How Homeowners Are Actually Finding Contractors Now (And What to Do About It This Week)

Our CEO Quinn Small sat down to walk through something we've been watching happen in real time: homeowners aren't Googling the way they used to. They're opening ChatGPT, describing a problem, and asking for a recommendation. If your business isn't showing up in that answer, you're losing jobs you never knew existed in the first place.

The full session is worth watching start to finish. Here's the shape of it, and where you can go deeper right now.

Watch on YouTube: How Homeowners Are Actually Finding Contractors Now →

The shift isn't that Google is going away. It's that the moment a homeowner used to spend typing a search term and scanning ten blue links, they now spend describing their actual problem in a sentence or two and getting a direct answer, often with a recommendation attached. That's a different game than SEO was built for. Ranking on page one doesn't help you if the homeowner never sees a page one.

Quinn walks through what this looks like in practice: how AI agents are actually handling these customer searches, what they're pulling from to make a recommendation, and why the businesses that show up aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest ad budget or the best-designed website.

This is the part we've written about before, because it's the part that actually matters. Three things determine whether an AI assistant recommends your business when a homeowner asks:

Specificity. Vague copy doesn't give a model anything to anchor on. "Home comfort solutions" tells an AI nothing. "24-hour AC repair in Lincoln, Nebraska" does.

Consistency. Your business name, phone number, and address need to match everywhere: your website, your Google Business Profile, every directory you're listed in. One mismatch is a small trust problem. A handful of them and a model has no confident answer to give.

Proof. Reviews across more than one platform. Job photos tied to real addresses and real work. Mentions outside your own website. AI models are built to look for outside confirmation before they'll vouch for you.

We put this exact framework into a 28-point checklist if you want the full breakdown with examples of what a specific, provable review actually looks like versus a generic one.

You don't need a 90-day plan to start. Pick these off one at a time, and each one makes you easier for a model to name with confidence:

1. Rewrite one page in plain, specific language. Swap vague slogans for exactly what you do and where: services, cities, and hours a model can quote back. "24-hour AC repair in Lincoln, Nebraska" beats "home comfort solutions."

2. Fix your name, address, and phone everywhere. Pull up your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory you're listed in, and make the business name, phone, and address match character for character. Kill the mismatches.

3. Get reviews on a second and third platform. If everything lives on Google, ask your next handful of happy customers to post on one other platform. Cross-platform reviews are the outside confirmation models look for.

4. Attach proof to real work. Add a few job photos tied to real addresses and describe the actual work done, not stock imagery. Specific, verifiable proof beats a polished gallery of anonymous shots.

5. Publish one AI-readable page about your business. A single clear page stating who you are, what you do, the areas you cover, and how to reach you gives a model one clean source to pull from.

The businesses treating this as a someday problem are going to find out it was a right-now problem the hard way. Your competitors haven't done this work yet, and most of them won't for a while. The ones who fix specificity, consistency, and proof this quarter get recommended through next year. The ones who wait are optimizing for a search behavior that's already changing under them.

If you want the step-by-step version you can hand to whoever owns your marketing, start with the AI Referral Checklist.