How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Gemini & Claude in 90 Days

Aaron Horner
Is your remodeling company currently being recommended by large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini and Quad? Or would you even know if it was? Today we’re bringing Patrick onto our show, our in house SEO expert to explain a 90 day action plan full of practical steps to actually get you cited by AI. If all this seems very overwhelming to you, we’re making this episode very beginner friendly and defining the terms as we go along so you can actually have a solid foundation for how do you get your company cited in the new.

Patrick Scully
Era of AI foreign.

Logan Shinholser
Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser and today we’re joined by Patrick Scully who is basically our marketing savant.

Patrick Scully
He, I’ll take it.

Logan Shinholser
He is. If you, if you look up like contractor SEO or any of that stuff, we are number one as the time is recording because of Patrick. He is a wizard when it comes to stuff. And today we’re talking all about basically how to get found in AI searches within the next 90 days.

Patrick Scully
Yes.

Logan Shinholser
So at the time of this recording, Google just rolled out a bunch of new stuff. Yesterday at like their big event, they talked about how they’re going to start to shift a little bit away from like typical Google searches where it shows the normal like Google links. And then now they’re more into like they’re going to kind of push the AI search and Gemini search a little bit more forward. So it’s not like you have to push like a, it’s not like a fallback method. So much like more of a proactive method. So whether we like it or not, this AI search thing is becoming more and more of a thing. So we’re going to talk all about today of really what it takes to get found in there.

Logan Shinholser
And for those that are doing these things proactively, can you get found in 90 days? What kind of background do you need to already have that if you do these things you will then be getting found in 90 days? So the whole premise of this is about in the 90 day world, can we get found or in other words, cited in AI searches? And that’s what today is all about.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, sounds good. So not an over promised thing, just going to be some good tactics you can take to see increased visibility. It may not be the full, you know, we’re not saying in 90 days you’ll be, you know, the only person sighted, but it’s a good way to say where am I at now? What can I do in the next 90 days? Remeasure after that period of time and see what kind of progress you’ve made.

Logan Shinholser
Got it. So this is basically like you’re not going to get married in 90 days, but we’re at least going to hopefully get you on your first date within 90 days. Which after enough of those, you’re going to get to that marriage point.

Patrick Scully
Yep, exactly.

Logan Shinholser
All right, so when we go through the term, let’s just say cited because we’re going to say cited a lot during this. What do we mean by being cited in AI search?

Patrick Scully
So for me it can mean a couple of different things. One is someone’s looking for answer to a question that they have. So it’s more of a how to or why is this a how do I do this type of question? And if you have the right content or the right answer to that on your website, on a social media post, wherever it might have landed, you will get cited in the sense that your answer will show typically with that, at least in AI overviews or Google’s form of AI search, there’s kind of citations that come with that to show, okay, here’s the answer. This is where we got it from. That’s really where you’re kind of showing up is your link to your article.

Patrick Scully
If you’ve clicked on those, you’ll notice they’re kind of highlighted in purple when you get there to show exactly where in that piece of content they grab that two or three sentence bit. The other piece is now you’re doing a local search and you’re saying I’m in the market for a remodelers near me, remodelers in my town. That citation now is typically your Google business profile showing, especially when you’re in that AI mode version of Google and that’s your actual business listing showing. So that’s a better click that you’re going to get. It typically opens up your Google business profile where now someone has to click through to your website. So for me it’s either providing the answer and that’s like a brand building thing over time.

Patrick Scully
You know, the kind of idea is that you know, you’re seen in your local market as the kind of expert continuously providing this information. The second piece is actually now you’re getting shown as the top five options in your area. Someone that’s further down the funnel wanting to click on a local business, probably make a phone call, fill out a form, something like that.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, so basically when we say citation or cited, that is like, you know, if it’s more of a, what’s called an informational search. There’s somebody just wants to know what’s it going to cost. Hey, should I go with this style of backsplash or that style of backsplash? If your website or your some online entity, whether it’s social media or YouTube or whatever it could be, is where they got the answer from, they will then give you credit for that answer coming from you.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, search has always been about providing the right answer to the question that’s being asked. So you know, whether that cited citation from you is a direct answer to a question. Here’s some data points on, you know, how much kitchen remodeling costs or something of that nature, or they’re looking for. The data that they’re looking for is reviews and a phone number and you’re providing that through your Google business profile. So however you get surfaced in that search, you’re being cited on the data that you’re providing. So you either provided answer to a question or a phone number.

Logan Shinholser
Got it. And then on. Let’s just take that first part. So the informational search side of things, I understand like if we’re here in Charlotte and I want to know how much a kitchen costs, it would beneficial if I went there and said what’s the kitchen cost here in Charlotte? And then a Charlotte based company that did kitchen said this is what it costs based off of all this information that we’ve, you know, collected over the years. I get that. But if I wanted to say like what would better, a herringbone backsplash or subway backsplash? Like how does my company. Because like there’s no. That’s like very. I’m just curious about this stuff and maybe I’m not even looking at like a remodeling company or maybe I don’t even want to have remodel.

Logan Shinholser
Maybe I’m just like writing a article for an interior design class that I have in college.

Patrick Scully
Sure.

Logan Shinholser
What is the benefit of actually having a citation back to my website to say, oh, you know, Patrick’s remodeling company was the one that answered the which one’s better? Herringbone versus subway tile? What’s the benefit? Is, is there a benefit there like to actually then at some point driving revenue or is that more of just like that’s still on the SEO side where if you get found for that stuff then that creates that authority that Google goes, oh, they know a lot about backsplashes. When somebody does look up a kitchen in the area. It kind of all ties together.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, mostly that. It’s mostly still the SEO play to make sure you’re building up that kind of topical authority, which means you have shared about backsplashes because you’re knowledgeable about it. The other option that Google has really displayed a lot of data, especially in their latest event over the past kind of six months, they’ve come up with a lot of data that’s showing that you may get less clicks. So 90% of the people searching for Herringbone backsplashes are maybe writing an article, maybe doing a research, maybe, you know, maybe not in the market for you specifically, but when that person does come that says, I want a kitchen remodel, I love Herringbone. I love all this stuff because Google knows about them. Either they’ve typed that all out in their search or because Google’s connected to their Gmail and connected to some other things.

Patrick Scully
All that data about them that click from that person to your website is very highly qualified. Already moving further down the funnel than just a typical search visitor from, let’s say, traditional kind of organic search, because it’s such a specific, exact question that they’re asking something very specific that they’re finding or looking for that you provided on their website. So.

Logan Shinholser
Oh, okay. So let me. Let me rephrase this. So basically, the article itself, that what is better, Subway versus Herringbone, that it’s big for Google because it’s still like people are searching for that stuff. But ultimately, if your website has an article that talks through the differences there, and the AI search was, we’ll call it Gemini because I think that one’s going to win. But Gemini sure knows. All right, Patrick’s remodeling company.com has an article about herringbone versus subway tile, which means that they’re knowledgeable on both of those things. If Logan the homeowner says, I’m looking for somebody to redo my kitchen, and Gemini knows, Logan, you’ve been looking at different tile types.

Logan Shinholser
And I see in your emails or your, you know, like your texts with your wife or whatever, like, you’re looking up this Herringbone style because Patrick’s website says, you know, has knowledge on Herringbone style because of this one article. And when you’re looking up who does my kitchen, Patrick’s website also says, I do kitchens. It ties the two together. So now basically, those blog posts that, you know, the traffic, because people may not be going, because I know for me personally, the way that I use it is like, I. I don’t click on the article a lot of times. But I will, like read about it and understand it to understand more about it.

Logan Shinholser
But from a, okay, I’m ready to buy this thing standpoint, the more depth and the better depth that your website’s going to cover, the more that when it is time to actually hire somebody to do this thing, the Gemini is going to say, oh, I know all this stuff about Patrick’s Mile and company. This is the perfect company for you because of these reasons.

Patrick Scully
Right. So it’s just kind of the next level of search, getting smarter. So, you know, whereas it used to just show you 5, 10 options and you needed to click through those. They were all good businesses, but you needed to find on their website, do they do backsplashes? How do they feel about them? You have to go dig for that information. So now the three to five that are getting surfaced in your particular chat may not be the ones that have the most reviews or the most, you know, backlink authority or whatever has driven traditional kind of SEO rankings. It’s now re ranked. So all these systems have kind of a re ranking functionality that says, here’s five people in the area. Let me go re rank them according to Logan’s preferences.

Patrick Scully
So you may not be seeing them just ranked on the number of reviews or, you know, length and time of business or things of that nature, which traditionally have pushed people up the search results. Now you’re getting some of those, but also mixed in with like highly synthesized to your search.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, so like the way that I look at this is I remember back in the day, back when I was on Tinder, when you open up the Tinder app, it always showed the most attractive people first.

Patrick Scully
Okay.

Logan Shinholser
And I assume that was because Tinder knew, okay, these people are getting the most positive swipes on them. It’s probably because they’re the most attractive. But to keep Logan on the Tinder app, they’re going to lead off with the most attractive people. Because it’s like, okay, that now it’s like that endorphin high that I get. But the way that Tinder worked was you kind of have to go through everybody to then go on a bunch of dates and then figure out who wouldn’t be a good fit. Flip it around and you now have somebody that, say, is a professional matchmaker. Where I fill out, this is who I’m looking for. I want somebody that is this and this, these are their hobbies. This is this is that.

Logan Shinholser
And then on the flip side, that person’s profile has also explained all the things that they are into and they like to do. And then now the matchmaker goes, Logan, you don’t. You don’t need to sift through all these people. You basically just need this one person right here. Because your interests and your goals and your values align very well with theirs. But we need their information fully filled out and we need all the things that you have filled out, Logan, to make that connection. And then now when I go on the date with that person, I’m not looking at this as like, man, they’re pretty hot, but I hope they’re not weird. And more of like, okay, I’ve done this very extensive all about Logan. They have this very extensive all about them. This is.

Logan Shinholser
So now I’m going into this date not like, I hope this works out. And way more like, wow, this is probably going to be a fantastic date. I wonder what we’re going to do on day two, even before I even get into date one. Yeah.

Patrick Scully
And that matchmaker isn’t confined to the data that’s in Tinder. I met my wife way before Tinder, so never used it. But yeah, I’m. So basically that matchmaker is now looking at what has that person posted on social media in the past year?

Logan Shinholser
You know, I’m active and oh, like, maybe they didn’t explicitly see like.

Patrick Scully
Pickleball, but they didn’t say they like pickleball, but the folks are of them playing, like. So it’s a little bit more like broadened out to what does AI know about you? Just not like, what have you inputted into your website to teach it about you. It’s also using reviews from around the Internet. And so it’s kind of like showing up in press or awards and that kind of.

Logan Shinholser
Damn it. Like, I could like, if I knew. Okay. Because like, they had a. There was a book that I read. It’s here, it’s great book. And it talked about it was by a guy that created a startup that was dating websites before. Like, dating websites were a cool thing. Like, it was like he was talking about, like the first five years you didn’t tell people you were doing Internet dating because it was like, weird. But he said, you know, girl, guys with a photo in their profile, like, image would have like a 15% increase, but women that had it had like an 18% decrease. And the reason for that was because the 15% increase in guys showed, oh, they’re empathetic, they’re caring.

Logan Shinholser
But for the girl, it was, well, at the end of the night they’re going to want to go home to their own house because they have a dog they have to take care of. So they went through all that data to basically say it. So basically what? Like, in my case, maybe, like, right now, I could game it and just have all my photos be with me and a dog. And you’re like, oh, this dude loves dogs. I don’t have a dog at home. I’m not really a big animal person myself. I think they’re fine. But I have two kids that are, like, more than enough. So it’d be very misleading if, like, I had that. But I could still game it.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, but now that’s topical authority right there.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah.

Patrick Scully
Because you could game it with a picture of you with a dog. But have you ever mentioned hanging out with your dog on social media? Now there are any pictures of you at the dog park. Like, you know, so it’s. That’s like the depth when you know, you’re talking about herringbone articles. Like, you write that. Because that’s the evidence that’s out there to say, okay, this person just didn’t show a picture of a herringbone backsplash one time.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah.

Patrick Scully
There’s evidence across the Internet that this is true.

Logan Shinholser
And they have examples of it. And then they have clients that posted, like, you know, in the review, hey, we love our new kitchen. And then Google can look in that photo. Oh, there’s a herringbone backsplash, which shows they’ve actually done it. Okay, Exactly. So, all right, so perfect. This is very helpful because it kind of reframes the whole point of, like, the. Yes, you can still game it to a certain extent, but, like, it is becoming harder and harder from at least my perspective to game some of this stuff. The biggest way to game it is just to do the right stuff correctly, which is what we’re going to talk about in the next 90 days.

Patrick Scully
Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
For right now, there’s a lot. I mean, I would say half the sales calls I’m on, people are like, oh, if you think the photos on our website are fine, you should look at the ones in my Dropbox or Google Drive. And they send me just, like, these immaculate photos that have won awards. And I’m like, how would I ever be able to find these? And they’re like, I don’t know. I’m like, okay, that’s an issue. So, like, yeah, a lot of it is, like, we just got to get our stuff out there. So 90 days. How realistic? Like, what.

Logan Shinholser
What scenario or what position does somebody have to be in where if they are not really being found in AI search right now, but 90 days later they are being searched, what foundation do they already have to basically come in with for this to actually be a realistic thing?

Patrick Scully
Really the only foundation the requirements are you have a live website and you have a little bit of history online of your business. That means that you’re Google business profile has been up for a little bit. I mean if you just started today and you decided to launch a business today, this isn’t really for you because you would still have to build your website and start to put the content on your website. So Your night first 90 days looks a little different.

Logan Shinholser
Let’s talk about the trust piece because I have somebody else that like let’s say today the website’s done and you have content, you have blogs and all that stuff. It’s a brand new business, brand new domain. Talk a bit about like the trust factor because I know like we have a client of ours that it’s like, hey, this client finally like popped. And it took like four months to get to that point because they went from not being ranked at all to all of a sudden being on page one, but it still took four months. So can you talk a bit more about like, because like the way that Google does it, I imagine AI search is very similar where like, you know, Warren Buffett has that quote that’s like some things take time.

Logan Shinholser
You can’t have a baby in a month by getting nine women pregnant.

Patrick Scully
Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
It’s like the same idea to a certain extent with Google and I assume AI search. So can you talk a bit more about like the trust and like even if you try to, you know, force your way into it still is going to take some time.

Patrick Scully
Yeah. So that’s even getting smarter and smarter. Because trust in the past when it comes to Google is really just a formula or an algorithm that they’ve come up with to determine at the end what is your kind of trust score based on all these inputs. AI now brings a like thinking layer to that so they can say, wait a minute, you said you liked dogs. But I just did all this and I didn’t see any dogs. So I’m not really going to say that you like dogs. So it has that thinking capability to it. So it’s not just like shooting out a score based on do they have a. Do they have reviews? Check. Do they have more than 10 reviews? Check. Do they have a award logo on their website? Check.

Patrick Scully
That kind of used to be the trust the way that you build trust the old way, now it’s much harder, like you said, to game the system because now they’re going to go check that website for the certification and they’re going to make sure that you’re not just putting the logo on your website. Like it all has to really connect. So that’s the biggest thing. And then just making sure your website is strong in that regard as well. So for example, one of the most crawled pages on a website from AI,.

Logan Shinholser
When you say crawled found.

Patrick Scully
So when some, when AI comes in, you know, looks for your content, one of the pages that they’re looking for the most, they’re not looking at your entire website. Everybody has URLs name differently and everything. A lot of people have an About Us page. The URL is usually about dash us, whatever, something like that. They’re going to find that page and crawl it more often than let’s say one of the blog posts on your site. This is because they want to build that trust to see who is part of this company, what’s the kind of story behind it, how, you know, have they won awards. So building out like a robust About Us page can be a great thing. And then also featuring your projects on the site as well, going into depth.

Patrick Scully
So a lot of times we see, you know, a portfolio page with 50 photos on it and no information about what the project was, where it was, what it cost, you know, the purpose behind the project, things of that nature. So just making sure your website is kind of ready to get cited before you start going out there and doing the other activities to like get it cited.

Logan Shinholser
So can you get cited without a website or like with a very crappy website, like let’s say I have a terrible website but I win every single nary award possible.

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
Could I still get cited and get leads?

Patrick Scully
Yes. On one sense, the look and design of your website. When it comes to either Google visiting it or an LLM visiting it, the design doesn’t matter so much as the content. So you could have a very simple website. If it’s not mobile friendly, it’s not going to do good in Google search. So there are aspects that you do need to have. But does it have to be the prettiest website in the world just to get cited? No. Does it need to be pretty to convert a homeowner into a client? Probably. So there is a balance there. But the only type of site that we’ve seen that struggles, and this struggles in regular search as well is like A single page site that you just try to put everything one page. It’s usually not very in depth.

Patrick Scully
It’s more looking like a, almost like a landing page for an ads campaign. Those pages are hard to do because again, there’s no depth to the website. There’s no, I’ve gone to the home page and now I’m going to go to another page and look at that page. It’s only just one page. So the biggest thing is making sure that your content is accurate. Your, you know, there’s no real right now, there’s no number of pages that you need to have or anything like that.

Logan Shinholser
I’d imagine like you can make it easier where it’s like, you know, let’s just say like back to the dating example. You could either be attractive or you could be rich. And it’s like best case scenario is you’re attractive and rich now you’re appealing to everybody. But if you’re really ugly, then you gotta be really rich, which is kind of like in this boat. Like if your website’s bad, you gotta win a ton of awards to potentially get picked up versus like if your website’s good and you have some awards, that’s good. If your website’s amazing and you have a couple awards, maybe. So it’s almost like a, a ranking system where it’s like the uglier you are, the richer you gotta be.

Logan Shinholser
But it’s the, you know, the worse your website is, the more awards you have to just naturally win on your own. Yeah, but why make it harder on yourself? Because it’s hard enough to win awards. Because if you’re banking on basically the whole award approach, then what if you don’t win it that year, what happens then? So yeah, the way I kind of.

Patrick Scully
Think about it is designing your page better doesn’t necessarily make the content more true or make you more of an expert. So just proving first that you are like a real expert. I think that’s mostly what these AI tools are like geared towards finding is they know that at the end of the day they’re sending you to me. Real interaction, real people. Probably going to meet up at your house. Yeah, you’re probably looking at spending, you know, 50,000 more dollars. So it’s like a real big financial purchase in search. For a long time that’s been a category of business that gets scrutinized a little bit more.

Patrick Scully
So that’s why it’s important for remodelers to show their pricing, show their expertise, show how many Years they’ve been in business, show the awards that they’ve won because you’re not buying a $20 widget, you’re spending a big amount of money, you’re having people in your house for months on end. So that’s like a different, it’s almost like you were, you know, searching for a doctor to do a surgery. Like that’s a big deal. Yeah, they’re going to take that more seriously and you need to prove yourself more.

Logan Shinholser
I gotcha.

Patrick Scully
And once you have that down, then yes, like make the site look great, you know, do all that stuff to, you know, increase your brand and everything like that, increase your conversions. But when it comes to like trust in an LLM or a search engine, it’s more about the content, it’s more about what you’re kind of saying about yourself.

Logan Shinholser
Got it. Okay, so let’s go to those first 30 days. So the first thing that you know, you talk about is running an LLM. And just for everybody, since for a large language model, but we’re kind of using that interchangeably with like LLM versus like AI search. Because AI search could be ChatGPT, it could be Gemini, it could be Perplexity. All of those are LLMs. So if we say LLM or AI search, assume it’s basically the same thing.

Patrick Scully
It’s the same thing. There’s a little caveat where there’s two kind of types of data that you can get back from. Let’s say ChatGPT1 is what it knows about you in its training data. So when they come out with their new model, you know, 5.5 just came out, that means they’ve now it has more training data than it did before. So the cutoff is sometime this year.

Logan Shinholser
Whereas that means like if it’s like, okay, this is called January 1st, 2026 was the cutoff. That means that any data, any information, unless it’s going out to the Internet, it’s going to say, this is what’s stored in my Rolodex of information. But if you ask me what happened on January 2, 2026, I have no idea.

Patrick Scully
Exactly. Okay, so when you turn off like the web search capability in ChatGPT, you’re basically just asking it for information from its training data. So that’s one thing you can do. You turn that off and you say, what do you know about my business? It’s either going to spit back some information. It could be maybe out of date information because it hasn’t caught up to this year and you did a rebrand or something like that. So it might be old or it’s going to say I don’t really know anything about your business. So that’s one thing.

Patrick Scully
Turning web search on now introduces a new capability to ChatGPT, which is it’s now going to do some searches for you, it’s going to go out on Google, it’s going to use Bing and it’s going to find up to date information, synthesize that back to you in the form of answer. So there’s two types of getting found in LLM is am I in the training data? It doesn’t know anything about me to begin with. Number two is when it goes and does a search like who does remodeling in my area, am I getting found and kind of presented in the answer. So that’s why traditional SEO still matters a ton, because for most searches you’re doing on these AI search platforms, it’s doing that search for you in the back end on Google and just presenting.

Logan Shinholser
You with the answer or on the training data. I guess the only way that the training data would be able to find you is the same thing. It’s just, they have a cutoff and now it’s just like this is what has been stored.

Patrick Scully
Yep, a cutoff. And then it’s also based a little bit on, you know, site authority and things of that nature where if you are a brand new website, even if they go and do a new set of training data, if you’re brand new, if you’re not really out there, you’re still not going to show up in it. Sure. So it’s about, it’s a long term play. It’s kind of like the play for the rest of the decade really is to just start building up that kind of corpus of data that you have Based on your 30 years of remodeling experience. Not really thinking about it. Like, will someone ever come to this blog post and read this whole article? Forget about that.

Patrick Scully
Put it out there as a data point so that you know when someone does search for something that you do, it can use that as a piece of evidence that you’re the trusted person. Essentially, yeah.

Logan Shinholser
I almost look at it as like they’re the person, the homeowner’s agent. Like now, like a lot of times I don’t go to Google and type something in, I just go to Claude or I go to ChatGPT. I mostly use Claude. But I’m like, tell me about this Or I use Gemini. So I’m like, you figure it out for me. But I’m not actually going to the live thing. I’m having it turn it back to me now if I’m like, looking for a restaurant or something, it’s like more of like, I’m going to buy this thing that I’m definitely going to go at this point to Gemini.

Patrick Scully
Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
But I mean, I kind of live in, like, Claude. So, like. And just everybody knows. I. I didn’t realize this when I was. I thought everybody that, like, is an entrepreneur. I was like, everybody knows AI really well. And I was talking to my younger brother who’s. You think they’re younger than you? It’s funny because, you know, you talk to somebody else and like, oh, yeah, Gen Z, which he’s not, but Gen Z, like, they grew up with AI. They know how to use this stuff. They’re good. I was talking to tj, my little brother, a couple months ago, and he’s, you know, owns a business. I thought he’s pretty hip on all this stuff. And I was like, yeah, how much Claude are you using? He was like, who’s that? I was like, claude? Yeah, you know what Claude is?

Logan Shinholser
He was like, are you saying claw? And I was like, no, I’m saying Claude. He’s like, no, I don’t know what that is. And I was like, you know what ChatGPT is? He’s like, oh, yeah. I mean, I know what that is, but I’ve never used it. I’m like, you’re 30? Yeah. Like, how have you never used this before? Like, my Claude. I mean, I. I speak to it because it’s like, it’s faster. But just everybody knows when we’re saying this Claude is a one of these LLMs that you get to interact with that can do all this stuff as well. It’s basically like a chatgpt, but just a different version of this, a very similar thing. Just to kind of put that out there in case you’re probably like, what does this stuff mean?

Logan Shinholser
So when I say Claude, I mean, like, I’m saying, hey, Claude, you know, talk to me about Herringbone versus, you know, Subway Tile Backsplash. I’m not one at that point. I’m not like, oh, I’m gonna go explore these websites. It’s more so it’s almost like my quote unquote agent is going out and doing it for me and bringing it, synthesizing it back to me. Be like a designer that’s like, I’m gonna go out and get tile and actually bring it back to your house. I don’t then go, well, where’d you get it from? Oh, the tile store. So show me the tile store. Let’s go there. I’m like, I don’t care where you get it from. Just make sure that it’s good tile from a credible place.

Logan Shinholser
So that way if there’s an issue, I can go back and get the warranty on it and then you bring it back to me. But if I’m now going to be like, all right, I’m going to go buy a bunch of tile, I actually want to go to the tile shop and make sure that it’s legit. So it’s almost like when you’re saying this to me, it’s like, don’t necessarily worry about you’re going to write this and go, is this going to get, you know, is everybody going to look at it and they’re going to love it? Now talk to me a bit more about, okay, great. If that’s the case, why can’t you just hammer a bunch of blog posts out there like, does quality of these things still matter or is it quantity only?

Patrick Scully
So quality still matters and quantity matters on the lower side because at the.

Logan Shinholser
End of the day, like it matters less.

Patrick Scully
Like it matters. You want to do quantity matters because you don’t want to do more than what’s going to. Basically, let me rephrase, AI search is still using Google. Google has terms of service. To show up in Google’s index, you need to follow those terms of service. One of those things that they say you can’t do is create a bunch of kind of useless to the Internet pages just for the sake of getting search traffic. Now sounds like that’s what SEO is. But really what they’re looking for is you to create unique, helpful content. And if you do that, then that content will end up ranking or be in the index in some point. So the AI is still using that index to find the content that it’s synthesizing. It’s not use, it doesn’t crawl. They’re not storing their own. It’s way too expensive.

Patrick Scully
Like OpenAI is actively losing money monthly. It’s. They don’t have the infrastructure. So Google has 30 years of search experience floating data centers. They want to put stuff up in space and like they have this huge trillion dollar infrastructure for search that like.

Logan Shinholser
Stores all this information.

Patrick Scully
So Claude’s just going out and searching on Google for you. So if you do things that are going to penalize Your website from showing up on Google, that’s going to have retroactive negative effects on you getting found in AI.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, so it’s kind of like Uber doesn’t have their own cars. And if you need to have enough cars that Uber’s like, okay, this fleet is. They have enough that we could fulfill all of our customers. Because if this fleet doesn’t have enough, then our customers are gonna be pissed off and then they’re going to end up going over to Lyft. But if you say, great, I’m going to give you way, like a ton of cars, but they’re all crap. Then again, the, the people using Uber are gonna hate while these are a bunch of crap cars. I know that there’s a plethora of them, but, like, they all suck. You kind of want to find that sweet spot of it needs to be enough that Google is.

Logan Shinholser
Or that Claude is able to trust you in Google, if you just game it, then it’s going to probably be crap, which then Google’s not going to want to rank it. And then at which point Gemini and Claude and chatgpt, they’re not even going to find it anyway.

Patrick Scully
Exactly.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, so with the 30 days, how do you actually do like a visibility audit on your company? And when we say visibility, is that just, like, how much are you showing up? Like, like, what does that even mean?

Patrick Scully
Yeah, so it’s been a little bit tough that. Because it’s so new. Because, you know, wanting to know where you’re cited as a business on AI search is kind of a new concept. There has been some tools that come out to track that. The issue has been that because your personalization is different than my personalization.

Logan Shinholser
Meaning what if you and I both did the exact same search in our own clawed accounts and I. And we both said, who is a great remodeler in Charlotte? Yep. Mine knows so much about me. And I have two young kids and you have two older kids.

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
So like, somebody who specializes in or talks about on their website, like, hey, when it comes to building, we are really big into families that have younger kids. These are all the specific things that we do. Right. Well, in your case, it may be like, hey, one of the things that we do for all the people that we build for is we send them to Disney World. My kids are too young for Disney World, but yours are not. So basically, if we both did that exact same search, we’re probably going to get two very different sets of answers, even though it’s the exact same search. On paper.

Patrick Scully
Right. Which has been a little bit different than tracking search results traditionally, because we would probably get a very similar top 10, you know, businesses or websites ranked.

Logan Shinholser
A. Google still tries to personalize it, but it’s not as.

Patrick Scully
Yep, they’re getting better with the Gemini stuff built in because they’re able to add that more. But it was always, you know, if you’re the. If you do all the SEO stuff right, you’re going to be the number one found, and everyone in the area will see the same basic results.

Logan Shinholser
So something I’ve been, like, telling people is, like, what you should do is instead of like, trying to game like, who’s a good remodeler? It’s almost like, start off with, like, saying, this is my company. What do you actually know about me?

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
Is that accurate? Like, is that, like, a good way to at least get, like, a sense of, like, first off, does it even know if I exist or not? And second off, what does it think about me and to what depth? And like, that way it’s like an understanding of, like, before I go, great, am I showing up for these things? It’s more about, like, what do you even know? Because that’s going to kind of get me maybe halfway there to figuring out, is my website or is my online presence doing a good enough job to get found.

Patrick Scully
Exactly. And you’d want to do that search with the web search tool off and then on so you can see what’s in your training data and then what they find out about you on the Internet.

Logan Shinholser
And. And if. If you built a website after the training data, or let’s just say you started coming out the training data, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do until the next set of training data.

Patrick Scully
Exactly.

Logan Shinholser
Okay.

Patrick Scully
Yep. And that’s why it’s important to start publishing content.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, perfect.

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
So with that, you start off with, like, what do you know about me? It gives you all this information back. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. You can ask questions around it. Let’s just flip it over to then, like, okay. Do you also suggest, like, hey, you should actually ask what people are probably typing into Google right now, which could be like, good remodeling company near me. Is that a good way to at least have an understanding of, like, who is showing up? Or is that also, like, because maybe it knows I’m a remodeler, so if it knows I keep going to my own website or it, you know, like, it knows that kind of stuff. Is that Going to skew it or like, how do you approach that?

Patrick Scully
Yeah, that’s why some of those tools, I think, like came out, because they’re able to not really use your account to do the search like you put in those things. And it uses anonymous accounts, essentially. Yeah, but again, that introduces the issue of now you’re seeing, okay, anonymously I do show up, but most people are logged into their thing.

Logan Shinholser
Right.

Patrick Scully
So that’s why it’s just been a little bit more of a kind of see if you are there, but don’t worry about if you show up fourth in one search and then second in another one. Or, you know, they change all the time. And studies have even shown that if you do the same search on, let’s say, Google and get an AI overview a couple minutes later, if you do that exact same search, you’re going to get a slightly different AI overview. Got it. They’re either testing stuff on the back end to see which one you liked better, or just because it’s kind of AI driven, it’s not really like deterministic, it’s more probabilistic. So it’s like using probability to come up with the answer, which is never going to be like the exact same words every single time.

Logan Shinholser
I gotcha. Okay, so. Because also, like on the personalization side, you know, if it’s anonymous versus maybe mine is anonymous. But the only thing I’ve ever typed in one time was like, I have two kids. It would still kind of tweak the answers a little bit because it’s like, okay, I know you have two kids, so, okay, so it really sounds like the content part is like the big thing of like that’s going to help with that quote unquote personalization. So let’s say they go off, they do this. The searches that are like a combination of what do you know about me? Then on the other side they go, okay, who’s the best person for this? Who’s the best person for that? And what you’re saying is, don’t worry so much right now about who is showing up number one.

Logan Shinholser
Because basically the searches are all so different based off of the back story to these or like to these accounts that ultimately, even if I typed in a quote unquote anonymous chat, who’s the best? You know, remodeler in Charlotte. And I’m like, oh shoot, my company is number five. Somebody else that is looking up the exact same search, iqv, number one, much easier just because of how their personalization on their account is Set up.

Patrick Scully
Yeah. And that’s why it’s so important to get into like your ideal customer. And that’s why we, you know, at cgm, we dive really deep into that for every project. Because from there you can start to kind of reverse engineer. Okay, if I know my. And when we say ideal customer, that doesn’t mean homeowner in my area, it means specifically, is it a family? Is it a aging in place situation? You can start to say, you know, reverse engineer. Okay, if it’s a young family that is, you know, constantly I’m doing work for what types of searches would those people be searching for versus if it’s aging in place projects that I’m always doing work for, what types of searches are happening there. And then you can kind of put content on your site to match that.

Patrick Scully
So if it’s young families, have blog content about, you know, how kids school schedules aren’t interrupted by remodeling projects or, you know, how to deal with kids and pets in the home and stuff like that. If it’s aging in place, you’re doing content around that. So really thinking through about who is actually doing the search, you’re not going to know about all their personalization stuff, of course, but just based on, you know, the neighborhoods you want to go after, the type of, you know, homeowner, family, whatever, you can start to kind of think about, you know, what are those people searching? And you know, if I had to put in a really long search as that homeowner, what would I put in and just start to play around with it? I mean, you can just, you can do a million chatgpt conversations.

Patrick Scully
So just open it up and start to kind of play around with it and see if you do Remodeler near me, do you see kind of the same generic businesses that you might see if you did that search directly on Google Maps? If you do Remodeler near me that specializes in families and does awesome home editions, you know, with huge windows like that. So you’re going to see a different search result there. So part of it is just kind of like experimenting and playing around with it.

Logan Shinholser
Okay, so say you do all those and you realize, like, I’m probably not showing up as much as I wish I was, at least, you know, maybe I, I’m really good at, like, I know my ideal client is a young growing family and I love doing home editions and I love make, you know, opening up the space and making it feel lighter. You know, I love doing skylights and big windows so basically, like that last example that you just gave, let’s say I’m not showing up for that. I know we keep talking about the word blogs and talk to me a bit more about, like, service pages. Like, what is. Because, like, talking to somebody the other day, and we’re talking about doing these project pages, like, you know, where it’s like, we did this project in this area. Here’s all the information.

Logan Shinholser
He was like, why do I then need a service page in each, you know, location that I serve if I already have a page that talks about the project? So I explained the difference of intent where one’s like, we did this thing. It’s great, but it’s different than somebody who’s saying, I want somebody that does this in this area. So can you talk a bit more about, like, if you want to get found for, hey, I want somebody who does this, and this. Should you only do project pages? Should you add some of that stuff to a service page? What is the difference there? Can you talk a bit more about that?

Patrick Scully
Yeah. So really, you want all those types of content on your site. You want service pages because that identifies to search engines, to, you know, AI search, actually, what you do, what service you sell.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah.

Patrick Scully
So it’s not a specific project, because if you’re just detailing one specific project, it’s going to get very specific about that. You know, you’re probably putting how much that project cost, where it happened, what materials you used, which is not going to be the same data for every single project that you do.

Logan Shinholser
Right.

Patrick Scully
So the service page handles the fact that you do kitchen remodeling, and it shows your process, and it shows, you know, the different ways that you go about that service. The project page now dives deep into a actual project that you did that service.

Logan Shinholser
So, okay, so like, project page, maybe like, we just did this home edition. Boom, boom. It costs $450,000. But your service page says, we like to do home editions. For most of them, we do, you know, open it up. Skylights, that kind of stuff, they typically range between 250 and 500. Where if I’m now a homeowner going, I want to get a new home edition, and my max budget’s 300. Who do I go with? If I just had that project page, that’s fine. I mean, it just shows that. But the other. But the service page is the one that’s actually saying, these are our ranges. This is typically how long it’s going to take. So if I’m. If that same $450,000 home edition page says, and this thing took six months.

Logan Shinholser
And I’m saying, hey, I want this thing done by Labor Day, which is three months out. And then on that service page it says they typically take between two and six months. Now that service page is basically saying more like broad of this is a service that we do in this area and here’s a bunch of information around it. So that way you’re able to get like 90% of the way there to see is this going to be a good fit or not. But then the actual project page is more of like proof and specific data that says, hey, we have done this thing before. Come check this out.

Patrick Scully
Yeah. And so like, let’s take just example. You want to rank on Google Maps with your Google business profile. If you put in your categories that you do kitchen remodeling, you should have a kitchen remodeling service page on your site. Google is looking for that connection.

Logan Shinholser
Got it.

Patrick Scully
And on the flip side of that, you don’t want to get into, you know, our Herringbone Subway backsplash example. If you put that on your service page, do you do that in every single project that you do? Probably not. So the featured project page is really an opportunity to go into depth on that project and get all those little details, the finishes that you use and all those little things in there.

Logan Shinholser
So what should a service page have on. I know this is a kind of piggybacking off SEO as well, but it all goes together. How do you like. The way that I explain to people is like a service page is meant to have the things that somebody who is. Look that would ask you in person, like, hey, tell me more about this kitchen remodeling service that you provide. And you have to kind of Give like your 60 second elevator pitch on what you do, why you do it, how you do it, that kind of stuff. Is that best practices to. On a service page you get found in like AI search or like how to. How to. How do we approach it?

Patrick Scully
Yeah. So it’s in depth about. You can go into your, you know, there’s unique things about your business because you’ve been doing it for so long. You know, maybe your process is really good. Getting into your process, showing off, you know, pricing, whether you have different tiers that you do or how you go about pricing. It’s not the exact pricing for a particular project that would be on the, on a feature project page, you would say this one cost $102,000. On your service page you would be showing more of like what goes into when you do pricing, what are the pricing options, things of that nature. So it’s not just like one specific instance that you did that service. It’s a more broad kind of stroke across. Okay, how could I. Oh, now I want to see some examples.

Patrick Scully
Let me click into an actual project page to see how this one went. Do I like the pictures? Am I in the same budget range? That type of thing?

Logan Shinholser
Got it. Okay, perfect. So that’s in the first 30 days is basically do a baseline. There’s other things with it, but just for sake of like how deep do we go? Because you can, you could spend, you know, do a 12 hour podcast, which basically then goes back to like the history of how SEO came to be. But so get your baseline down, figure out what it knows about you. Ask a bunch of questions that your ideal clients probably wondering as well. And I know we are also coming out with a tool that basically you can put in your information and it’ll tell you from anonymous standpoint across these different services or different LLMs, what does it know about you? And then it’ll even say, this is now what you should probably focus on if you want to actually get found for those things.

Logan Shinholser
But focus on what it knows. Ask those questions. Make sure your website’s broke. You know, you’re starting to have a service page that answers the questions that people are probably asking or want to know about that specific service. That’s gonna be a good start to that first 30 days, if you will.

Patrick Scully
Yep. It’s very similar to SEO. If you don’t have a good, strong kind of technical foundation, website up website, good pages are good pages that you need are there. Like that’s where you need to start for all this stuff. So just getting kind of your ducks in a row is the most important thing that you can do before just publishing new content or whatever you’re gonna do.

Logan Shinholser
Perfect. All right, so let’s go like to the next. Let’s say we nail that down.

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
Now it’s day 31. Talk to me a bit more. You know, we have talk about specific structured numbers when it comes to what you’re talking about on your website. So walk me through like, you know, we talked about specific numbers on future project pages. Is it just like more of that or is it also like articles around cost and things like that?

Patrick Scully
Yeah. So the more you can again prove your expertise in this kind of industry or your what you’re kind of selling, the better. So that data can come in the form of, yeah, going deep into cost in an article and showing tables and what was involved and maybe a comparison between two projects. That’s really good data. That’s kind of unique first party data which all these tools are always looking for. The other thing is putting, you know, on your homepage, how many years have you been in business awards that you may have won certifications that you have these different kind of data points that can just kind of again, everything online is evidence towards, you know, they want to, Google wants to select the best business, the best answer for a question. It needs to have the evidence to back that up.

Patrick Scully
Which is not one mention on your website, just on your homepage you have, we have 500 reviews. It’s you have 500 reviews on your homepage. You have a reviews page, you have a couple of feature project pages that have testimonials on them. You have a Google business profile that has reviews, you have a house profile as reviews. So it’s kind of that full ecosystem of what you can do and then getting into again in this next 30 days, I would be focused on that content.

Logan Shinholser
Talk about like the sales call, like either recordings or FAQs because I know that’s something that we do at CGN, but like talk a bit more about that.

Patrick Scully
Yeah. So traditionally when we’ve been looking at blog kind of topics or keywords to go after in search, it’s always been really volume based. You know, what’s the number one keyword that people are typing in and I need to rank for that keyword to get some traffic to my site. Now with the fact that people are using AI search and you don’t really need as much traffic as you do qualified clicks. Like if you took 90% of the traffic out of your website, it’s probably people that were never going to buy browsing bots, whatever it is. So that last 10% of the traffic is really where you made all your money. Now that 10% are the people that are coming to your site. You’re just not seeing that other 90% now, which is fine. So what?

Patrick Scully
So how that has shifted is now instead of just saying I’m going to go only after keywords that I know get search volume is I’m going to present information on my website that people ask me all the time. Every single sales call I get on, people are always asking me, you know, do you guys clean up after you finish a job? So putting information out like that, whether it’s a, you know, you can decide Is the answer to this question a couple sentences? Can I get it done in a couple sentences? Maybe that’s a FAQ that you go and add to your service page. Is it something that I need to go more in depth on? Maybe that’s an article that you now put in your blog and is the.

Logan Shinholser
Reason because like, this is like the whole premise of like they ask you answer by Marcus Sheridan. But is the reason, like, yeah, everybody always asks me on a sales call like, do you clean up? Is the reason that we wouldn’t typically write about that one? Because if you go and see what are people searching for in my area, the amount of people that are googling does a remodeler cleanup after themselves, it’s either zero or it’s next to nothing. That it’s not the juice is not worth the squeeze to write that article. That’s historically, if it was just straight up a Google and SEO play, we would not have done it.

Logan Shinholser
But now it’s even more important because yes, it was important for the website and for conversion and people that are like browsing, turning into a customer, but now it’s like AI is going to pick up on that. So if it, you know, if it knows, hey, that’s important to Logan and Audrey, then we’re going to go ahead and make sure that we mention that as well.

Patrick Scully
Right. So if you’re in a chat with chat cbt and you mentioned, you know, we want to get some remodeling done, had a really bad experience last time. They trashed my house and like, you know, like, if it knows about you in that full conversation. So did someone search for remodelers near me that clean up after they’re done? No, but because you have content on your site that talks about it now in an AI conversation where you’ve already mentioned that the last people that came to remodel, you know, messed up your doorways and you know, scraped your walls and did all this kind of stuff, it puts that into its kind of ability to synthesize. So now when it suggests someone to you, it’s going to maybe suggest you more because you did put that content.

Logan Shinholser
Okay.

Patrick Scully
So Logan won’t have a bad time on this time because he mentioned the only thing wrong the last time was they messed up his house leaving. So now we don’t want that to happen again. So we’re going to present answers or companies that won’t do that essentially.

Logan Shinholser
Got it. So basically what you’re saying is the question that you’re going to guess whether they’re big questions or little questions or one offs. Still, having those online that these AI searches or, you know, AI platforms can find is important because maybe that one off person like, you know, hey, the last person I had was terrible. I need to find somebody who’s good this time. And if somebody’s website addresses, hey, you’ve probably dealt with this specific thing. This is how we proactively address it. Yep. That way it’s going to basically come in and say, hey, Patrick, I know the last time that you worked with remodeler, they basically left you all the excess material that you had to lug off to the dump yourself. This company talks about on, you know, in a quick faq, what do we do with the extra material?

Logan Shinholser
Not only do they get rid of it, but they actually then return it back to the supply house and then provide you with a refund for. And now you’re like, oh, that’s like two birds, one stone. That’s perfect. Yep, got it.

Patrick Scully
Exactly. And that’s why, you know, Google has come out with some data around. You know, people are seeing their impressions go down and their traffic to their website go down and things of that nature and like, oh man, what’s going on? Google has come out with data. Of course, it’s Google. So that shows that you may be getting less clicks from search, but those clicks that now you’re getting are the most qualified, the people that are actually going to buy from you.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah.

Patrick Scully
So if we took out 90% of your website traffic today and left only the 10% of people that were actually going to fill out your contact form and be a real lead, you’d be probably fine with that. So they’re seeing that because this, you know, they’re surfacing businesses that are more in tune with the personalization of the person that’s searching. Once they do finally click through, they’re clicking through for a reason, not just to find out if there’s a reason. So the clicks are down, the traffic’s down, but the qualification of that traffic that is coming in is way up.

Logan Shinholser
Got it. Can you talk a bit more about like on the same lens or same mindset? Like here at cgl we had like this client brain and this is something we’ve been building out for the past few months. It’s a pretty extensive project. But to me, what we’re talking about right now is pretty much in line with what the client brain is meant to do, where basically we call it client brain, but it basically it’s well, you explain it. Tell the world what is the client brain.

Patrick Scully
So really it’s a library of information about our clients that is able to be searched and sourced from by the different LLM tools that we’re using, things of that nature so that we can get really accurate information into content, into our marketing strategy overall. So in the course of every kind of marketing project, tons of data comes in. You know, your pricing, your projects, your photos, your. Everything that you’ve said on phone calls about strategy. That stuff gets traditionally easily missed, filed in a Google Drive folder somewhere, probably never opened again. So what we’re doing is now taking all of that data that we have for each project and putting it in a kind of external library where we’re now able to take Claude or take ChatGPT and say, has this client ever done a remodeling project in this area?

Patrick Scully
And was it under, you know, $100,000, which is a very specific search that you need to do. Looking through a two hour transcript for those words is almost impossible. So what we’re doing is using this new kind of technology that’s out there. The same way that ChatGPT works when it comes up with answer for you is basically connecting the dots between information. So if I have one Google Doc that says, you know, from a year ago, that says one pricing and I’ve got a new updated pricing sheet from this year, if I just maybe searched in my drive for the word pricing, it would bring up both and I’d have to open both docs and go through it and see what the most accurate thing was.

Patrick Scully
With this new system, we’re able to now make that determination much faster and kind of programmatically so that we only get the most relevant answers back.

Logan Shinholser
And for us, like to give you an example of what this does is like we have like one of our clients, Ranney Blair Weidmann. We have this whole, you know, like they have their own client branch. So each one of our clients has like their own basically stored Rolodex of information. So I just said, okay, great, and if you were to write a bunch of blogs for them, it needs to be one written about a topic that they would bring up. And instead of us having to go back and go hey, what do you want to write about next? Or us going to Google and saying, hey, what are people searching for?

Logan Shinholser
If we’re basically now saying based off all the conversations that we’ve ever had with them and all this other information from like search data and all that stuff what would they want to write about? It will then say, these are the articles that they would want to write about that they would want to get found for. And this is now what it entails. So I’ll give you like a readout. What one of them would be is why a whole home remodel can cost $500,000, which typically in a Google search, whole home remodel, $500,000 is not going to be something term researches for. Yeah, but if there is somebody that’s like talking through what’s it cost? Well, this article gets, could get cited.

Logan Shinholser
So what this tool does, because we built the whole thing out would then say, okay, great, if you’re going to write an article that talks all about why a whole home remodel can cost $500,000, you would want to then talk about first, what counts as a whole home remodel and what doesn’t. Second, where the $500,000 actually go with labor, materials, you know, permits, design, all that sort of stuff. Next, why moving walls could double the budget. Next, what a $500,000 whole home remodel is going to look like here in this specific town. Next is when a whole home remodel is actually the right call versus you just moving. And then how to tell if a remodeling firm is under quoting your scope. So that right there all would be encompassed under the article. That’s why a whole home remodel can cost $500,000.

Logan Shinholser
And basically Google would never tell you to write that. And even if I went back to Peter and Scott and Dan and said, hey, what should we write about next? And they’re like, I don’t know, like maybe a cost of something. It wouldn’t get to that specificity because basically would be a lot of back and forth to go, well, what if we also mentioned this and what do we also mention that? Or you tell us how you would explain this to this one article explains to somebody and it would be an hour of them explaining the whole thing and then we have to go, well, how do we now whittle this down into a 1500 word blog post that then gets found by AI and all that kind of stuff.

Logan Shinholser
This now is basically saying, hey, we know so much about them and their clientele and how they think and how they speak. And then it’s also trained on their brand voice because we have all the transcripts. So when they explain things, do they say the word subs, do they say the word trade partners, do they say vendors, all that stuff. So now when an article comes out, it is written as if they themselves wrote it. And a lot of times, because I do this, like with cgn is I have all of our sales calls recorded. I’m like, what does the next newsletter need to be about? And it’s like, well, actually the last five sales calls that you had all focused on this one thing. Do you want me to write it for you?

Logan Shinholser
So it’s a whole thing that we built out that then goes out to the market. But now it’s almost like it’s just taking the data and then making it easier to then say, well, this is what you should now write about. And it’s it. So it’s cool. It makes it so much easier. But it all comes down to like, for us, we have our own sales calls recorded. So now like, little by little, we’re going to start to go out to clients and go, great, can we get call recordings and you know, ways that we can keep this data trained. So if you now go out and say, oh, the way that I explained this thing landed really well on this client.

Logan Shinholser
Well, we already know that because we see it in the transcript of how you explained it, how the client then reacted to it. We’re like, oh, that’s a great analogy that then gets added into that clients client brain. So then we write a blog post that talks all about that specific thing. It potentially could bring up that analogy because it seemed like it landed really well.

Patrick Scully
Yep. And it kind of moves us away from this like keyword matching like you talked about. Google would want to see a blog post with the, you know, $500,000 kitchen in the blog title or whatever. With this new system, we’re moving more towards like the relationship between words and kind of like the meaning behind them. So if the question is $500,000 kitchen, but on every call with our client, they said 500k kitchen. If you were just keyword matching, you may not find that because it doesn’t say dollars. So with this CGM brain that we’re building, we’re really using kind of like the relationship between almost words and ideas to find the right information. So we’re not just saying, did they ever mention the word pricing? We’re asking about pricing and costs.

Patrick Scully
And because they could say pricing or cost or dollars or estimate or final payment, whatever they said, we’re going to locate that information within kind of their brain.

Logan Shinholser
Because I know in part of this as well is something that I brought up was like, oh, we could write this and you’re like, well, actually what you could also write is an article that just says like, you know, what does a whole home remodel cost? And then you could have section one. This is what you would get for 100,000. This is what you get for 200,000. So it’s like each section would almost be a price point there. So if I then went in and said, hey, I got quoted $625,000 for a whole home or model. Unless somebody wrote an article right now in Google that said, why does an art. Why does it cost 625,000? Like, yep, this, it would then be able to read this and go, well, I’m. Instead of ranking the whole article for just this one term.

Logan Shinholser
It would know like Google or Gemini would know. Okay, this article talks about a $600,000 and a $700,000 remodel. You know, whole home remodel. Let me now figure out what the differences are between the two and then return the answer back to Patrick and say, hey Patrick, this one company says this is what the difference between 6 and $700,000 is. What you’re talking about with your $625,000 one for that company, you’re actually probably looking closer to $800,000. In fact, in that same article they even talk about how do you know when your person is under bidding the job? And it talks about these things. Do you want to upload your scope of work? And I’ll check it out. So like it can now read it in like what’s called chunks?

Logan Shinholser
Not exactly like the over, like you don’t have to write one pull for keywords. Yeah, it’s not like, why does it cost a hundred thousand? Next article. Why does it cost 200,000? You can now like Wikipedia, put it all within one article. And because the AI knows all right, I’m going to go 4018 words deep to find this answer because it has it all stored and it’s super smart now you can almost have more in depth articles. It sounds like if that’s like the case.

Patrick Scully
Yep. And so like on just a technical point of that, like Google has always kept an index of the pages on the website. I mean on the Internet. So when you get into their indexed or you get a page index, that full page, let’s say it looks like a spreadsheet, you are added to a new row on that spreadsheet. So you’re now in the index. What they have now is a chunked index. So your whole page doesn’t show up in there. But Four sentences that you wrote that were great about why a kitchen costs $625,000 in a full article is getting the. All those pieces are getting indexed themselves. So when someone searches for that, they don’t need to go and, like, read your article again and, like, find that section that spits out that answer.

Patrick Scully
So thinking about it in a way of putting information out there, but not, you know, some questions that we come across aren’t really, like, a full article. You don’t need to have, you know, 2,000 words to answer the question. So whether it’s, you know, going back to old ranking articles about the same topic and adding some more FAQs or updating the information, it doesn’t always have to be like pushing out a new page to get indexed. It can be, you know, updating a particular paragraph with maybe you wrote it two years ago and things have changed. So looking at it like that to like, is this paragraph as good as it can be? Essentially?

Logan Shinholser
And I know, like, so with this one, it’s like, maybe you’re like, well, you know, that sounds like a lot of energy and effort. What could you be doing right now in that 30 to 60 or 31 to 60 days? That, to me, the answer be like, start to, you know, have like, a call recording, like, phone system set up. Because, you know, the more that you can record this stuff, like, we are fortunate that, like, we have years of recordings that we are able to, like, train it on to say, this is how CGN works. This is how we explain things, stuff like that. I was talking to Andrew, like, one of our clients the other day, and he was like, I don’t have all my calls recorded, but we have thousands of YouTube videos that explain projects and features.

Logan Shinholser
Could you guys use that to train our client Brain on it? And I was like, 100%, because it’s basically like thousands and thousands of hours of them explaining things and highlighting things and how they say things and how all that kind of stuff. So, like, YouTube, I know, is like a pretty underrated feature. Yes. For the art client Brain is very helpful because, like, I also, like, when I wanted to write, like Logan, I had it trained on, hey, go to my slack, go to my email, go listen to all these podcasts that are all transcribed. Figure out how Logan speaks. And then I’ve also had it trained on, like, if you want to speak like a remodeler, go listen to all these different podcasts and listen to how the remodelers talk about it as well.

Logan Shinholser
So it’s like you can train all that kind of stuff, so. So YouTube is helpful for that. But I know YouTube’s also pretty helpful for just getting found in AI search as well. Even without this quote unquote client brain. Correct?

Patrick Scully
Yeah, for sure. And especially with some tools over others like you know, if you’re using perplexity, if you’re using even like AI overviews on traditional Google are showing a ton of YouTube videos. What they’re mostly doing is scraping the transcript and again chunking it down. So finding, you know, think of it as like 200 to 300 word sections. So they’re able to now not only show you that video as a search result, but also the exact minute or second in that video where the person is talking about the answer that you’re mostly concerned about. So you don’t have to, you know, sift through 10 videos, watch them and try to get find where they end up talking about, you know, there’s chapters and all that kind of stuff.

Patrick Scully
But this is actually getting you right to the point of the video where your question is getting answered.

Logan Shinholser
Perfect. So in the, in days 31 through 60, best thing is going to be okay, we are they up to day 30. We already figured out what it knows and what it doesn’t know about us. Day 31 is360 from what it sounds like and what I’m. I guess my side of things would be like, worst case scenario, get call recording set up. Best case, you start a YouTube channel and then you’re able to take your call recordings that you’re just starting and then actually figure out, okay, what FAQs are coming from this and that way you can then update your service pages and your website with more specific things. But in the very least, even if you’re like, it’s the busy season, I got a lot of stuff going on, I don’t have time to think about this stuff.

Logan Shinholser
Worst case scenario, you can come, you know, get your stuff started to be recorded. Because now it’s a game of almost like first party information where maybe it’s like getting professionally shot photos. Like maybe you don’t build a bunch of campaigns with those photos right now, but it’s so much harder to go back in like the winter time and go, how do I do all this stuff? Shoot, I should have gotten those professionally shot photos. And now you’re stuck with nothing. Right? So let’s talk about day 61 through 90, which is a lot about like citation. So let’s assume you’re on this path. You have somebody that’s doing all this stuff for you and they’re like, great, I’m all set up for the first 60 days. Talk a bit more about the amplification and citation side of things.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, so this is where you want to start thinking about getting your content spread across the Internet, not just focused on your website.

Logan Shinholser
So up until this point’s mostly been like, do this on your website because that’s also like, in your direct control and things like that.

Patrick Scully
Yep. And I would probably lump your Google business profile in with that as well. So when those two things are set up and good to go and you’re publishing content now, you can start to think about kind of spreading your influence onto some other platforms. You know, let’s talk about reviews. You’ve built up a good amount of reviews on your Google Business profile. Homeowners are also looking at Houzz and Angie and some of these other big sites as well, your Facebook page. So now starting to think about getting people to leave reviews on those platforms. Spread your kind of realm of influence, which just makes it, again, more pieces of evidence. For the AI to pick you, it needs evidence. Your website’s great, your Google business profile is great. What other pieces of evidence can you put out there on the Internet?

Patrick Scully
And there’s communities like Reddit where people are actually asking real questions every day. You know, what is there?

Logan Shinholser
Like, why would you not do that? Like, on day one as well? Like, if Reddit’s there, is it just more of like, hey, if you had endless. Or if you had like an abundance of time, sure, you could do it all at once. But basically it’s kind of like, get your own. I put your own oxygen mask on first, which is your website, your. Your review, basically the things that are within your control. But then come the last 30 day sprint, that’s like, you know, you can’t force your way into winning an award that mentions you or like, you can’t force your way into like, oh, a subreddit popped up that I should answer. It’s, it’s. So now we’re getting into like, your home base is covered. Let’s now go off into expansion mode, if you will.

Patrick Scully
Yep. And. And, you know, one Reddit comment or post or multiple without a good website or without a website is not really.

Logan Shinholser
Going to do much for. Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Scully
So doing things kind of in the right order has always been a big piece. And then these tools have, you know, made partnerships like, you know, Reddit and open AI, I believe, have a, you know, partnership where Money is exchanged and the full kind of Reddit fire hose is opened on the back end to OpenAI. So it’s, you know, it doesn’t have to go out and search on Google and find a Reddit post and read it. Like, it’s not working like that. It’s using that as like a separate index of information, basically. And there’s lots of sites like that. There’s, you know, quoted and there’s Quora and there’s Yahoo. Answers has always been a thing.

Patrick Scully
So again, while answering a question on that platform may not directly, like get you a lead from someone reading it and, you know, maybe it will, maybe it won’t, it’s just building up those little bits of information to again, prove that you’re this trusted person that I can come spend thousands of dollars with, invite you into my home, you know, have face to face interactions.

Logan Shinholser
It’s, it sounds like, it’s almost like the billboard where it’s like, if you’re gonna go into a, you know, let’s just say an architect’s office or an interior designer’s office to like, say, hey, I’m Logan, I do really good work. I would love to partner with you on stuff. If you have a billboard and they’re like, oh, I’ve already, you know, I’ve seen your billboard before. It helps that much more versus you walking in cold. The billboard by itself is probably not going to go, oh, I got to call that guy right now. Yeah, it’s more of, I’ve seen you, I’ve heard about you. It’s almost like a, it sounds like a branding play more so that just like. And it helps these LLMs or AI search tools go, oh, this person just doesn’t have just a great website.

Logan Shinholser
They have actually, they’ve won awards, they’ve been on podcasts, they have a YouTube channel. They have these external things that they don’t have direct control over all the time, but because they’ve done it long enough. Yep, it builds and builds. On top of that, they have a great website with great reviews, man. They seem holistically great. We should probably recommend them.

Patrick Scully
Yep. Okay, that’s pretty much, that’s the gist of it, really. You know, and the bonus is, you know, maybe that Reddit comment in the Denver, you know, subreddit does get you a job because they’re looking for contractors and you know, you answered the question and you know, someone clicked on your profile. Like it can lead to some jobs as well, but just kind of like thinking about all these tools as kind of evidence gathering machines. And your job is to go put the evidence out there for it to pick you know, like a. Same way a murder trial is. Like, you know, if you’re going to convict, like, the evidence has to be strong and we all have to agree on it. So, yeah, if the LLM has the evidence and everything kind of agrees.

Patrick Scully
Which is why, like, you know, we go back to, you know, your citations or your local listings, if they all kind of have a different phone number on them or something, like, all the evidence doesn’t agree. Yeah. So it’s going to be less secure about presenting you as answer.

Logan Shinholser
What about joining like, NARI or chamber of Commerce? Like, are those signals that AI would go, oh, this is pretty good too? Like, we see that they’re like part of an association. We know that association. We trust the association because they’re part of this association. That’s pretty good.

Patrick Scully
Yep. So bonus side of that, it also boosts your kind of local SEO efforts as well. You typically get a link from those websites. When you get a profile on there, you get a kind of, what’s called a. We’ve used the word citation, but this is kind of in the local SEO world, when you get your name and your address and your kind of phone number listed. So all those things can kind of. Again, half of the goal is to get the LLM to trust you as a business. Half of the goal is still to rank on Google so that when it goes and does its Google searches, you also appear there. And when it does its Google search, your website appears.

Patrick Scully
And when it finds Houzz, you know, lists out their top 15 remodelers in the area or whatever those pages are, you’re listed there as well. So now it has two bits of evidence in that one search to say, okay, we’re going to recommend this person. Yeah. So it’s just like building up that, you know, it’s almost like what SEO was always supposed to be was you putting out great content, you proving that you’re an expert, and naturally they’re going to recommend you. Like, there’s no reason not to.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. It almost sounds like it’s like in court, like you’re proving, like you talk about like the burden of proof or the proof part. Like, it almost sounds like you’re building a case. Yeah. Where it’s like you have so much evidence that if, like, if you’re, you know, the prosecutor and you know, the def, like, defense comes up and says this one thing, you already have A rebuttal because, you know, maybe you don’t lead with that individual piece of evidence, but if they go, oh, by the way, we have testimony that you were at the scene of the crime, and you’re like, I knew you were going to do that. Here’s actually evidence of the alibi that, you know, shows better. It’s almost like you’re building an entire case and you don’t, you know, shotgun the. All the evidence all at once.

Logan Shinholser
You kind of build your story from there, but you have it all ready to rock. But in this case, the AI search is like looking at all the evidence at once and they’re just like, you know, this guy’s not guilty. Like, just let them go. So it.

Patrick Scully
And that’s what it adds is that kind of thinking intelligence layer. Because Google has always done that. But again, it was in a kind of algorithm format where it was, you know, does he have reviews? Check. Does you know? So it’s, yeah, the evidence was out there. Does he have a backlink from this website? Okay, that’s a piece of evidence to trust him more. But again, easily gamed. And that’s why there’s Google updates and that’s why they continue to, like, adjust things. Because people are like, okay, let me go just make a bunch of backlinks. Let me go publish a bunch of content. So then they come up with ways, oh, well, we’re going to stop that, we’re going to adjust. But they never had that, like, thinking layer on top of it.

Logan Shinholser
It’s more of like, if, then, if they do this, then it will work. So then we have to course correct. Now it’s like the AI is, like, smart enough to go, yeah, I know what you’re doing. Not going to work. Exactly. So, all right, so let’s say, so you start at the beginning. It is. You’re going to AI search. You’re saying, what do you know about me? This is what people are searching for. Then over the course of the next 90 days, you are, because this is, you know, very straightforward, easy to do. You are actually creating blog content around the information that you want people to be wondering about. You are updating your service pages. You’re starting to record your phone calls which help out with your FAQs. You’re getting on YouTube, you’re getting on podcasts, you’re starting to answer Reddit.

Logan Shinholser
Then you’re, you know, joining these different, you know, associations. And by the end of those 90 days, assuming that the AI search tools are able to find those things. Because again, back to the idea that you can’t, you know, have a child in a month if you get nine women pregnant. Back to that. If it has enough time and it picks up of your stuff quickly enough, then when you say, great, now what do you know about me? It will then have a much deeper knowledge of your company than when you do some of those searches. It will go great. In fact, they do talk about this article and they do this one thing, and this is the evidence that’s associated with it. You’re in a much better spot. Yep. Cool.

Patrick Scully
Yep.

Logan Shinholser
I feel like that’s a good stopping point.

Patrick Scully
Yeah, I think that’s definitely good. And what you would want to do at the end of that is kind of do a recheck of what you did in the beginning. So if you searched a bunch of stuff on chat, you know, what you know about business remodelers in my area, do those, you know, record those the first time you do them on a Google sheet or whatever it is, you know, track what showed up. And now at the end of this 90 days, go and do it again and see what progress was made. Is it more accurate? Am I showing up more things of that nature?

Logan Shinholser
So I feel like the accuracy part’s big because over those 90 days, your personalization could have changed. Like, it could be different and stuff like that. So like, and as it changes versus, like, to me, if I want to do without going crazy, I would be like, these are the questions that I would ask. But more so I would just say, what do you know about this company? That way it’s kind of like a single blind statement that just says, go out there and you figure it out on your own.

Patrick Scully
You could also, when you see other companies that show up in that search, pop those websites open, pop open their Google business profile, see maybe what they’re doing and why, you know, do they have a trusted by 1500 homeowners on their homepage or, you know, all these kind of stats that lead an LLM to think that they’re more trusted and you don’t have those. So maybe you can spot some easy gaps or easy wins just by seeing who are the people that are. If I’m not the ones getting recommended, who is and what are they doing different than me?

Logan Shinholser
Perfect. Cool. All right, good luck. See you guys next time. See ya. Sa.