as a carpet cleaner, that’s a pH of a sticks and you needed a different kind of enzyme to clean that. And you know how to do that.
Speaker A [00:21:31]:
And that’s your carpet cleaning page in the middle of it about carpet cleaning. AI is going to love that. Humans are going to love that. All of that’s going to get eaten up because that’s real. We’re back to being authentic, which is great, which means that anybody who is trying to just game, my website’s just a brochure. Okay. That’s great. But you are driving 100% of the traffic to it manually with yard signs and business cards because it ain’t going to get found.
Brad Killgore [00:21:56]:
Authenticity trumps it all. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what, John is one scary guy. You never know what he’s going to come up with or what persona he’s going to pop out with. And that was freaky, man.
Speaker A [00:22:06]:
Well done.
Brad Killgore [00:22:08]:
There you go. Any other thoughts, feedback on this subject, guys? I think we’ve kind of, kind of gone around robbing on it. We’ve kind of hit the high points. I mean, authenticity, get it tuned up, start getting content out there. And what else can you guys think of?
Speaker A [00:22:21]:
If you are working with an agency, make sure you give them that stuff because a lot of us as agency owners, and if anybody is an agency owner, Obviously this as well. One of our good friends in the, in the, in the, in the Agency World Mastermind talked about how he interviews his clients every 90 days, was it? To get just— it’s painful. It’s lawyers. They don’t want it, but they’ll sit down for 45 minutes or an hour or 2 hours or whatever every 90 days because he needs the personalized content information, sorry, to then build content from. So what cases did you run into recently? What have you done in your personal life? How’s your golf game? Like, you know, think about all of that becomes part of articles. And blogs and stories and stuff like that. So you can go out right now and see where your website is showing up in AI recommendations. You can test it yourself.
Speaker A [00:23:08]:
There’s tools. You can call any of us and have us test it. Yes, that’s great. If you stop for a second and say, I’ve never put any real content on my website, I wouldn’t even do the audit yet. Like you might show, yeah, like it’s understand fully that get the stuff on the site that AI and authenticity cares for. And make that your priority, not, gee, I wonder if I show up and if we’ve happened to game the system. Now, if you’re far enough along that you’ve been doing a lot of that, go test now, right? That would be one of the things to make sure that you’re— that’s, you know, one of the checks you can do is see where do I actually show up in these different search engines for these core sentences that, you know, conversations that people might have. And just understand the days of keywords, carpet cleaner near me, carpet cleaners near me, carpet cleaning service near me are all different search terms.
Speaker A [00:23:56]:
that come up with different results in the world of AI. The dog peed on the carpet. I think I need a carpet cleaner. Who do you recommend? Is entirely different than, hey chat, so, you know, we’ve got these issues and, you know, like the ramble that’s different comes up with a different answer, right? It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s conversation. You don’t just show up because they mentioned the word dog pee once. Yeah, that’s going to be these guys’ sites show up 100% of the time in the local market. It doesn’t work that way at all.
Brad Killgore [00:24:22]:
All right, John, since you’ve got the mic, do you want to wrap us up on what, what they can do, what our viewers can look at and do with the AI Marketing Experts platform?
Speaker A [00:24:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. So definitely go into the show notes, whatever platform you’re on, or into the description, the whatever, and you will get show notes. You can get Take Action with Amy ride-along that comes with each one of these episodes. Click the link. We’ve got the private community. You’re going to, you can join in there and join the conversation, chat along, all that kind of stuff. You can also go to the aimarketingexperts.net. website to make your way there as well.
Speaker A [00:24:57]:
So if you’re just listening and driving, aimarketingexperts.net, and go there and you can follow along, join every one of these episodes, become deeper dive, take action with Amy checklists and, and all of that kind of stuff and community conversations.
Brad Killgore [00:25:11]:
Perfect. Well, be sure, like, share, subscribe, tell your friends about us. And our goal is to always provide value and help businesses succeed. So with that, we’ll wrap up this week’s episode of the AI Marketing Expert. And we’ll catch y’all next week.
