How to Connect AI Citation Share Improvements to Actual Client Leads

Hey, Jeremy with PushLeads here on the PushLeads channel. I just wanted to show you some of the things we have been working on, and there is some pretty exciting stuff here.

First of all, we only have 675 subscribers and 143 videos. Honestly, we really need to get to about a thousand videos covering different niches. The first thing I want to share is that I learned YouTube alone accounts for about a third to half of all AI citations out there. We did some deep dives and found that 50 percent of the citations are actually coming from YouTube when they are not coming from our clients' websites. Google looks heavily at YouTube, and because of that we have been doing both Shorts and long-form videos. The Shorts are ones I am doing myself, and then we have these longer videos as well.

Here is a video I made this past weekend talking about how YouTube got cited 6,000 times in AI on my client's site. YouTube is a big deal, and we need to make a huge push there. I have built a whole set of workflows that actually do that.

Now, the interesting thing is that Shorts bring people to the channel, but Shorts do not really drive AI citations according to the research I found. If you look at the channel, I have been posting five Shorts a week for the last three weeks. Most of them are getting small view counts — 13 views, 35 views, 5 views. One on commercial restoration had 149 views, but most are pretty low. Honestly, I do not care that the view counts are low. I am only three weeks into promoting this channel, and I am not pushing hard for views yet. I am covering a variety of niches, and what I really care about is getting cited by AI.

The interesting finding is that Shorts account for only about 5 percent of AI citations, while long-form regular videos account for 95 percent of the equation.

So what I have been doing is posting these long-form videos myself. I do not care that some of them have four views or zero views. Each one covers a different topic. This one, for example, is about garage door SEO — everything about garage door SEO. That video is then embedded directly on the garage door SEO page on the site. I have built workflows that produce the content and load it to the site automatically. Here is the page on the site where I cover garage door SEO, and it is well-structured and highly citable.

I can now produce one of these videos a day. This is my voice and my content. The video goes at the top of the page, embedded with video schema markup directly on the page. The written content on that page is around 5,000 words, so there is plenty of citable content for AI. I am basically reinforcing to Google and other AI systems that I have content combining video, AI-generated images, and long-form text. That makes the page far more media-rich than text-only content, which is how we started.

So I can now produce this content and target AI visibility, and that is what I am really focused on. I have influencers reaching out saying they will make my channel famous. I tell them I just want AI visibility. I am testing this with PushLeads, my own agency, and once I see enough success — which I am already starting to see — I will roll this out to clients and we will start going after AI citations through YouTube video. This also helps with entity SEO, which is critical right now.

I asked Claude to summarize the growth we are seeing over the past 30 days. Looking at Perplexity, we are showing up in 21 out of 50 searches. In the prior 30 days we had 6 prompts we showed up for, and now it is 10. ChatGPT went from around 6 to 5, which is roughly flat. For Google AI Overviews, we had no way of tracking it before, and now we are showing up for 4 distinct prompts.

These are the new searches I am appearing for in the last 30 days, and they are all Google AI Overviews. This is coming from the videos we are creating as well as the content on the site. Queries like "how much does water damage restoration cost," "how much does fire damage restoration cost," "how do contractors use YouTube videos to get more calls," and "how to market a restoration company." Perplexity is showing the same pattern — "how to market a restoration business," "how do I get more leads," "how do contractors use YouTube videos to get more calls."

What this growth tells you is that all the work I am doing in the restoration niche is actually working. It is great to see the work producing results. This is where I cue the mad scientist laugh, because I consider myself the mad SEO scientist. We also have persistent zeros where we are not getting any visibility on certain prompts, and that is fine. The bottom line is this is working.

I now have the ability to publish ongoing content on a consistent basis — short-form content to bring people to the channel, and long-form content that actually earns the citations. According to the research I found, YouTube videos in the 12-to-15-minute range are what actually get cited, not short videos. So I am doing a mix of both. If you come to the channel you will see a variety of content, and I honestly do not care about my subscriber count. I care about producing high-quality content that is getting cited.

Check this out. This is an actual Short that is being cited right now in Google AI Overviews. We also have one long-form video — "Why your restoration company is not showing up in Google and how to fix it" — that is being cited as well. Two videos published on the 8th and the 14th of this month are now being cited. That is roughly one to three weeks. And it is being cited both in the AI Overview and on the blog page.

Let me see if I can recreate the search live. I search "what water damage costs" and there is my Short right there. And I am showing above Servpro. Scrolling down — there I am at the very top, showing up in YouTube and on my website. This is the power of video SEO, and this is only about three weeks in.

This video is so good I am going to put it on YouTube and LinkedIn. I just want to show you that the work we are doing for our own agency is producing real results. As more restoration companies contact us and we build up our portfolio, we are looking to grow from a couple of clients to five by the end of the year. If you are a restoration company looking for restoration SEO, look no further. We will do a full evaluation of your current situation and give you concrete suggestions to improve it.

Here is an example of the audit presentations I have been building. A lot of these are Shorts because I am trying to get some visibility, covering topics like being found in Google AI Overviews, why YouTube videos matter, and why structured data is important. I am scheduling about five a week. I am also recording Loom videos and sending them to clients. I made a presentation for someone who asked how to get their Google Business Profile set up, and it opens right on their phone.

These audits cover everything. Where are you on the map? Where are you in Google? Is your GBP verification failing, and if so, why? How is your domain ranking? Who owns page one in search — which is often Servpro? And yes, it is possible to beat the national franchises. A lot of SEO and marketing agencies are not doing ongoing work. It is the same story every day. But some are, and we are.

Here are the kinds of website gaps we find in audits: no address on the site, no schema markup, a duplicate About page, inconsistent phone numbers. We do a full audit of everything and then present a three-phase process. If you want to work together, here is what we do. Phase one: stop the bleeding and clean the foundation — disavow toxic backlinks. Phase two: start publishing ongoing content. Phase three: build the assets — citation building, inner city pages, service pages. City pages and service pages are super critical.

Doing this audit up front gives us a baseline, and the baseline is everything. How are you going to measure success if you do not know where you started? That is the real reason we built the dashboard we are rolling out to all our clients.

Here is our restoration client in Northwest Arkansas. They found me on ChatGPT. In the dashboard we can see their AI visibility score is 14.9. They are showing up for 13 mentions across 13 pages. I can see exactly where — Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT — what prompts we are tracking, how many mentions they are getting, and how many citations in each platform.

In the AI tab, here is the breakdown of share of voice. In this case, Restoration One has the largest share of the voice market. For AI visibility, our client is showing up in two ChatGPT results, two Perplexity results, and two out of eight tracked prompts. In the Prompts tab I can see the specific queries. For example, "who to call for fire damage in Northwest Arkansas" — the intent is buyer intent, and we are cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. We can keep tracking that over time.

Regular search visibility on desktop is around 1 percent, which seems low, but let me show you the actual keywords. They are showing up for sewage cleanup, building restoration service, home restoration near me, and storm damage contractors. They also offer home services, so water heater replacement, fire damage repair, water damage near me — we are number three for that. Toilet installation is there too because they have a variety of services. Other terms are on the bottom of Google's first page or on page two. We are tracking all of it.

We are also tracking the competition. Our client has 1 percent of the market for regular search. Servpro has 20 percent. Paul Davis has 15 percent. We know where we need to go. We can see in the analytics that their traffic is going up — about 18 to 20 sessions a day from organic, 166 from AI or direct search, and then paid. We are running Google LSA — Local Services Ads — and we can see their top pages. I am rolling this dashboard out to all my clients so they can see everything.

Here is the Google Ads section — ad spend, conversions, cost per conversion, return on ad spend. We can break it out over 90 days or 7 days. I have been building this dashboard for about four months and I am really happy with it. I am going to keep showing it because anyone serious will see the value of a company that is ethical and does what it says it will do.

There is a concept called ethical SEO, and it basically means you do what you say you are going to do. So many marketing companies are not doing ongoing work. One client I spoke with this week had their previous agency publish one blog post in 180 days. You need two to four blog posts a week and 20 to 40 inner pages a month published on your site, or you are not going to show up in AI. And you need to be on YouTube. You need long-form content on your channel.

The greatest thing is we now have all the content we are publishing visible directly in the website content tab of the dashboard, and it looks great on mobile too. I can see "Emergency Plumber Cave Springs" — there is the blog right there. We can see all the SEO silos we are publishing into, all the links we are building, and a site visualizer showing a graph of all the pages on the site, how many pages are linked to each other, and what that structure looks like. We have a lot of content published, and all of it has internal links. Our tool also flags pages that do not have internal links, the high-priority critical issues, the fixes we are working on, any keyword cannibalization where pages are competing with each other, the estimated revenue impact over time, what strategy we are following, and whether we are doing any website builds.

So yeah, we have made some huge progress. Your main takeaway here is this: if you have a restoration business and you are not on YouTube, you need to start posting long-form educational content that answers the common questions your clients ask. I am Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads. I help small businesses get more leads without the struggle and frustration.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae, filling in for Bill Gilliland, with your local business training and coaching firm, ActionCOACH Business Growth Partners. I'm really excited to have Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads as the focus for our Epic Entrepreneurs podcast episode today.

So Jeremy, can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, and what primary products or services you offer our community?

Sure. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, and what we do is help small business owners get more leads without struggle or frustration. What we primarily do is get your business visible at the top of Google, and also recommended by AIs such as ChatGPT and the other AI platforms out there.

There's a lot of frustration these days because business owners really want to get to the top of Google and be recommended by AIs, but they don't really know what to do. They have no idea what it takes to get up there, to get recommended. We make that our expertise. We've been doing this for about 15 years full time. We've got about 45 clients that we work with on an ongoing basis, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm really living the dream, doing what I love and helping businesses grow at the same time.

So how long have you been in business thus far?

About 15 years. I went full time around 2012. There were a lot of things that led up to the point where I decided, "You know what, I love doing this and I want to go full time."

If you had to start from square one, what would you do differently?

If I had to start from the beginning, what I would do is go out there and hire one or two sales reps to beat the streets and pay them a really nice commission for generating leads. If I had done that from the beginning, I probably would have been growing more exponentially, like I am now.

I have a really amazing outside sales rep who also doubles as my social media manager, and she's actually here in the office with me today. Her name is Andrea. She has been going out there, meeting with potential new clients, and bringing them reports on what they can do to get higher in Google. If I could go back, I would have hired someone like Andrea — an outside sales rep — 15 years ago. But I didn't. I started on my own, doing networking groups and growing slowly. If I could go back, I would try to bring on people like her from the beginning.

Yeah, so basically you were juggling everything by yourself. Is that what I'm understanding?

Yes, and that's the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make. They think, "I'm going to do everything on my own." When you're dealing with cash flow issues and starting a business, it can be difficult. But what I've found is that if you can create a structure that rewards people for doing the work, and they're motivated, they'll keep producing because they're motivated. They're doing work that's producing income, and that income is also helping your business.

The arrangement I've come up with with my current outside sales rep is that she gets a 20% commission on any business she brings in. She also handles social media, so she gets 100% of the revenue on that work because she's doing all of it herself. People need to have motivation to work. If you find somebody who is young — or not young — but they have drive, they're showing up, doing the work, grateful for the revenue you're paying them, and they're just consistent, that kind of person is like a superpower for your business.

It's hard to find that person because so many people just don't have drive. But when you can find someone like that and test them on a small project, and they consistently deliver, and you give them more work — I've found that's a real recipe for success. How you do one thing is how you do everything. If you're the kind of person who gets out there, is a go-getter, is in the community, making connections, doing the work, that whole active approach to life really rewards you.

With Andrea, I said, "Here's one of my clients. It's a wax salon in Los Angeles, and they've been my client for a couple of years. Let's meet with the business owner, show them where they are in Google, and talk to them about doing social media." She was interested. I said, "Let's come in at a lower-than-market price, around $300 to $400 a month, and see if we can produce results, because you don't have a lot of experience doing this. But if you can be consistent and posting on their Instagram and TikTok, the client will keep working with you."

She took that client on and started posting for them on TikTok and Instagram. That was three or four months ago. Now she has 10 clients, and I'm paying her roughly $500 to $1,000 commission a week because she is killing it. I need about five more Andreas.

What have your biggest learnings been as an owner since you started your business?

I think the biggest thing I've learned is that it's really important to understand something intimately as a business owner before you delegate. But once you do, delegate as soon as possible so that you can free yourself up to go out and do more things.

For example, one of the things we do is publish inner hidden pages on a client's website around different subjects. One of our clients is a roofing company, so we publish a lot of inner hidden pages around roofing costs, roofing maintenance, different aspects of roofing — even DIY guides and things like that. What I've found is that I enjoy doing this process initially, coming up with a strategy and then documenting it. Once I've tested it and I know it's consistent and producing results for my clients, I pass it off to one of my virtual assistants, and they start doing it consistently.

When I first got started, I was doing all of that myself. That's fine if you have 5 or 10 clients, but you can't scale to 20, 30, or more clients if you're doing everything yourself. So one of the things I've really focused on is understanding the process myself, documenting it, and then hiring people to implement it so I'm freed up to go after more clients or meet with existing ones.

We're a huge fan of using Loom to record the screen. Loom is a screen recording tool with a small video bubble of you in the lower left-hand corner while you record your screen. I can take any task I do, record it, get the transcription, and make a step-by-step SOP — a standard operating procedure. From there, I can create that as training for a team member to go out and start doing. That's really what I've been doing in the last six months or so: documenting my processes and then hiring people to implement them for my clients.

What would you say are some common misconceptions about running a business?

I think one of the common misconceptions is that you need to go out there and get a huge loan to be successful. It's not always the case that you need a lot of initial capital, especially if you're considering going out on your own.

What I ended up doing when I first discovered I really wanted to do this full time was — I had a client paying me about $5,000 a month, and I only had that one client. I was like, "What happens if I lose this client?" I was just month to month with no annual contract. So I went to the bank and got a $12,000 loan. I said, "Okay, this will maybe last me three or four months if I can make it stretch."

Then at the same time, I lost that client because I'd finished the work he wanted done and he didn't want to keep paying. At that point, I literally had three months to make this work. It was a total sink-or-swim moment, and I did not give myself the option of failing. After about three months, I was making maybe $3,000 to $4,000 of income — not enough to totally survive, but enough to keep going. Eventually I got to the point where I was making enough to survive.

So you don't necessarily need $50,000 or $100,000 to start a business, especially if you're working full time and doing what you love on the side, and it's a side gig that could become a full-time gig. You could start slowly moving into that. Or you could be in a situation like mine where you have some amount of money and a timeframe to make it work.

Having that drive to produce, having a time limit, and having a goal — those are all super important. I'm really big on manifesting, on believing something and then bringing it into reality. It really comes down to coming up with a goal, taking actions toward that goal, saying affirmations that begin to make that goal a reality, and then sometimes letting it go and letting it marinate. You can work too hard. It's a balance.

Getting back to the story: I was able to make it work because I had a goal, I had three months, and I had a strategy. I joined two different networking groups, went every week, let people know what I do, and started meeting with clients face to face — because everything was more face to face back then. And I started getting clients. Looking back on it, it was kind of crazy, but it was a sink-or-swim moment for me.

Yeah, and a lot of people in that situation would actually crumble. But you took that 90-day period and said, "I'm going to make this work." That says a lot about your character.

There's this whole thing we don't really talk about enough in our culture: resilience. When the going gets tough, how tough are you? Are you going to work late? Are you going to work weekends? Are you going to take personal time to recharge so that when you are working, you're super productive? Those are all things I've learned.

Resilience is super important, and I really discovered that I love what I do. Years ago — and you were probably going to ask why I started my company, so I'll just share that story — before I went full time, I saw Steve Jobs give a commencement speech to the Stanford graduating class in 2005. I watched it on YouTube probably in 2008 or 2009. You should totally go look it up if you've never seen it. It just blew my mind. I almost started crying watching it, and I'm not even a fan of Apple as a company. But I found the speech to be so inspiring.

Basically what Steve Jobs says is, "If you can find what you love and find a way to make money doing what you love, you'll never work another day in your life." It will still be work — you're still showing up, doing tasks, meeting with clients — but it won't feel like work because it is your passion. And it just hit me at that point. My passion is helping small businesses grow. What if I could make this into a career? What if I could make money doing this?

That became the impetus for this drive to be successful. And I guess that would be a piece of advice I'd give aspiring entrepreneurs: find what your passion is, and find a way to make money with that passion. If you can make money doing what you love, it really won't feel like work.

Do you think you are a better entrepreneur or employee, and why?

I think I'm a better entrepreneur than employee because I really enjoy learning something new. I'm always learning, always growing. It used to be that I read books all the time. Now I really talk to AIs all the time, which I know sounds crazy, but AIs can teach you a lot more in a much shorter amount of time. I do still find importance in reading books and being offline, taking long hikes in the woods, listening to the wind blow through the trees. I'm a huge fan of being offline, but also reading old-fashioned turn-the-pages books, while also using the technology we have now.

What I've found is that continuing to learn and grow keeps you mentally fresh. To me, that's really what being an entrepreneur is — being mentally fresh, meeting with your clients and showing the progress you're making, as well as doing things to expand your own horizons. I like learning things and then testing them to figure out whether what I'm learning is going to help my business. If it does, I start documenting that process and have my team implement it.

As an employee, you're the person who takes these implementations, takes these standard operating procedures, and executes them. That kind of wears me out, honestly. Consistently doing something like posting on social media or writing blogs — have I done it? Yes. But I'd rather have people do that for me, because I get worn out from consistent repetitive tasks. I've just learned that's how I'm hardwired. So I document a process, have my team implement it, and then come in as needed to add extra high-quality touch on top of what they're already doing.

How do you handle taking vacations while running your business?

For the bigger picture, see our AI Overview tracking guide.

One of the things I've found is that I can tend to be somewhat of a workaholic. I love what I do so much that I tend to work a lot. My partner and I have been working on the balance — having a time where you stop responding to emails and texts and you are just completely offline. You're present with your partner, or with yourself if you're single.

My goal this year is to do at least one weekend or week-long vacation once a quarter. Maybe it's just a weekend once a quarter, maybe it's a week-long vacation sometime in the summer. For Valentine's Day, we're going to one of my clients' cabins — a really great cabin we love — and we're going to try to be offline the entire weekend. Just be present with my partner. Her love language is quality time, and quality time means you are focused and attending to your partner. You're with them, doing things with them, just being with them.

What I typically do on a weekend is get offline and stay off the entire weekend, then slowly get back on as the weekend ends. If it's a week-long trip, I let my clients know I'm unavailable for that time, send them an email or a group text, and have someone to take over tasks if something urgent comes up during that week. My goal for this upcoming year is to have someone handling the business during any week-long vacation.

What I've found is that the more you can disconnect from your business, the more you can be offline, the more quality time you can have with yourself, your partner, or family and friends — the more productive you are when you're back in work mode.

Years ago, my ex-wife told me, "You're a Cadillac." I said, "What?" She said, "You're a Cadillac. Cadillacs are a high-end brand that requires a lot of maintenance. But if you maintain the car — get regular oil changes, do all your preventive maintenance on time, are consistent with it, and don't drive it too hard — it will reward you with a long life and take you where you need to go. That's what you are. You're a Cadillac, and your tendency is to burn the candle at both ends and go hard. But the harder you push yourself, the more exhausted you are when you're working. If you could learn to disconnect and be with me and be with your kids and your family, you'll be a better, more productive worker."

Even though that marriage didn't work out, I took that advice. I was like, "Yeah, I am a Cadillac." It's okay to not work. I need to set aside time to just be present, to be offline, to be in the woods, to be sitting with my partner watching a show or reading books. It's still a work in progress, but that's what I've been learning.

What have you attributed to the growth of PushLeads so far?

I think the growth has really come down to, first, understanding what my passion is — which is helping businesses grow — and then, second, taking action to connect that passion to something that produces results our clients can see: getting higher in Google.

I completely self-taught myself how to make businesses show at the top of Google. It's called search engine optimization, or SEO. And now I'm teaching myself how to show up for the AIs, how to be recommended by the AIs — whether we call it generative engine optimization, GEO, AEO, AI SEO. There are so many terms thrown around. But this whole idea of learning the industry on your own has been foundational.

I'm a kinetic learner. I learn by watching people do things, then doing them myself, imitating them, and then doing them on my own. That whole process of testing things, seeing the results, and then implementing what works has really been the foundation for my success. But also meeting with potential clients, showing them my work, and bringing them on as clients is super important.

When I first got started, it was way back in 2003. I read a book about how to show up in Google, and back then it was really about writing a blog. Just blog. Write blog posts about your passion, share that with people, and eventually that will turn into income. I was like, "I don't know how that's going to happen, but okay, I'll do this."

Around 2002 I created a blog called buyapc.org. It was literally a .org domain, and the whole idea was that if someone was looking to buy a computer, maybe they'd do some research and read my reviews about computers and potentially buy one. I created this blog and started posting on it weekly, talking about the most popular laptops and desktops. This was before smartphones, before all the modern technology. I always loved hardware — I'm a total geek — so I would write about computer hardware, share what I loved about a particular piece of hardware, and publish that as a blog post.

Two or three years later, I discovered I could write about hardware that's on Amazon — the most popular gaming desktops, the most popular office desktops, et cetera. I started doing that and then realized I could put an affiliate link in the post. If somebody clicked that link, went to Amazon, and bought that computer within 24 hours, I would make some money. By 2009 I was generating $20,000 of business a month for Amazon and making about $5,000 a month just from the commission.

The whole process is this: a lot of times your goal or your destination is something you can't see from where you are. All you can see is the next step in front of you, or maybe two or three steps. Your intuition, your higher power, whatever you want to call it, is leading you to that destination, but you don't know how to get there. You just know what the next step is.

Imagine standing in front of a wide river in the woods. There are stones popping out of the water, and you're on one bank. You can see the first couple of stones to hop to, but from there you don't know where to go. It's not until you hop to that first stone, then the second, that you can see the next one — or maybe you have to go through the water at that point, or there's a branch you can grab to get to the next step. You're eventually going to cross that river and get to the other side, but you can't see all the steps. You can just see the first stone in front of you.

A lot of us are too afraid to jump to that first stone, to take that first risk, to step out there. But if we do, our vision gets wider. We have greater perception because now we're in the river. Now we can see that next stone. Maybe it's slightly under the water, but that's okay. Maybe you get your feet wet. From there you can go to the next dry stone. That was kind of my whole process — starting a tech blog, writing posts, then learning how to get affiliate links and make money from them. And then later I was genuinely surprised when I logged in and saw I was generating $20,000 of hardware sales a month.

Now we're going to move on to the quick-fire round. I'm going to throw out one word, and I just want you to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind in regards to running your business.

First word: education.

My response to that would be continual learning. I'm part of a BNI group — BNI is a networking group you can be part of to help grow your business — and one of their core ideals is continual education. I think we need to embrace that as a core value, because the more you learn, the more you earn.

And actually, before we get back to the one-word round, you've talked a lot about networking today. What other networking groups would you recommend for small business owners looking to grow?

If I was a small business owner looking to grow, I would definitely join the local chamber. The Asheville and Hendersonville chambers are important to join. But more than just joining a chamber, going to a weekly leads group is super important. It's going to be a group of maybe five, ten, or twenty people, and everyone has one minute to stand up and talk about their business. From there, people will walk right up to you after the meeting and ask about what you do, potentially wanting to set up a one-to-one. Doing those one-to-ones is how you get business, how you get clients. Asheville is still very face-to-face, so I would recommend joining the chamber and looking into BNI groups.

There's also a group I meet with on Mondays — it's an online networking group called the Mosaic Momentum Networking Group. We can provide the link in this podcast. It's a group of about ten entrepreneurs: some business coaches, a therapist, service-based business owners. The group is an hour long and different from a BNI with thirty-second elevator pitches. We start with the spark — what's the one big win you've accomplished this past week? Then we go into a breakthrough session where we talk about issues and how to solve them. Then we meet one-on-one in Zoom breakout rooms, and we end with a victory lap where we talk about wins. I've enjoyed that group because it goes a little deeper than just standing up and talking about your business. The deeper you can go with people, the more effective you can be.

There's also a group I'm forming for other people who do what I do. It's only for people who do SEO, and I'm starting it at the end of this month. The first meeting is 10 AM, Friday, January 30th, and it's called SEO Geeks and Freaks. Essentially, it's a no-BS monthly mastermind for SEO professionals who live and breathe anything about SEO — whether you're a geek who loves technical details or a freak for the latest algorithm updates. What I want this group to be is a place where we get together, connect, and collaborate. We build genuine relationships with other SEO professionals, stay current on the latest AI updates, share what's actually working — real strategies — and grow together. We say, "We're not going to try to take each other's clients. We're going to try to help each other."

A lot of times, people who do SEO are just off on their own. They may ask questions to an AI, but there's not really anyone they can ask a real question to. This group is a way for me to give back and share what's working with my current clients, and to learn what's working for other people. There's a guy in my co-working space — I work out of Mojo Coworking in downtown Asheville — who's an SEO professional with 65 clients. He's ahead of where I'm at. I'm at 45 clients, and I sit down with him regularly, about once a week, and he always shares nuggets with me. I thought, what if we could make this a group where we share these nuggets with other people and help them grow? So those are the three groups I'm part of: BNI, the Mosaic Momentum Networking Group, and this new SEO Geeks and Freaks group I'm creating.

Next word: planning.

Planning is all about understanding where you are right now, where you want to go, and how you're going to get there. My best time to do planning is generally on the weekends — first thing Saturday or Sunday morning, where I sit down, look at what's going on with my clients, what needs to be happening, and come up with strategies as needed. It doesn't take a lot of time. It can be just 30 minutes to an hour, because I definitely want my weekends to be mostly offline, mostly with my partner or out hiking.

Planning is important, but it's also important to not always be in left-brain mode. Planning can also be a right-brain experience — more spontaneous. You're looking at what's happening, and based on what a client is saying — "Hey, I need more leads in this one area" — you stop and plan for 30 minutes. I've found it's important to have both scheduled planning and spontaneous planning.

Next word: inspiration.

Inspiration is connected to your passion. We're all designed differently, and different things will inspire us. For me, I really don't care about football or sports. I've just never cared about it. But I really enjoy technology, art, and science. I think it comes down to what inspires you, and then being around people who do the same things you're interested in. Or if you can't be around those people, maybe it's a podcast or a group that gets together. The more you can be inspired, the more you can aspire to new heights and new growth.

A lot of times we just get stuck in a rut doing the same thing. I remember hearing about a study from the late nineties in New York City where they were tracking the location of cell phones throughout the city over about a year — not names, just locations. What they found is that people tend to take the same route to and from work every day. They tend to go to the same places to eat. They tend to congregate with the same people. It's like we're all in a video game, just NPCs doing and saying the same thing over and over again.

The more you can break out of that pattern and do something different — something off the grid, away from your normal routine — the more you can be inspired. Part of what I try to do is plan times where I am not doing things I normally do. A lot of times that means I'm in the woods.

And speaking of video games, I love that you brought that up. I saw something on Instagram yesterday where a couple has played Mario Kart for 30 years to see who makes the coffee every morning.

I love that. I love video games. I grew up playing them. One thing I've found is that the addictive dopamine rush you get when you play video games — you can take that whole idea and transfer it into business. You can gamify starting a business, growing a business, or selling a business. You can turn anything into a game. The more you can do that, the more you can reward yourself. I could talk to you for hours about how fun that is.

Last word: commitment.

Commitment to me is consistency. It's me reaching out to Andrea about six months ago and saying, "Hey, I have clients that need you to post consistently on social media. Is this something you're interested in doing?" She said, "I'm on TikTok all the time. I've really wanted to do social media." I said, "Let's start with one client. Let's see if you can be successful with one client. If so, we can give you more. But if you're not consistent, it's not going to work."

Consistency is super important, and it's been great because she's proven herself. We ended up getting 10 clients within about three months because she was consistently showing up, doing the work, closing clients with me, and then actually doing the work.

In my own life, it's showing up and meeting with my clients on a regular basis. It's showing the work that my team and I are doing that's getting results, and being transparent about that. The biggest problem in my world is that a huge portion of companies that do what I do will take your money and run. They're not ethical. They don't care about producing results. They just care about taking your money.

I didn't know this was a thing until I started calling companies out of the area and they thought I was trying to scam them. I was referred to a business lawyer in New Jersey about seven or eight years ago. He said he was spending $1,400 a month with the previous SEO company working with him. I asked what kind of results he got. He said, "First, log into the website and see what they were doing." So I logged in, pulled up all my tools, and did research. From what I could tell, they were doing about 1% of the job needed to get to the top of Google. I said, "You were spending $1,400 a month for a company doing 1% of the job?" He said, "I got one call in a year." We produced a lot better results for him, and that's another story.

I started realizing there are a lot of companies that do what I do that will not do any work, or the work they're doing is subpar. So it's super important when you're looking for a marketing company to work with that you do your research — or have an AI do research on them — and make sure they can show you results they've actually gotten for other clients in similar or the same industries. Also make sure they'll sit down with you on a regular basis and show you the work they're doing. The scammers will not be transparent because they're not ethical. Ethical marketing means doing marketing in a way that produces results that bring income to you as a business owner, and also genuinely helps your clients. It's really about giving back.

When I talk to a new or potential client, I start off by asking, "Have you been scammed?" Because everyone has their own scam story. And then I say, "Here's how I work. We're going to meet on a regular basis. I'm going to email you and show you the tasks I've done. We're going to look at the tools and see you getting higher in Google, see you being recommended by AI. We're going to do all those things." If we can be transparent, then we can be ethical.

What final words of advice would you offer to other small business owners who are looking to grow?

I remember hearing this years ago: "See a need, fill a need." What is the need you're seeing out there in the marketplace? Is that something your current offerings are satisfying? If so, how can you satisfy it better? If you can help people, give back, and solve their pain point — for me, the roofer needs more leads from Google and needs more AIs recommending them. That's the need. The better I can fill that need, the more consistently they'll keep working with me.

A lot of my clients are month-to-month or quarterly. I don't have annual contracts at this point, which I know is kind of bold, but I'm really big on proving results. "Let's continue to work together, and I'll continue to show you the results I'm getting."

Really what it comes down to is this: in every interaction — whether you're on a podcast like this, sitting down with an employee, or sitting down with a loved one — are you giving back? How much are you giving back? If you can give back in every interaction and help people, whether they're employees, family members, or friends — if you can be a listening ear, if you can be somebody who solves the problem — the more you are giving, the more the universe, the higher power, will give back to you to give away. That's what it's all about: giving without expecting something in return and just helping people out.

BNI calls it "givers gain." If you are giving without expecting a return and you are helping people, then people will want to work with you. They'll be attracted to you. Maybe it's a non-verbal thing, but they'll want to be around you, talk to you, work with you. Why? Because you are giving back.

I sat down with my real estate agent — a friend of mine — a couple of years ago. I had a question about a real estate transaction I was looking at. He gave me an hour of his time and all the documents I needed, and he did all of this for free. His time was super valuable, and I still remember that two hours of time he gave me, even though it was two or three years ago, because it was high-touch, high-quality, and it really made a huge difference in my life at the time.

So I always ask myself, "Am I giving back? How much am I giving back?" If you can end an interaction — a podcast like this, a meeting with a client or a friend — and they're saying, "Man, I can't wait to connect with you again," if you leave them wanting more, then you've done your job. You've helped them, and they want more from you. That's really what it's about: giving back.

If I could give one piece of advice to new entrepreneurs or someone growing their business, find a way to give back. Find a way to help people. Find a way to serve your clients better than what you're doing. The more you can do that, the more you're going to grow, because people and businesses will be attracted to you.

What's the next big thing for PushLeads?

The next big thing for PushLeads is that we're looking at potentially creating an SEO operating system — an entire operating system that does automated SEO for your business. Right now, everything is a mix of AI and manual work, and I always feel that humans will always be a component of the process. But I'm experimenting with the idea of automating more of what I'm doing.

My biggest win this past year was creating an AI automation that scans your website, understands what your brand voice sounds like, and then writes content that sounds like you wrote it, around any subject. We've found that when we publish that content on a website, AIs see that content and start recommending you.

If there's one piece of advice I could give to all business owners, it's this: start publishing inner hidden pages on your website around related subjects to what you do and what you sell. The more you demonstrate expertise in your field by publishing these inner hidden pages — not in the menu — the more an AI will recommend you.

We're testing this whole process. I've been working with a med spa in the West Asheville area, and we started publishing content around their core services. One of their core services is a chemical peel. My AI automation started publishing content that sounds like they wrote it, as an inner hidden page about chemical peels. And they went to the top of Google for "Asheville chemical peels." From there, they went from 10 to 40 searches at the top of Google around these related subjects. It really made a huge difference.

We want to take that whole idea and slowly move into more automation, but being very careful about it. If you give AI full control, it will go off the rails. It's really about having a human as part of the process while also automating more of what we're doing.

What's the best way for someone to find you or get in touch with you?

You can go to PushLeads.com and book a meeting with me right from the homepage or the contact page, and set up a Zoom meeting with me. You can also call me at 828-348-7686 and ask to speak to Jeremy Ashburn. An AI will answer the call — I apologize for that, but it is an AI. If you ask to speak to a real person, it will connect you to me. You can also ask it to set up a meeting with me, and it will do that. You can also email me directly at [email protected].

You can look me up on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — search PushLeads and follow me there. You can also look me up on LinkedIn: Jeremy Ashburn on LinkedIn. I regularly post videos about what I'm doing with my clients. If you want to get to know me a little bit before booking a meeting, go to my LinkedIn. I'm most active there, and you can see videos, results I've gotten with clients, and different experiments I'm working on. LinkedIn is kind of like the modern phone book — the modern Yellow Pages — but much more interactive, where you can scroll down and see who I am, what I do, and watch videos about me.

Thank you so much for being a part of the community and for all that you're doing. We certainly wish you continued success in everything you're doing with PushLeads, Jeremy. I really appreciate you coming on today.

Thanks for having me on, Cliff. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Hey, I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle or frustration.

We're talking today about uploading videos to YouTube and what the actual official data shows. About 29 percent of the AI equation for showing up in Google AI Overviews comes from posting on YouTube. So if you are a local business and you're not posting on YouTube, a lot of us aren't. I wasn't until about three or four weeks ago, because my videos would get zero views. But guess what? It doesn't matter that they get zero views. What matters is that you're posting consistently — as a blog on your website, on YouTube, and so on.

In this video we're going to look at how many videos you actually need to get more visibility and grab some of that AI slice of the pie. Let's look at the numbers we already have. We've got about 306 videos on the PushLeads channel. You can go to YouTube and see it. Only two of those videos have ever been cited in an AI answer. We have a lot of content, and the volume alone didn't make a difference.

However, in the last sixteen days we've been doing laser-targeted content. We did a whole bunch of research and figured out what people are searching for in AI, and then we started making content that answers the common questions people search for. One of the kinds of companies I work with is restoration businesses — water damage, fire damage, mold damage, you name it. So I did a lot of content around restoration marketing and restoration SEO. I have a restoration company I've taken from $450K to $650K in revenue, so it's a space I know well. In those sixteen days we posted forty-three Shorts and also some long-form videos. We're going to look at the data.

The first question is: does channel volume drive AI citations? The short answer is no. There is no published study that establishes a view-count threshold, and the correlation data is essentially zero. The evidence base here is from Otterly AI, March 2026, where they looked at 100 million AI citation instances over thirty days across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini.

What replaces volume is per-video answer fit. In plain English that means making videos that answer questions your customers are actually asking. You also need an extractable transcript, chapter structure, a rich description, and recency — meaning you're posting frequently. The unit of work is the individual video. For bonus points, you should also have the video embedded on a page or blog post on your site.

If you are a local business and your SEO person isn't talking about video, and isn't embedding video on the site, you might want to consider working with someone who is actually jumping into the AI game. A lot of SEO agencies are very old-school and haven't made the switch, or they're just relying on tools and not actually doing the work. I honestly can't stand that, but I'll get off my high horse.

Let's look at the correlation with citation frequency. Otterly AI looked at 100 million instances in March 2026, and what they found is that description length was one of the strongest levers. Recency — publishing fresh content — accounts for roughly a third of the equation. Hashtags account for about another 0.2 of the equation. Duration and likes make no difference. View count, subscriber count, video views — none of that makes a difference.

Everything that looks like clout — subscribers, views, likes, library size — sits at or below zero correlation. What that means in plain terms is that if you post videos answering questions and you give value, AIs will reward that. AIs don't care about salesy content like "I'm the best SEO company in the world." They care about actual data. AIs are like Spock: give me the data. So you need to post the video, write a description, post frequently, and use hashtags. That's what the data shows.

The crazy thing is that AI is leveling the playing field. Small channels are getting cited. About 40 percent of the AI-cited videos had under 1,000 views. This is why I keep saying it doesn't matter if you post a video that gets zero, one, or five views. That's actually one of the reasons I stopped posting on YouTube for a while — I thought, what's the point if nobody watches? Even when I was posting Shorts I wasn't getting many views. But it doesn't matter. Google wants to see that you're active, and YouTube is one of the channels that AI engines can most easily see you posting on. It's one of the easiest channels for AI to capture data from. You don't have to be logged in to YouTube to get the data, whereas Facebook has multiple layers of access restrictions.

Thirty-six percent of the cited videos had under fifteen likes, and 35 percent of the cited channels had under 10,000 subscribers. The median cited channel had about 41 videos, and our channel has 326. Being eight times larger than the median channel brought us two citations — not because of volume, but because of our targeting.

So what actually earns a citation? The bottom line is that if you have a strong title, a clean transcript, and a good description, along with a video where you're actually talking — it can't just be a slideshow with no audio — that is the winner. If the title mentions the query, that was the strongest signal we observed. Only two of our titles did this, and those were the two that got cited. When you have a clean, corrected transcript — creator-uploaded captions run at 99 percent accuracy versus the auto-generated ASR captions which run at 85 to 95 percent — Google and AI engines prefer the accuracy. And then chapters in the description matter a lot. Seventy-eight percent of the cited videos that were cited more than once had chapters in their descriptions. Chapters are behaving like H2 headings in a blog post. Super critical.

Here is the share of YouTube citations by engine. Perplexity is 38 percent. AI Overviews is 36 percent. Google's AI Mode is 19 percent. ChatGPT is about 4 percent. Copilot is about half a percent. Overall, YouTube accounts for 29.5 percent of all AI Overview citations according to a BrightEdge study of 30 million sources, and YouTube is cited 200 times more than any other platform.

The bottom line for SEO agencies is that you need to be getting your clients posting on YouTube, or you need a strategy for generating that content consistently. And if you want to show up in ChatGPT specifically, you also need to be posting on Reddit, since ChatGPT tends to surface more Reddit content.

The next question is: how many videos do you need to show up in regular Google searches? Volume is irrelevant here too. A properly structured video can earn a rich result. A thousand badly structured embeds earn nothing. The 2022 and 2023 Google rule still governs: Google shows a video thumbnail in the SERP only when the video is the main content of the page. Blog posts with a supporting video no longer qualify. It is all per-video work — the schema markup, the real watch page, the captions, the chapters, the thumbnail, the video sitemap. All of that has to be done, and it's just part of your checklist.

Here is your video rich result checklist. Give the video its own watch page — when you're publishing content, the page needs to live on the site, either as an inner page or a blog post. Add VideoObject schema markup to the page using JSON-LD; this is what makes the page eligible for a thumbnail and duration badge in the SERP. Add clip or SeekToAction markup, which produces key moments in the SERP. Upload corrected captions rather than relying on auto-generated ASR, since we know that doesn't perform as well, and those captions feed Google and every other AI engine. Use a unique thumbnail per video — Google specifically says not to reuse thumbnails. And submit a video sitemap via Google Search Console. You can submit up to 50,000 URLs. If you build a system that does all of this consistently, you are going to be successful.

What about Shorts versus long-form? Shorts account for only about 5.7 percent of citations. They're really too short to yield a usable transcript, they're only cited inside Google services, and all 43 percent of our Shorts were essentially useless for citations — they didn't show up. They may bring people to the channel, and they're still fine for reach and brand awareness, but that's about it.

Long-form content accounts for 94 percent of citations. It has enough spoken content to extract from. This video is about ten to twelve minutes. I'm really targeting twelve to fifteen minutes. You need chapters, which drive citation. The largest cited cluster averages ten to twenty minutes, so twelve to fifteen minutes is your go-to. And 50 percent of cited videos were under eight minutes, so you don't have to go extremely long.

What about embedding video on the site — does it help? Yes, probably for engagement. Wistia's 500,000-session data on longer page time is credible. Dwell time is not a confirmed ranking signal, but it does help click-through rate. The mechanism is clear. BrightEdge measured roughly a 30 percent click-through rate lift from VideoObject schema thumbnails across 25,000 pages, and they found that a thumbnail draws the eye. The famous stat that video makes you 53 percent more likely to hit page one goes back to a 2009 claim with no accessible methodology, so I'd ignore that one.

Our own data across 39 pages: our average Google Search Console impressions went from 227 to 557 pre versus post, and our average position went from 27 to 24. The number of keywords per page rose by 145 percent — from 13 to 17. This is us measuring a change, not enough data to say definitively this is the cause. There was no control group, so we can't separate the embed effect from normal content aging. Pages accumulate impressions and keywords over months whether or not you add video, and better pages tend to be the ones that get video added to them. It's early data, but that's what we're seeing.

The honest caveat is that we measured a change, not the cause. Without a control group, content aging and selection bias explain an unknown share of every lift.

AI citations are extremely volatile. We saw this ourselves. We had a video show up in an AI Overview one day and be gone the next, replaced by a competitor's video. That is the norm, not a bug. Multiple independent studies converge on a citation half-life measured in days and weeks, not months.

Here are a few independent measurements of how fast AI citations churn. Sample one: a tracker looking at 10,000 brands across seven models found a 30-day half-life. Sample two: 73 percent of URLs cited once were never cited again. Digital Authority looked at 1,100 URLs and found that only 10.6 percent were still cited after 28 days. Get Mentioned looked at 530,000 citations and found that 69 percent of those sources changed within two days. And one AEO tracking tool tracking single URLs found a median of six consecutive days cited. Domain-level visibility outlasts URL-level visibility because the engines are swapping one page for another. So build the site, not just individual assets.

A couple more questions. How do engines read a video? They are primarily looking at the transcript, the description, chapters, and metadata. Google's models are also processing the audio and structure. So say the target question verbatim early in the video and answer it within the first 40 to 60 seconds.

Should you republish transcripts on a page? Yes. Google permits a video plus its own transcription on the same page. The risk is using that same transcript over and over across multiple pages — Google doesn't like that.

What about video length? Roughly eight to fifteen minutes. Duration barely correlates with citation frequency. Length is not the lever. Having enough substance to support real chapters is the lever, and the largest cited cluster is in the ten-to-twenty-minute range.

The local reality check: Google AI Overviews are primarily an informational thing. Whitespark measured 540 manual queries and found that 92 percent of informational local queries triggered an AI Overview, and 97 percent of hybrid-intent ones did. But near-me searches — plumber near me, roofer near me, water damage near me — still belong to the map pack, showing up there 93 percent of the time. Transactional demand has not moved to AI yet. But what happens when AI answers start showing up inside map results? That's probably coming at some point.

Video wins the top of the funnel. It wins queries like "how much does water damage restoration cost?" — that was one we actually got cited on. Google Business Profile posting, reviews, and the map pack still win the call. So you have to be posting regularly across your site and keeping your GBP active.

So what should you do next? Stop counting videos and start matching questions. Create one video that is eight to fifteen minutes long answering each question — one question per video — and title it as the search query. For example: "How much does water damage cost?" We are going to retrofit our 266 existing long-form videos with chapters, corrected captions, and 300-plus-word descriptions. That is essentially zero new production and will produce the highest ROI.

We're going to fix the embed technicals — the real iframe in the DOM, VideoObject schema markup, video sitemap — and we're going to remove click-to-load facade embeds. We're going to build a prompt cluster tracker and track 50 to 100 prompts daily across four engines, reporting citation share over time. We're going to run a matched-pair experiment, publishing 60 to 80 paired pages — some with video embedded on site, some without — and measure that over 90 to 180 days. And we're going to protect the fundamentals: Google Business Profile posting, reviews, and the map pack. Video is additive, not a replacement.

The real answer to "how many videos do you need" is roughly one well-built video answering one question worth owning. Based on our current data, that works.

I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk to you soon. Thanks.

Two weeks ago, we published a video with a number in the title: 493 videos, zero citations. That number was real. We had checked every video we and our clients had ever put out, and not one of them had ever been cited by ChatGPT, by Perplexity, or by a Google AI Overview.

Today that has changed, and I want to show you exactly what changed and what did not.

Hey, I'm Jeremy with PushLeads. I help local business owners get more leads without struggle or frustration. This isn't a new hustle for me. I've been getting businesses found online since before smartphones.

So let's get into how to get your YouTube videos cited by AI search.

Here is where we started. In late August, we ran the check across every engine we track: zero. Nothing we had produced had been pulled into an AI answer as a source. We published that result because it was true, and because most of what you read about video and AI search is somebody guessing. We were not going to add to that.

13 days later, we ran the same check again. Four of our videos are now cited across two different engines. Perplexity is citing us. Google AI Overviews are citing us. Same channel, same method, same 40 queries. The only thing that changed in between was how we set the videos up on our own website, and I will get to that.

These are the four. A video on why a restoration company is not showing up in Google, cited by Perplexity twice, on two separate weekly checks. So it held rather than flickering in once. A vertical short on what water damage restoration costs, cited by Google. A video on dashboard features, cited with a timestamp link 12 seconds in, which tells you Google read our key moment markup and followed it. And one on choosing a restoration agency, cited four days after it went live.

Now here's the number I care about more. Of the 40 queries we checked, 12 had an AI Overview that cited a PushLeads page — not the video, the article. That is a better outcome, and it is worth understanding why.

When an AI Overview cites your video, the click goes to YouTube. That is good for your name, and it does nothing for your phone. Our video appearances in Google Search Console over the last 28 days came to 58 impressions and zero clicks. When an AI Overview cites your page, the visitor lands on your website, where your number and your form are. Both results come from the same setup. Only one of them books a job.

Here is the whole trick, and it is not complicated. Language models read text. They do not watch your video. If your video sits on a page as an embedded player and nothing else, a text-first crawler sees an empty box. Put the transcript on the page as readable text, and suddenly the model has something to read that is tied to a page it can cite. That is why our dashboard citation came with a timestamp attached.

So here is what worked, in order. Answer one question your buyers actually ask, not a topic you find interesting. Build the page first, because the video supports a page — it does not replace one. Publish the full transcript on that page as readable text. Then wait three to four weeks. Our fastest citation took four days, and that was on a topic where we already ranked in the top three. Most took a lot longer.

Now the part most people leave out: production format made no difference. Of the four cited videos, two are me on camera and two are a digital twin over a slide deck. Volume did not help either. We put out 82 videos in 30 days and four are cited. The citations landed on the videos that answer a narrow question and have a page behind them, not on the ones that got the most polish.

And be careful how you measure this. On our first pass, 28 of the 38 AI Overviews came back as stubs that had not finished loading. We had to re-request them with a different flag to see what they actually cited. A tool that reports an unfinished overview as not cited will hand you a false zero. Ours did exactly that until we found it and fixed it, and every citation number we published before that understated reality.

One more thing worth your time. While checking this, we found that an AI Overview was citing a page that did not contain the video. Two posts existed on the same topic: a thin one written in July that published automatically in September, and the real one with the video and the transcript. WordPress will not put two posts on the same address. So the good one got a dash-two on the end and the thin one owned the clean address. Before you create a page, check whether a scheduled post already owns that address.

Four citations out of 300 videos is not a victory lap. It is the first real evidence that one specific approach works, and the approach is boring. Answer one question per page, put a video on it, publish the transcript, wait a month, measure it honestly.

If you want to know where your own visibility stands right now, the link is in the description, or call 828-348-7686.

Ask ChatGPT to find you a water damage company in your town. Go ahead, try it tonight. Somebody's business comes back with a name, a rating, and a button that says "request a quote." Here's who decides whether that business is yours.

I'm Jeremy, and this is PushPro from PushLeads.

On July 23, 2025, Yelp announced it is licensing its reviews, ratings, photos, and business details to OpenAI. That is 330 million reviews and more than 8 million business listings feeding straight into ChatGPT. When someone asks for a plumber, a roofer, or a restoration company, ChatGPT can now answer with live Yelp data, and Yelp's request-a-quote feature comes inside the chat itself. The customer never visits your website, they never see Google — they ask, they get a name, they tap.

And it is not just Yelp. Angi has integrated with Google's Gemini. Thumbtack has integrated with Anthropic's Claude. Both of them are also inside ChatGPT. The entire home services stack is wiring itself into the assistants people already talk to.

One number to hold onto: a July study of 28 million AI responses to local business questions found Yelp cited 3.4 times more often than the next closest platform. If you have spent years ignoring Yelp because the review filter drove you crazy, I understand. But the assistants did not get that memo.

Let me be fair to Google here, because the sky is not falling on local search yet. AI Overviews now show up on roughly 48% of all Google searches, and where they appear, organic clicks drop by about 38%. That is brutal for blogs and how-to articles. But for local intent — emergency plumber near me, AC repair Phoenix — AI Overviews appear on only about 7% of searches. The map pack with three businesses, reviews, and a phone number is still what most customers see.

Here is what is changing underneath it. Google is rolling out AI-powered local packs. Sterling Sky is tracking them on about 7% of local keywords, mobile only, United States only, so far. And the call button on Google Business Profiles is showing up less and less on mobile. Businesses that hold their ranking are still watching calls from their profile decline. Same rank, fewer calls. That is the trend line.

So what does ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude look at when it decides which contractor to name? Four things, and none of them are secret.

First, your reviews. Not just the star rating — volume, recency, and whether the reviews are actually visible on your public profile or sitting in Yelp's "not recommended" section, where the assistant may never see them.

Second, your business details. Hours, service categories, service area. If your categories say "general contractor" and the customer asks for water damage restoration, you are not in the conversation.

Third, your website. The assistants read your pages the way a very fast, very literal customer would. Answer-first content, clear service pages, real numbers.

Fourth, your Google Business Profile. It still anchors the entity. When your profile, your website, your Yelp listing, and your reviews all say the same thing about who you are and what you do, the assistant can recommend you without hesitation. When they disagree, it moves on to someone it can trust.

At PushLeads, we do not guess at this — we track it. Our PushRank dashboard checks every week whether Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and the other assistants mention our clients and where the citations come from. We also rank in our own space for terms like "local SEO firm," "disaster restoration SEO," and top plumbing keywords. We did not buy that. We earned it by publishing the exact kind of answer-first content the assistants prefer. And we have watched it work for clients. One restoration company went from 72 AI mentions to 336 in four months — same business, same service area. We changed two things, and we are going to walk through both of them in the next video.

Here is what to do this week.

One: clean up and complete your Yelp profile even if you hate it. Categories, hours, photos, service area. It is now a data source for the biggest assistant in the world.

Two: review velocity. Ask every finished job for a review on Google and on Yelp. Recent beats many.

Three: consistency. Your name, address, phone, and categories should match across Google, Yelp, Angi, and your website. Every mismatch is a reason for the assistant to pick someone else.

Four: put a dedicated tracking number on your Yelp profile so you can see the calls the assistant sends you.

Five: add an AI assistant option to the "how did you hear about us" question on your intake form. ChatGPT clicks from the web show up in your analytics as chatgpt.com, but clicks from the mobile app show up as direct traffic. Most contractors are undercounting these leads today.

Six: once a month, ask the assistants the questions your customers ask. "Best water damage company in your city." "Who fixes garage doors near me?" Write down who they name. If it is not you, you now know exactly what to fix.

The customer is still out there. The question is who the assistant names when they ask. If you want to see whether ChatGPT and Google's AI mention your business today, go to seo.pushleads.com/audit and run the free check. It takes about a minute.

How do you prompt-test your brand across AI assistants every month? You run a set of scripted prompts through multiple AI assistants on the same day every month, and then you log what each one says about you. That's the whole system. Everything else is just building the habit and knowing exactly what to look for. Let me walk you through the exact checklist that we use at PushLeads, step by step, so you can copy it and run it for yourself starting this month.

Why this matters right now: think about how your customers are searching for you today. A lot of them aren't typing things into Google any longer. What they're doing is asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot a question like "who's the best roofer in Asheville" or "which HVAC company should I call in Denver?" If your name isn't coming up in those answers, or what comes up is wrong, you're losing calls that you never knew you lost. The problem is that most businesses have no idea what AI assistants are saying about them. They're not checking, they're not logging it, they have no baseline — and that's what this checklist fixes.

The first thing you want to do is pick your four AI assistants and stick with them, because consistency is the whole point of monthly testing. You need to test the same platforms every single time so that you can track change over time. The four that we test every month are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Those four cover the majority of where the real searches are landing right now. Pick those four, open accounts if you don't have them, and don't rotate platforms month to month. Changing platforms will break your comparison.

Next, build your core prompt library. You'll need a library of prompts, and every prompt needs to say the same thing word-for-word, month after month. If the wording changes, you won't know whether your visibility changed or your question changed.

Bucket one is category prompts. These are questions like "who is the best plumber in Charlotte" or "what's the top-rated landscaping company in Nashville." These show whether AI assistants are putting you in their short list at all.

Bucket two is comparison prompts. Questions like "how does this company compare to their competitors" or "what do customers say about this business?" These reveal what reputation data the AI has absorbed.

Bucket three is direct brand prompts. Questions like "tell me about this company" or "is this company trustworthy?" These tell you what the AI believes about you specifically.

Start with 12 to 15 prompts total across those three buckets. That's enough to give you a real signal without burning an hour every month.

Pick a specific day every month and protect it. We run ours on the first Tuesday of every month. It doesn't matter what day you pick — it matters that you pick one and don't skip it. Set a recurring calendar block for 90 minutes. That's enough time to run all four platforms and log everything. If you skip a month, your trend data breaks. One month of skipping won't ruin you, but two months in a row starts to hurt your baseline.

When you sit down for your testing session, open each AI assistant in its own browser tab and start with a fresh session for each platform. Don't use the same chat thread you used last month, because some platforms pull context from previous conversations. You want a fresh session each time.

Then run every prompt from your library through platform one. Copy the full response and paste it into your log. Then move on to platform two. Use the same prompts in the same order and repeat for all four platforms. Don't edit the AI responses before you log them — you want the raw output exactly as it appears. Resist the urge to paraphrase. Paraphrasing is how data gets distorted over time.

Now you review what you've captured, and you're looking for five things. First, is your business mentioned at all? If you're not in the answer, that's your biggest problem. Second, is your business described accurately? Check your location, your services, your specialty. Wrong information is common and it's fixable. Third, what sentiment does the AI use about you? Is it positive, neutral, or negative? Log the actual words it uses. Fourth, who else is the AI recommending alongside you or instead of you? Log your competitors by name — that tells you who the AI trusts in your category. Fifth, does the AI cite any sources? Perplexity almost always does. ChatGPT sometimes does. Note the sources, because they're the content the AI is learning from.

Log everything in one place. You'll need a single spreadsheet or document where every month's results live. Column one is the prompt text. Column two is the platform name. Column three is the date. Column four is whether or not your business appeared. Column five is the sentiment score — you can just use negative, neutral, or positive. Column six is competitor mentions. Column seven is source citations. That's seven columns. Keep it simple. Don't add columns because it feels like progress. More columns usually means less consistent logging.

Once you've logged the raw data, you need a simple score so you can track trajectory. We use an appearance rate. Take the number of prompts where your business appeared and divide that by the total number of prompts you ran. If you ran 15 prompts across four platforms, that's 60 total prompt runs. If your business appeared in 22 of them, your appearance rate is around 37%. Write that number down. Do the same calculation next month. Is the number going up, flat, or down? That trend is your signal.

Run the same test in private or incognito mode — this is the one that most people miss. Some AI assistants personalize results based on your account history or your location data. Run a second pass of your most important prompts in a private browsing window or incognito mode while logged out. Compare those results to your logged-in results. If they're different, you're seeing personalization. The incognito results are closer to what a stranger sees, and that's what matters most for your business.

Check your competitor prompts too. This is in our checklist every single month. Take your top two or three competitors by name and run them through the same category prompts. Ask the AI who is better, you or them. Ask it to compare your business to theirs. Log what it says. You want to know if an AI assistant is actively recommending a competitor over you before your potential customer finds out the hard way. This also shows which competitor the AI trusts and points you toward the content or sources that you need to match.

Trace the sources that AI is pulling from. When an AI cites a source, go look at it. Open the URL and read the content. Ask yourself why the AI trusted that page. In my experience, AI assistants tend to trust review aggregators, local directories, industry associations, and press coverage. If your name isn't on those sources, that's a content gap. If the information on those sources is outdated or wrong, that's a correction you can actually make. Fix the source and the AI's answer often changes within a few months.

Wrong information is the most common problem businesses find when they start running this checklist. The AI says your hours are wrong, or your address is old, or your services are incomplete, or your name is misspelled. Here is what actually moves the needle: update your Google Business Profile, update your website with clear structured information, and get that correction published on the sources the AI is already citing. AI assistants don't have a correction form for you to fill out, but you can change what they say by changing what they read.

Let me walk you through what a session looks like in practice. Say you're a residential HVAC company based in Raleigh. You open ChatGPT in a fresh tab and type "who are the best HVAC companies in Raleigh for residential service?" You copy the full response and paste it into your log. Your company appears in position three. The AI described you accurately but called you a commercial contractor, which is wrong.

Now you open Perplexity and run the same prompt. Your company doesn't appear at all. Perplexity cited a local magazine article from two years ago that mentions four competitors but not you. That article is now a target.

You go to Gemini and run the prompt. You appear, but only in a generic list with no detail.

Then Copilot — run the same prompt. You appear with the correct description and a review snippet.

Now you have a picture. ChatGPT has the wrong data to correct. Perplexity has a source gap to fill. Gemini needs more detail in your online profiles. And Copilot is working. Those are four specific actions from one morning session.

If you want to know exactly where your brand stands right now across AI systems and traditional search, you can get a free visibility teardown at seo.pushleads.com/audit, or call us at 828-348-7686. We'll show you exactly what AI systems are currently saying about your business and where your biggest gaps are. Start running the checklist this month. The businesses that build this habit now are going to have a real advantage over the ones who figure it out a year from now. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads.

Hey, I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. In this video we're talking about something that genuinely excited me: ChatGPT sent me a client a couple of days ago, and I wanted to break down what I think actually made the difference.

What basically happened is that somebody in Los Angeles was unhappy with their SEO person and their Google Ads person. Their previous agency had started cranking out junk AI content — AI slop, as we call it. AI slop is not good. We as humans don't respond well to it, and of course AI doesn't like it and Google doesn't like it either. But if you use AI to produce really good content, it's genuinely helpful. It just depends on what you're producing.

So this person was unhappy, and instead of Googling they asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT recommended me. It said, "If you're looking for Google Ads help, you should reach out to Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads." I'm not in LA. I don't have any outreach happening there. I do have a couple of clients there, but they're not referring this type of client. So that was pretty exciting.

The exact question the prospect asked was who would be the best person to help me set up a Google Ads campaign. They asked for a person, not an agency. And of course agencies are out there, but about half of them are scams. I regularly audit accounts where an agency is charging two thousand dollars a month and no actual work is being done. The bar in digital marketing is low because of all those bad players. But if you do high-quality work, stay transparent, meet with clients, and show them the work, the industry rewards that. It doesn't reward lazy.

This is also bigger than one lead. ChatGPT had around 900 million weekly active users as of February 2026, and that number is probably closer to a billion now — up from 400 million the previous year. AI changes the referral game because it's not really about being on page two versus the top of page one anymore. It's about producing high-quality educational content that gives value to people without asking for anything in return. When you do that, AI names two or three businesses, and it doesn't matter where the person is based. This person was in Los Angeles; I'm right here in Asheville, North Carolina.

What was interesting is that yesterday — the day I actually spoke to her — I also got a referral from a real person. Both referrals behaved the same way. They both arrived as if they had been sent by someone who already trusted me. The first was a local referral here in Asheville, and the second was the AI referral. She asked me directly: "I want to know exactly what you're doing to get AI referrals." I walked her through the three things I'm doing, not asking for anything up front, just showing the value. BNI talks about givers gain — giving without expecting anything in return — and that's basically my approach. Then I said, "I can come in at two-fifty a month, run Google Ads for you, and show you what I can do. Ultimately we probably want to spend a thousand to two thousand a month on everything, but let's start small and I'll prove it." That's what people are looking for: consistent, high-quality work. And when AI refers someone to you, those leads arrive pre-sold. That's the exciting part.

Now, there's also the person-versus-agency dynamic worth talking about. A faceless agency has generic team pages and fewer signals tied to any one person. They're often not producing high-quality content consistently. A real identifiable expert has a real name and face, reviews that mention that name, a story on the about page, YouTube content with their name attached, and articles with a byline. So the question is: do you want to go with a faceless agency or an identifiable expert?

So why did I show up in ChatGPT? There are four components. First, I have pages that directly answer the buyer's question. If someone asks how to set up their own Google Ads campaign, I give all the information away. If they want help doing it, I'm available. Second, I have third-party content that describes my Google Ads work — signals from other websites, not just my own. That's part of why this video is on LinkedIn and YouTube. It has to exist in multiple places. Third, I have a consistent business history going back to 2012. And fourth, I have more than a hundred videos on my YouTube channel with my name attached to every one of them.

That's my best read on why it happened. We don't know exactly how these models weight things, but I know the difference in the last couple of months is that I've been producing a lot of content.

Here's what my YouTube channel looks like right now. I have just under 700 subscribers, and I don't care about that number. I care about how many high-quality videos I have. On the channel I'm doing three formats: slideshow-style videos that answer specific questions with data; real talking-head videos with graphics and B-roll; and Loom-style screen recordings where I walk through something practical. I don't care whether any individual video gets a lot of views. What matters is that it's high-quality content answering real questions.

That leads to the point about consistency. Consistency generates confidence because AI models are cross-checking things. AI does hallucinate, but it doesn't want to, and it's getting better at not doing it. When an AI sees your website with content, videos, long articles, LinkedIn, and directory listings all saying the same thing, it treats that as solid fact. That's called triangulation. When that happens, the confidence comes through, and that's why ChatGPT said, "I highly recommend Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads" — not just some nameless, faceless agency.

The next question worth addressing is whether YouTube videos actually matter to ChatGPT. I was curious about this myself, because ChatGPT doesn't play videos. But it does read the titles, descriptions, and transcripts. All of my videos are embedded on my site with the title, transcript, chapters, and everything else. So every video is another page tying my name to my expertise. It's a huge library for a person browsing my channel, and it's also a huge library for AI.

When I started doing this I thought I was mainly going to show up in Google's AI Overviews, because that's a big component of AI visibility. I was actually surprised that ChatGPT found me. It's because ChatGPT is reading the transcripts, seeing that I'm producing a lot of content, seeing that I'm helping people, and seeing that I'm not asking for anything in return. That turns into a very favorable signal.

So what should you do with this? Your biggest upgrade is to start making videos that answer your most common customer questions. The videos should be ten to twenty minutes long, because AI pays closer attention to content over ten minutes and is more likely to cite it. You need to publish the video with the transcript, chapters, and video schema markup on your site. That turns each video into a page AI can read directly.

To get recommended by ChatGPT or any other AI: answer your customers' questions on your own site, get real reviews, be consistent everywhere, put your name and face on your expertise, publish video content as text on your website, and stay on topic. Don't produce a bunch of random content that doesn't connect to what you do.

To test whether AI is recommending you: go to an AI and generate a list of real customer questions, or come up with your own. Then ask each question in ChatGPT with the chat history turned off so it's not logging and remembering your sessions. Run those five to ten questions regularly. The answers will vary, so check what sources it provides and repeat that monthly to track your changes. And start asking every new lead one question: how did you find us? If AI was involved, ask them exactly what they typed. That prompt tells you which question you're already answering well. If you're winning that prompt, you're winning.

If you want AI to recommend your business, we help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Go to PushLeads.com/contact. You can also run an audit of your own business right there on the website. I'll talk to you soon. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads — thanks so much, and have a great day.

GEO, SEO, AI SEO — three acronyms, a lot of confusion, and real money on the line if you mix them up. This video gives you the honest both-sides treatment: where these approaches overlap, where they genuinely differ, and the one condition that decides which you should be working on right now.

We built this from our full guide at PushLeads. We work across all three from Asheville, North Carolina. I'm Jeremy Ashburn. I started PushLeads to do one thing well — turn searches into phone calls for business owners and marketers. I spent nine years selling outcomes to business owners before I ever sold marketing, so I think in jobs booked, not impressions. What you're getting here is what GEO, AI SEO, and classic SEO each mean, where they overlap, and the one workflow PushLeads runs that covers all three.

Start with the definitions, because the terms describe layers, not competitors.

SEO — search engine optimization — earns you rankings and clicks in traditional search results. That is the foundation. Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, gets your business quoted inside AI-generated answers on tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. AI SEO is simply the umbrella term for doing both together inside one connected program. Same signals, different endpoints.

Here is why SEO still matters enormously. Google processes roughly 8.5 billion searches every single day. A business that ranks in the top three positions on a given query captures the largest share of clicks. That has not changed. What has changed is that ranking well is now also the most reliable path to earning an AI citation, because both outcomes draw from the same authority signals. SEO is not dying. It became the prerequisite.

Now the urgency side. ChatGPT crossed 100 million weekly active users. That is not a forecast — it is the current number. And 58.5% of United States searches now end without a click, meaning a customer reads an AI answer, sees a recommended business, and acts without ever visiting a website. If you optimize only for traditional rankings, you are invisible in a growing share of buying decisions happening right now in your market.

So where do SEO and GEO actually differ? The foundation is identical: authority, reviews, clear content, consistent business information. The difference is in emphasis and endpoint. Traditional SEO can bury the answer after background context and still rank. A GEO-oriented page cannot afford that delay. AI models decide what to extract in the first 40 to 60 words of a section, and queries of eight or more words are roughly seven times more likely to trigger an AI Overview. GEO rewards businesses that explain their work, not just list services.

Here is the most important number for anyone still skeptical about GEO. 52% of sources cited in Google AI Overviews also appear in the top 10 organic results, according to SEMrush in 2025. The overlap is massive. Ranking well through traditional SEO remains the single most reliable way to earn a generative engine citation. You are not building two separate visibility strategies. You are building one with a sharper layer on top.

Now the honest caveat — and the part most agencies skip. Chasing AI citations while letting your SEO foundation decay is a losing trade. Businesses that pause link building, let their Google Business Profile go stale, or stop earning reviews while chasing AI tactics tend to see both channels weaken at the same time. The foundation is not optional groundwork you do once and forget. It is the ongoing signal that AI answers rely on. Stop feeding it and the citations dry up.

Reviews are where this becomes very concrete. BrightLocal found that 75% of consumers always or regularly read online reviews. 88% would use a business that responds to all its reviews, compared to only 47% for one that never responds. That gap alone is worth building a serious review process around. And for GEO specifically, AI models pull language directly from your reviews when constructing a recommendation. Eighty reviews mentioning fast response and fair pricing give a model specific, credible language to use. Twelve generic reviews give it almost nothing.

Three numbers that show why zero-click behavior makes GEO urgent for local businesses right now. 58.5% of searches end without a click. 88% of AI Overview queries are informational, meaning customers are asking AI for help choosing a contractor, a dentist, or an accountant. And each AI Overview cites roughly five sources per query — five slots. Your competitors are competing for those same five slots in your market. Being absent from them is a concrete loss of demand, not a future risk.

The sequence matters more than the label you put on the work.

Step one: fix the SEO foundation — complete Google Business Profile, real reviews, clear service pages. Without that, nothing else sticks. Step two: structure content for direct answers — 40 to 60 word opening answers, question-phrased headers, numbered frameworks. Step three: strengthen entity signals — identical name, address, and phone everywhere, plus schema markup. Step four: publish original data — local numbers, project costs, case results, something AI cannot find on a competitor's page. Step five: build topical depth by linking related service pages together, so both search engines and AI models recognize you as an authority, not a single-page business.

The side-by-side tells the full story cleanly. SEO and GEO share the same goal of being found, but SEO targets a ranking and a click while GEO targets a quote inside an answer where no click may happen. Content format shifts: GEO wants the answer first, not buried. Original data matters more for GEO because AI needs something unique to cite. Schema markup helps both channels confirm your entity details. And critically, you do not need a separate website, a separate content team, or a separate budget. The same pages, sharpened, serve all three.

Three misunderstandings that cost local businesses real money. First, thinking GEO replaces SEO and pausing traditional work. It does not, and both channels weaken when you do. Second, assuming AI search needs a separate website or separate team. It does not. Running separate programs duplicates effort and misses the compounding effect of doing both on the same content. Third, assuming GEO always takes longer than SEO. In some cases, a single page rewritten with a strong direct answer and one original data point earns an AI citation within weeks — faster than a brand-new page climbs traditional rankings. The ceiling for quick wins on the answer-clarity side is real.

Here is the condition that decides it. If your Google Business Profile is incomplete, your reviews are thin, and your service pages are vague, start with the SEO foundation. That work carries the most weight across every channel, and AI answers pull from those same signals. Once the foundation is solid, the GEO layer is mostly sharpening answers, adding original data, and keeping your entity details consistent. Those additions also strengthen traditional rankings, so the two reinforce each other rather than competing for your budget.

The fastest way to know exactly where your gaps are is a structured audit that checks every layer before you spend a dollar. Get yours free at seo.pushleads.com/audit or call 828-348-7686.

Picture a homeowner with a wet basement at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. She opens ChatGPT and types "who are the best water damage companies near me." ChatGPT gives her three names. She calls the first one. She never visited a website. She never typed anything into Google. That call just happened, and one local business got it.

The question this video answers is how do you become the name ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say out loud. The short answer is that social media, AI visibility, and regular Google rankings are one system now. Build one flywheel, not three separate channels. I am going to show you the numbers, the mechanism, the mistakes most shops make, and a four-step plan you can start this week.

Before we talk about the flywheel, you need to understand the new map. Search is not one thing anymore. BrightLocal surveyed consumers in 2026 and found 45% used AI tools for local business recommendations in the past year. That was 6% the year before. Adoption is real and it is moving fast. But here is the number that should keep you grounded: only 8% of people start a local search with AI. 52% still start with Google search. AI is not replacing Google yet. What it is doing is adding a third lane alongside Google and the map pack. You need to show up in all three. The companies that panic and abandon Google for AI-only strategies are going to get hurt. The companies that treat all three as one connected system are going to win.

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Pew Research analyzed 68,879 searches. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular result 8% of the time. Without an AI summary, they clicked 15% of the time. That is roughly half the click rate. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords in December 2025 and found AI Overviews cut position-one click-through rates by 58%. So if you were ranking number one and an AI Overview showed up above you, you lost more than half your clicks. That is a real business problem.

But here is the flip side, and this is the key insight in everything I am about to say. Seer Interactive found that brands cited inside AI Overviews get 35% more organic clicks than uncited brands. So being named inside the AI answer actually drives more traffic to you than if the AI answer did not exist at all. The goal is not to avoid AI results. The goal is to be the name inside them.

So how do you get cited? This is where the social media piece becomes central. Pace AI analyzed 30 million sources and mapped which domains AI engines pull from most often. Reddit is the most cited domain overall, then YouTube, then LinkedIn, then Wikipedia. BrightEdge found YouTube accounts for 29.5% of Google AI Overview citations, and YouTube's share of social citations in AI answers rose from 18.9% in August 2025 to 39.2% by December 2025. That is a dramatic move in four months. The platforms that feed AI are not your website. They are community and social platforms, with video and discussion content at the top.

One important warning: these numbers move fast. SEMrush tracked ChatGPT's Reddit citation rate and watched it fall from around 60% to around 10% in about six weeks. No single platform is a permanent safe bet. The strategy has to be presence across multiple platforms, not a bet on one.

This next point reframes everything. Traditional SEO taught you to chase backlinks — get other websites to link to you and you will rank higher. That logic still matters for regular Google rankings. But for AI visibility, the signal is different. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and measured what correlates with showing up inside AI Overviews. Branded web mentions had a correlation of 0.664 with AI Overview visibility. YouTube mentions were even stronger at 0.737. Backlinks: 0.218. To be clear, that is correlation, not proof of causation. But the pattern is consistent. AI engines are reading the web for mentions of your brand name, not counting links to your domain. When Reddit threads mention your company, when YouTube comments say your name, when local Facebook groups talk about you, AI engines are picking that up and using it to decide who to recommend. This is why social media is not optional for AI visibility. It is one of the primary inputs.

Here is a number that should put the opportunity in perspective. Soci surveyed 350,000 business locations in 2026. 35.9% showed up in Google's 3-pack. Gemini recommended 11% of those same locations. Perplexity recommended 7.4%. ChatGPT recommended 1.2%. Even if you have a strong Google map pack presence, your AI footprint is probably thin. Most local businesses have almost no AI visibility yet. The businesses that build it now will have a real head start before everyone figures this out.

One more detail from that Soci data: the locations ChatGPT does recommend average 4.3 stars. Reviews still matter. I will come back to that.

I want to share some numbers from our client data so you can see what this looks like in practice. Across 39 clients, we tracked AI citation data. YouTube was cited 6,102 times in AI answers about those clients. Reddit was cited 3,786 times. Facebook 1,920 times. YouTube alone beat Reddit and Facebook combined. Here is the part that should reframe how you think about this: none of those 6,000-plus YouTube citations were our clients' own videos. They were other people's videos that mentioned our clients. Our clients are being recommended because the conversation about them exists on YouTube, not because they uploaded anything.

We also looked at Yelp, which a lot of local businesses obsess over. Two citations out of 166 tracked. Yelp is not the AI citation engine people assume it is.

We have a humbling number to share as well. Across our entire portfolio, we currently hold only 1.5% of available AI citation slots for our clients. There is 98.5% more to go after. That is not a failure. That is the opportunity. For clients where we did entity cleanup, AI mentions grew from 72 to 336 in four months. Our own site impressions are up 62%. Our clicks are down 2%. Same story the research shows: more visibility, fewer direct clicks, but more brand recognition driving calls.

Here is how the system connects. It is a loop, and once it is spinning, it feeds itself. Brand mentions on social and community platforms get picked up by AI engines. AI engines recommend your business by name in answers. People who see your name in AI answers search for you directly on Google. That branded search demand is a ranking signal. Your Google rankings improve. Better rankings drive more traffic. More traffic means more customers. More customers leave reviews, share experiences, and mention you online. Those mentions feed the AI engines again. That is the flywheel. The entry point is mentions, not links. The accelerator is video and community content. The measurement is whether your name is appearing in AI answers for your service category and your city.

The first priority in the four-step plan is making sure AI engines know who you are and what you do. Entity confusion is the most common reason businesses do not appear in AI answers. AI engines build a model of your business from the signals they find. If your name, address, and phone number vary across directories, the model gets blurry and you get skipped. Start with a complete Google Business Profile, consistent citations everywhere, and local business schema markup on your website.

Then build a list of 30 to 40 questions a customer might ask AI about your service category and your city. Search each one manually in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Document who gets recommended. That is your baseline and your competitive map.

The ChatGPT data showed an average of 4.3 stars for recommended locations. Reviews are part of the AI recommendation filter. Build a system that asks every customer for a review within 24 hours. The timing matters. The request rate drops significantly after a day.

On your website, rewrite your service pages as question-and-answer documents. Lead with the answer, not with your company history. AI engines quote pages that directly answer questions. If your page buries the answer in paragraph four, you are giving the citation to someone else.

YouTube is the highest-correlation social signal for AI visibility, and we see this clearly in the data we have right now. Create short question-and-answer videos for your most common service questions. Embed those videos on your website pages. This does two things for your visibility: first, it feeds YouTube's citation pool directly; second, it keeps visitors on your page longer.

For community presence, participate in local Reddit threads. Join local Facebook groups and Nextdoor. Do not spam these communities. Answer questions genuinely and helpfully. When your business name appears in a Reddit thread where someone asked for a local recommendation, that mention becomes AI training and citation material. For B2B local businesses, LinkedIn matters more. It is one of Pace AI's top-cited domains. Post answers to industry questions your audience is asking. Engage in comments using your real business name.

The final piece is earning mentions and publishing original data. Sponsor local events so your name appears in local news coverage. Reach out to local blogs and neighborhood newsletters. Get quoted in community stories. These mentions do not need a link back to your site. The mention of your name in context is what feeds the AI model.

Publish your own numbers. If you tracked how fast you respond to water damage calls, publish that as a page on your site. If you have completed 200 roof jobs in your county this year, say so. Original data gets cited. It is one of the fastest ways to generate AI mentions that you control.

Here is the measurement stack I recommend. Track AI citation counts across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for your 30 to 40 target questions. Check monthly. Track branded search volume in Google Search Console — that is the demand signal created when AI mentions your name. Track your Google Business Profile call volume and map pack position. Track your review count and average star rating. And if you can, use a tool like BrightEdge to automate the citation tracking at scale. The key metric is: for how many of your target questions does your business get named in an AI answer? That number should move up over three to six months if the flywheel is turning.

Here is where I want to land. The web used to reward you for having the most links. Then it rewarded you for having the most optimized pages. Right now, AI answers are rewarding you for being the most talked-about option in your category and your city. Not the business with the most ads. Not the business with the prettiest website. The business that the community talks about on YouTube, on Reddit, on local forums, on review platforms.

When someone asks an AI at 10 p.m. who to call about their wet basement, the AI is going to name the businesses it has read about most in the most trusted community context. Build your entity data so AI knows you exist. Build your reviews so AI trusts you. Build your community presence so AI has evidence to cite. Be the name in the answer, and the clicks, the calls, and the rankings follow.

I wrote out everything I just covered in a full guide at PushLeads.com. The link is below this video. Go read it. And if you want us to look at your specific AI visibility right now, go to SEO.PushLeads.com or call 828-348-7686. We will show you exactly where you stand.

Hey, I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. What we're talking about in this video is your YouTube videos showing up in Google search — why it's important to make videos on YouTube, because it will help you show up in Google and also help you show up in AI search.

If you run a roofing company, a restoration company, or you're a local contractor, you need to be getting on YouTube because YouTube is a huge part of the equation. In fact, yesterday I got my first call from someone using Claude, and they found me essentially because I've been producing a lot of video content and publishing pages on my website. So let's get into it.

If you run a roofing company, a restoration business, or whatever kind of contracting business you have, you have to understand that homeowners are searching before they even call you. And they're increasingly searching on AI. The share of consumers using ChatGPT and other AI tools for service-based businesses went from 6% to 45%. If you run a service-based business and you're not doing YouTube or paying attention to AI search, you're going to get left in the dust.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this. Homeowners are searching for things like: how much does a roof replacement cost, should I repair or replace after hail, how does the insurance claim process work, what happens during a remodel day by day, and how do I know if a contractor is legitimate. These are the kinds of questions homeowners ask, and if you make YouTube videos answering them — videos that are 10 to 20 minutes long — and you have a page on your website that answers those same questions with the YouTube video embedded, that is a huge part of the equation.

So I'll give you the answer right up front: make YouTube videos, make them long, write long articles on your website, embed the video alongside that content, and that will help you show up in AI search. That's what I'm seeing. I'm now getting regular leads from AI tools because I'm doing this.

When you make YouTube videos, it also helps you show up in regular, traditional Google search. When you make a video and put it on YouTube, it starts showing up in Google. Here's the actual proof.

What I'm looking at here is my own YouTube channel analytics. Looking at the last 28 days and the last 90 days, this graph shows how often I'm showing up in traditional Google searches. When someone finds me through a Google search — shown here in light blue — you can see that before I started doing this consistently, around the beginning of September, it was random, one or two videos here and there. Then in September it started climbing to around 10 searches a day, and as of the day I'm recording this it was about 25 searches. On average I'm showing up in 17 to 25 searches per day, and the reason is simply that I'm making videos answering common questions.

Here's my channel so you can see what that looks like. I'm making videos answering questions like this one, franchise versus independent restoration companies, how much does commercial restoration marketing cost, and so on. Each of these videos is roughly 8 to 15 minutes long. Some are more produced — full-screen with a PowerPoint layout where I'm on the left and the screen is on the right, with B-roll — and others are simpler.

In the YouTube description I have chapters listed twice, and then I have a full written transcript. Here's what that looks like on my website: the video is embedded on a dedicated page, and below it I have the chapters and then the full transcript. That is something a lot of people are missing. If you make videos but don't put them on your site, an AI has nothing to refer back to. You need the video and the transcript on your site.

Some AI tools, like ChatGPT, don't even look at YouTube directly. What they do is visit your website and read the entire transcript. So having the video on your site is critical. If you're working with someone who does SEO, or doing it yourself, make sure you also add video schema markup to that page so that AI tools know you're publishing video content there. Then below the transcript, have a long article with infographics, images, and multimedia, and include an FAQ section as well. That is a big part of the whole equation.

Video results show up in YouTube's Videos tab, which is a full page of results. YouTube also shows key moments, and your video can show up in AI Overviews and Google's AI mode. Showing up in AI is really what everyone doing SEO and marketing is working toward right now, alongside traditional search. Doing video helps you show up in both.

One interesting thing I noticed is that Google sent seven out of ten outside viewers to my channel. Outside views went from roughly 210 to 304 within about a month. Those are external viewers coming from what I just showed you — Google search. The outside views per day went from two or three initially up to around 26 views per day. AI assistants like Claude are also starting to send people to our site. All of it works, all of it helps.

So why does Google send traffic to YouTube, and why should this matter if you're a contractor? It comes down to whether you want a bigger slice of the AI pie. Google owns YouTube, and sites led by YouTube content are showing up in roughly 47% of AI search results — so it's about half the equation. Your words in the video, including the words in this video right now, become text, and that's what an AI reads. AI reads the captions, the titles, the chapters, the transcript on the page, and the video schema. All of that matters.

Google and YouTube rankings work a bit differently, but you don't have to win on YouTube to win on Google. And it doesn't matter if your videos are getting a lot of views. What does matter is length — videos between 10 and 20 minutes make a real difference compared to two-minute videos. About 95% of videos cited by AI are between 10 and 20 minutes long. Don't assume that making Shorts is enough, because only about 5% of Shorts actually show up in AI citations.

Here is what Google says you need to do. Make each video its own page on your website with its own title and description. Add chapters to your YouTube description. Add video schema markup — the VideoObject schema — to the page on your site, which tells Google the title, thumbnail, upload date, and so on. And put the full transcript on the page, because AI reads the whole thing.

It's also worth noting that this is a fluctuating landscape. If you find yourself showing up in AI search today, that can change quickly. Video boxes in Google actually dropped in August when Google changed its results — from about 30% of tracked searches showing video before August 12th down to about 20% after. Video is still showing up, it just depends on how Google is weighting it at any given time. The page on your site is more critical than anything else, because a video plus a page plus a Google Business Profile clip of the video means you're showing up in multiple places, and AI tools respond well to that.

About 29% of YouTube's AI Overview citations come from YouTube. There are around 453,000 YouTube citations in AI Overviews. And 18% of Google AI citations come from pages outside of Google's top 100 organic results. So a video can get cited in Google's AI answers even when it isn't ranking in the regular results at all. It's all about video.

You don't need a big channel. You can have a small channel with no subscribers and it doesn't matter. What matters is making a video that answers a common question, and making sure that video is 8 to 15 minutes long — ideally 10 to 20 minutes. About 40% of YouTube videos cited by AI had fewer than 10,000 views. The link between views and subscribers and AI citation is very low. And 94% of YouTube citations went to long-form video, which is why a 10-to-20-minute video is more valuable than a Short. A Short might help people find you, but it's not going to help with AI. Video also wins in Google's AI mode and in Perplexity. Google AI Overviews, Google AI mode, and Perplexity all look at the video and the YouTube content. ChatGPT focuses more on the text and the pages, which is why the transcript on your site is so important there.

Here are seven video ideas I would recommend. First, how much does your service cost — for example, how much does water damage restoration cost in Asheville, or how much does a plumbing repair cost in Charlotte, North Carolina. Second, repair versus replace. Third, how does the insurance claim process work. Fourth, what happens on day one, day two, and day three of a job. Fifth, questions to ask before hiring a contractor. Sixth, a real before-and-after walkthrough. And seventh, one video per question your team hears every week — ask your team internally, find out what customers are asking, and make a video for each one.

Make every video findable. The title of the video should be a question. Answer that question in the first 30 seconds. Aim for 6 to 15 minutes, answer one question per video, add chapters as I showed you, say your service and your city — for example, "I'm a contractor in Asheville, North Carolina" or "I'm a restoration business that does X." Fix the captions and upload the corrected version. Then on your website, one page per video, add the VideoObject schema, put the transcript on the page, and add a 30-second Google Business Profile clip.

Here is your 90-day plan. List out your top 12 customer questions and film the first two videos. Do two videos a month, each one with a matching page on your site. Each page needs video schema, and each video needs a 30-second Google Business Profile clip. From weeks 7 through 12, keep going, keep tracking results, and keep checking YouTube Studio.

If you want to see where you show up in Google and AI search, you can get a free teardown at seo.pushleads.com/audit. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, helping small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. Talk to you soon.

Right now, homeowners in your market are opening ChatGPT and asking who to call for a leaking roof, a broken furnace, or a flooded basement. I'm going to show you exactly why most contractors never appear in those answers, and the three specific fixes that change that. This is the biggest shift in local business discovery since Google Maps, and the window to act before your competitors do is still open — but it won't stay that way.

A quick word on who I am. I'm Jeremy. I run PushLeads, and I've built my career on getting local contractors who are losing leads to AI answers ranked and called. I've watched every Google shift since 2007, and the fundamentals I'm sharing survived all of them. This video is about AI answering your buyers' questions without mentioning you, and how to get cited before a competitor does.

Here's the number that should stop you cold. 85.7% of businesses are completely invisible in AI-generated answers — even businesses ranking well on traditional Google search. According to Botify, published in 2026, established contractors simply do not exist when a homeowner asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. A pipe bursts at 9 p.m., she opens her phone, types "best emergency plumber near me," reads the answer, and calls whoever is named. If you're not named, that job goes to someone else.

This is not a fringe shift. According to BrightLocal, AI tool adoption for local business recommendations jumped from 6% to 45% in just twelve months. 61% of consumers now start their service search on an AI engine instead of Google. The heaviest users are homeowners age 30 to 44 — the exact demographic booking plumbers, HVAC contractors, and roofers. That's your core customer, and only 1.2% of local businesses ever get recommended when those homeowners ask for help.

The conversion numbers make this truly urgent. ChatGPT referral traffic converts at 15.9%. Google organic traffic converts at 1.76%. That is not a small difference. According to Search Engine Land, AI search traffic converts at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic traffic. Contractors appearing in AI answers aren't just getting more visibility — they're booking jobs at a rate that makes every other marketing channel look slow.

Here's the critical insight every contractor needs to absorb. Ranking on page one of Google no longer guarantees you appear when a homeowner asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. Less than 20% of Google's top ten organic results overlap with sources AI tools actually cite. These are two different games with two different rules. Traditional search ranks you as one link among many. AI visibility gets you spoken as the answer, and a homeowner who reads your name as a direct recommendation has already decided before visiting any website.

Most contractors are invisible due to three specific data gaps: inconsistent business information across the web, missing schema markup on your website, and a review footprint that doesn't spread beyond Google. AI tools don't penalize you for these gaps — they simply lack enough evidence to recommend you and move on to whoever has a cleaner data picture. Every single gap is fixable. As Darren Shaw of Whitespark notes, 85% of your AI visibility comes from third-party sources, not your own website.

The first gap is inconsistent business information. Your name, address, and phone number — your NAP — must be character-for-character identical on every platform AI reads: Google, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, BBB, Angi, and Foursquare. According to Whitespark, average business profile accuracy across AI platforms sits at just 68%. That 32% error rate quietly blocks citations. If your address says "Suite 100" on Google and "Ste 100" on Yelp, AI struggles to confirm you're the same business and may pass on recommending you entirely.

The second gap is missing schema markup — your AI passport. Schema markup tells search engines and AI tools exactly what type of business you are, where you operate, what services you offer, and your hours, in a format machines read instantly. Brands with strong schema are cited 37% more often in AI-generated answers. According to EWR Digital, pages with FAQ schema are cited 2.3 times more often than pages without it, yet most contractor websites have zero schema implemented.

The third gap is a thin review footprint. AI cross-references reviews from multiple platforms to validate reputation. Businesses AI recommends most consistently average 4.3 stars or higher across at least three to five platforms, with 100 or more recent reviews. 60 to 70% of businesses ChatGPT surfaces first pull from Foursquare data. Most contractors have never claimed their Foursquare listing. 50 detailed reviews spread across Google, Yelp, and Facebook will outperform 200 reviews sitting only on Google for AI citations.

Look at this growth curve. AI tool adoption for local business recommendations sat at 6% at the start of 2023. By early 2024 it jumped to 45%. By 2026, 61% of consumers start searches on AI engines. This is not a gradual trend — it's rapid replacement of the first step of the hiring process. Contractors who recognize this curve now will own their local markets before competitors even understand what happened.

Here's the audit you can run in 30 minutes. Step one: open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Search your trade plus city and zip code, and screenshot every competitor that appears. Step two: search your business name on every major platform and copy your name, address, and phone into a spreadsheet to compare character by character. Step three: verify your Google Business Profile primary category, confirm at least ten recent photos, every service field completed, and responses to recent reviews. Step four: run your homepage through Google's Rich Results Test to check for schema. Step five: count your reviews across Google, Yelp, Facebook, and BBB. Full picture in 30 minutes.

Five tools dominate fixing these gaps. BrightLocal handles citation audits, review tracking, and local rank monitoring — it's the standard for NAP consistency work. Whitespark runs deep directory audits and builds citations on sources AI systems trust most. Botify AI specifically tracks your citation rate across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, so you know whether fixes are working. Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator are both free and confirm your structured data is machine-readable — use at least two before guessing what to change.

Amanda Jordan, director of local search strategy at Rickety Roo, put it clearly: businesses getting cited by AI aren't necessarily the biggest or most established. They're the ones with the clearest, most consistent data footprint across platforms AI actually trusts. Data quality beats brand size. A newer contractor with complete, consistent, schema-marked listings on six platforms will outperform a 20-year company with a messy digital footprint every single time.

Once your data foundation is solid, content pushes you into actual AI answers. AI tools pull text directly from your pages to answer homeowner questions. A page titled "Water Heater Replacement in Asheville" explaining which brands you install, how long installation takes, and typical costs gives AI everything it needs to cite you. A generic page any contractor could have published gets skipped.

Fresh content matters too. Pages updated within the last 30 days receive 3.2 times more ChatGPT citations than content older than 90 days.

This approach is called answer engine optimization, or AEO. Build a dedicated FAQ page answering the questions homeowners ask before calling: emergency availability, licensing and insurance, service areas, timelines, and typical costs. Mark it up with FAQ schema. That single page, done well, can more than double your citation rate. Beyond that, build separate pages for each core service and each city or neighborhood you serve. Update those pages monthly — not a full rewrite, just current details or new answers. That refresh cycle keeps you competitive without requiring new pages every time.

Traditional SEO ranks you as one link among many, with click-through rates around 1.76%, driven by keywords, with your Google Business Profile generally sufficient, and less than 20% of organic rankings overlapping with AI citations. AI search optimization gets you named as the direct answer, with conversion rates reaching 15.9%, driven by specific homeowner questions, requiring accurate presence on five to six platforms. The good news: every step that improves AI visibility also strengthens traditional local SEO. You're not choosing between them.

Here is the prioritized action order. Fix NAP consistency this week — it's the fastest trust signal AI can verify. Complete your Google Business Profile. Complete, active profiles are 70% more likely to appear in AI local recommendations. Claim Bing Places and Foursquare — both feed ChatGPT local recommendations directly, and 60 to 70% of businesses ChatGPT surfaces pull from Foursquare. Add local business schema using the most specific subtype for your trade. Build one FAQ page with schema markup covering the six questions homeowners always ask. Route every third review request to your weakest platform until you have presence on at least three. That's the complete fix.

Here's why acting now matters more than acting perfectly. Only 12 to 15% of local businesses have begun any form of AI search optimization as of 2026. In most local markets, there is no dominant contractor in AI answers yet. That position is available to whoever moves first. AI systems build a picture of your business over time as they re-read your site, see reviews accumulate, and verify listings. Plan on three to six months before seeing consistent AI recommendations. The work you do this week shows up as revenue next spring. The early mover window is real. It is also closing.

Claire Carlisle of BrightLocal gave contractors the most practical frame for this work: treat your entity footprint the way you treat a job site inspection. Check every system, document what's broken, fix in order of impact, and re-inspect after repairs. That systematic discipline — which contractors already apply to physical work every day — translates directly to AI visibility gains. Contractors applying it to their online data right now are moving fastest.

Rules vary slightly by trade, but the mechanics are identical. Plumbers use the Plumber schema subtype. HVAC contractors use HVACBusiness. Roofers use RoofingContractor. Painters need distinct pages for interior, exterior, and cabinet refinishing. Concrete contractors benefit from separate pages for driveways, foundations, and flatwork. General contractors face the most competition and need the deepest location and service coverage. In every case the principle is the same: specificity wins. The more precisely your content matches how homeowners phrase their questions to AI, the more often you get cited.

Before changing anything, measure where you stand. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Run the same query in all three and record every competitor cited. Pull your top-cited competitor's Google Business Profile, review count across platforms, website schema, and how deep their service pages go. That comparison shows exactly which gap is largest. Start there. AI citation is driven by your weakest link, not your average quality. Set a monthly reminder in Botify AI to track whether your citation rate moves — at 60 days and 90 days, that's when you'll see results from work done today.

Let's pull everything together. Your contracting business is likely invisible in AI search because of three fixable gaps: inconsistent business data across the web, missing schema markup, and a thin review presence outside Google. The audit takes 30 minutes. Fix your NAP consistency, complete your Google Business Profile, claim Bing Places and Foursquare, add local business schema, and build a FAQ page with schema markup. Only 12 to 15% of local service businesses have started this work. Do it before your competitor does, because AI recommendations compound over time in favor of whoever acts first.

Run the audit yourself using the steps in this video, or get a full breakdown of every gap in your AI visibility picture. Find out exactly where your business stands at seo.pushleads.com/audit, or call 828-348-7686.

You get cited by AI engines when you look like the authoritative local expert on restoration topics, not just a contractor with a website. That means building entity signals and structured content that AI crawlers can read, trust, and repeat back to someone asking for a recommendation. Let me walk you through exactly how that works.

What AI citation actually means for restoration: when someone types into ChatGPT or Perplexity "who does water damage near me," those tools are not running a live Google search. They are pulling from what they have already indexed, trained on, or can retrieve from trusted sources right now. If your company shows up in that answer, that is a citation. The citation is simply your business name, your URL, and sometimes a short description. It is the AI vouching for you by name, and that is worth more than a page-three ranking. The question is what signals make the AI pick you over the next guy.

Here is some context from real search data on how people find restoration help right now. The keyword "water damage restoration costs" pulled 698 impressions at an average position of 21. The keyword "disaster restoration marketing" pulled 387 impressions at an average position of 44. The search "how to market a restoration company" pulled 492 impressions at an average position of 36. What those positions tell you is that even well-run restoration companies are sitting deep in results on the searches that matter most, and AI engines pull from the top of that stack. If you are averaging position 36, you are not visible to a ChatGPT answer. The fix is not more content. It is the right structured content tied to a recognized entity.

What is an entity and why does it matter? An entity is what AI and search engines understand your business to be, not just what your website says. It is the combination of your business name, your service area, your category, your reviews, your citations, and your structured data all agreeing with each other. When all of those signals say the same thing consistently, an AI builds a confident model of your business. When they contradict each other, or when the signals are missing, the AI treats you as uncertain and skips you.

For restoration companies, your entity needs to clearly signal three things. One, that you are a restoration contractor, not a general contractor and not a cleaning company. Two, that you serve a specific geographic area. Three, that you are the expert on specific perils like fire, water, mold, or storm damage.

Your Google Business Profile is not optional. It is one of the first places AI crawlers look to confirm your entity. It needs to be fully built out, not just claimed. Your primary category needs to be "water damage restoration service" or the closest available match, not something like "contractor." Your services list should name every peril you handle: water extraction, structural drying, fire damage cleanup, smoke odor removal, mold remediation. Your description should use your city name and your specifics in the first two sentences.

Photos matter more than most owners think. Real job photos, equipment in use, before-and-after rooms — all of these tell the AI and Google that you actually do this work. Every review that mentions a specific service by name — water damage, mold damage, fire damage — also adds to your entity signal. A review that says "great company" adds almost nothing compared to one that says "they handled our basement flood and had the drying equipment set up within two hours."

NAP consistency across the web: NAP stands for name, address, phone number. If those three things do not match exactly across every business map listing or directory listing, the AI loses confidence in your entity. In my experience, restoration companies have more NAP inconsistency than almost any other trade category, because so many of them changed names, moved locations, or got listed under a DBA at some point. Yelp says one address, Angi says another, and your website says a third. The AI sees that conflict and hedges. It will not name a business it cannot confirm.

Run a citation audit and fix the mismatches. Start with the big directories: Google, Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Better Business Bureau, and your local chamber. Then work down to the industry-specific ones: restoration industry associations, IICRC directories, and franchise directories if you are within a network.

Structured data on your website: structured data is code that you add to your website that specifically tells search engines and AI crawlers what your business is. It is not magic. It is just a consistent, machine-readable label. For a restoration company, you want schema markup for local business, for your local service area, and for your individual services. The local business schema should include your business name exactly as it appears everywhere else, your address, your phone number, and your geo coordinates. Your service schema should name each peril as its own service with a description and a service area. If your site is on WordPress, plugins like Rank Math or Schema Pro can handle most of this without custom code. If you are on a custom build, your developer can implement it directly. This is one of the most skipped steps I see in restoration SEO, and it is also one of the highest-leverage things you can do in under a day.

The content signals AI engines trust most: AI engines are not just looking at your home page. They are looking at whether you have written anything substantive about the topics that people care about for restoration. That means you need dedicated pages and articles on specific questions. "How much does water damage restoration cost" pulled 698 impressions in the data I pulled — that is one of the most searched restoration questions online. If you have an honest, thorough, locally calibrated answer to that question on your website, the AI has something to cite when someone asks it. The same applies to questions like "how long does structural drying take," "what does the mold remediation process look like," and "will my insurance cover water damage."

These are questions that people ask at two in the morning when they have a flooded basement, and they are also questions AI answers verbatim. Your content needs to be specific, not vague. Do not write "we handle all your restoration needs." Write something like: in a typical water loss, we set up commercial dehumidifiers and air movers within four to six hours of arrival, and structural drying usually takes three to five days depending on material saturation. That kind of specificity is what gets pulled into an AI answer.

A worked example of the math: picture a restoration shop handling around 80 emergency calls a month. In a typical case, maybe six or eight of those came from someone who searched online, found a recommendation, and called directly. The rest came from word of mouth, insurance referrals, or repeat customers. If that company built out its entity signals properly, published four or five solid answer pages on high-impression restoration questions, fixed its NAP across directories, and added local schema, it can start showing up in AI-generated answers for queries in its metro area. That kind of visibility shift can move the needle on direct inbound calls by a meaningful amount — often 20 to 30 percent in a six-to-nine-month window, based on industry ballpark patterns I have seen. That is not a guarantee. Geography, competition, and how thoroughly you execute all affect the outcome. But the opportunity is real, and most local restoration companies are not doing this yet.

How Perplexity sources local results: Perplexity is worth calling out separately because it behaves differently from ChatGPT. Perplexity does live web retrieval. It cites URLs in real time. That means your content can get pulled in as soon as today if it ranks well enough for a relevant search. The threshold for Perplexity citation is roughly a top-10 ranking for the question being asked, in my experience. That connects directly back to the position data I mentioned earlier. If you are at position 36 for "disaster restoration marketing," Perplexity will not pull your page. If you are at position seven for "water damage restoration cost in Asheville," it might. Local and long-tail searches are where restoration companies have the best shot at Perplexity citations right now. The competition is thinner and the AI is looking for geographically specific answers.

Backlinks still matter for AI trust: AI engines still weigh authority signals, and backlinks are still one of the clearest authority signals available. You do not need hundreds of them. You need relevant ones. For restoration, the highest-value links come from local news coverage of disaster events you have responded to, insurance agency websites that list preferred vendors, real estate agent resource pages, local chamber of commerce listings, and IICRC or RIA membership pages. A link from your local newspaper mentioning your company in a flood response story is worth more for entity authority than 50 generic directory links. Go after those deliberately. Reach out to local insurance agents and offer to be listed as a preferred vendor. Sponsor a local emergency preparedness event and get coverage. These are real, linkable moments.

What to build first if you are starting from zero: here is the order that makes sense. First, lock down your Google Business Profile fully. Second, fix your NAP consistency across the top ten directories. Third, add local business and service schema to your website. Fourth, publish one thorough answer page for each of your top peril types: fire, water, mold, storm. Fifth, go after three to five of those high-quality backlinks. Do those five things before you do anything else. They are the foundation that every other signal builds on.

Common mistakes restoration companies make: the most common mistake I see is publishing content that talks about the company instead of answering the question. "We are a top restoration team in the region with 20 years of experience" does not get cited. "Here is what to do in the first hour after a pipe bursts in your home" does. The second mistake is inconsistent category signals. If your Google Business Profile says water damage, your website says general contractor, and your Yelp page says cleaning services, you have an entity conflict. Clean that up. The third mistake is treating AI visibility as a separate strategy from SEO. It is not separate. The content and authority signals that rank you on Google are the same signals that get you cited by AI. You are building one engine, not two.

What to do next: go to seo.pushleads.com/audit and request a free visibility teardown. We will look at your entity signals, your content gaps, and your citation consistency, and tell you exactly where you are leaking AI visibility right now. If you would rather talk, you can call us at 828-348-7686. The restoration companies that build this foundation in the next twelve months are going to own AI-generated recommendations in their markets. The ones that wait are going to wonder why their competitor keeps getting named when they do not. Start now. I'm Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads, and I help restoration companies get more leads without struggle or frustration. Talk to you soon.

AI stocks had a rough October. Headlines were everywhere. And if you run a roofing, remodeling, or restoration company, you might be wondering whether any of this changes how homeowners find you. In this video we are going to answer that with real numbers and give you a clear action plan, no matter what the market does next.

If we haven't met, I'm Jeremy with PushLeads. Everything I do is about getting roofing, remodeling, and restoration company owners more calls and more booked jobs. Two decades of search work taught me what actually moves rankings and what's just noise. Today we're covering why a popped AI bubble would not stop homeowners from finding you on Google.

Let's start with the myth that is costing contractors real money right now. The common belief goes like this: AI stocks crash, AI tools disappear, Google shuts down its AI answers, and homeowners stop searching online. Here is what actually happened. Stock prices fell sharply in some cases, but search behavior did not move. Google funds its AI with advertising revenue, not venture capital. And a homeowner with a leaking roof does not wait for the NASDAQ to recover before calling someone.

So what did October actually show us? On October 30th, the NASDAQ had its worst single day since June. According to Yahoo Finance, AI stocks were near bear market territory. But here's the part that got buried in the headlines: the S&P 500 stayed close to its record high. These are two very different markets moving in two very different directions. The debate is not about whether AI works. It is about whether the spending pays off fast enough for investors. That is a Wall Street problem, not a homeowner problem.

Now, if the bubble does pop, think of it in two separate layers. The first layer is the stock market. AI shares fall, some startups close, investors lose money. Recent drops in 2022 and 2025 did limited damage to everyday spending. That is manageable. The second layer is debt. Data center construction is being financed with loans. Consulting firm Oliver Wyman warns that if those loans go bad in large numbers, the damage spreads to lenders and banks. That is the scenario that turns a stock drop into a real recession. Watch layer two. Layer one is mostly noise for a home services business.

Here's the part most people miss about Google specifically. Google's AI Overviews and AI mode are not funded by venture capital or stock prices. They are paid for by Google's search advertising business, the same business that has made money since long before anyone heard the phrase AI bubble. Google confirmed at its 2026 developer conference that AI mode passed one billion monthly users. And a 2026 study from PreVisible found that Google AI answers drive more traffic than every standalone AI assistant combined. Meanwhile, ChatGPT already started testing ads for free users back in January 2026. As investor money tightens, free visibility inside tools like ChatGPT only gets harder to earn.

Let's look at real numbers. Across the 43 small businesses PushLeads tracked in October 2026, there were 308,194 total website visits. Google organic search sent 81,799 of those visits. All AI assistants combined — ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of them — sent 1,107. That bar on the left is not a rounding error. That is the actual gap between where your calls come from today and where they might come from someday.

To put that gap in plain terms, Google organic search sent 74 times more visits than every AI assistant combined. The number is not close. And that is why, when you have to choose where to invest your time and budget, you start with Google every single time. AI assistants are worth showing up in. They are not where most of your calls come from right now.

There is a silver lining worth noting. The AI visitors who did arrive behaved well. About 64 percent of them were engaged sessions, compared to about 30 percent across all traffic. That is a meaningful quality signal. It tells you that when someone finds you through an AI assistant, they are often already convinced they need help. They just need to find the right business. Treat AI channels as a quality bonus, not your volume engine.

So what do the businesses that actually win do differently? Three things stand out.

First, they win Google before they chase anything else. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your service pages feed both regular search results and AI Overviews at the same time. One investment, two returns.

Second, they make their business easy for AI to understand. Clear service pages, a real service area, licenses, credentials, and consistent contact details everywhere online.

Third, they get mentioned in places AI trusts: YouTube videos, reputable directories, and genuine customer conversations. Those citations show up in AI answers across platforms, not just Google.

Here are six concrete actions you can take this week.

One: check your Google Business Profile. Confirm your category, service area, hours, and photos are current.

Two: review your top service page. Does it name your service area, list your license, and answer the question a homeowner would actually type?

Three: search your own business right now in both Google and ChatGPT. If you do not show up, that is your starting point.

Four: collect fresh reviews this week. Recent reviews with specific job details get cited in AI answers.

Five: track calls and booked jobs, not clicks. AI referral numbers shift monthly.

Six: if you need to trim your budget, cut the experiments first and protect the work that already fills your calendar.

Let's bust three myths that are actively costing contractors money.

Myth one: you can buy a permanent spot in ChatGPT. Anyone selling you that is selling something that changes every single month. AI ranking is not a one-time fix.

Myth two: you should cut marketing when stocks drop. When competitors go quiet on Google, the businesses that keep showing up pick up every call those competitors leave behind. Pullbacks create openings.

Myth three: AI will replace search overnight. A homeowner with a flooded basement is not waiting for the technology landscape to settle. Emergency intent is the most durable behavior in all of digital marketing.

I've run PushLeads since 2012, and I'll put it this way: the AI market will keep making headlines. Your customers will keep searching. The businesses that win are the ones that are easy to find and easy to trust on every platform. That is not optimism. That is what the data shows across 43 real businesses tracked through a volatile October.

Three numbers worth keeping in your back pocket. Seventy-four times — that is how much more traffic Google organic search sends compared to all AI assistants combined. About one third of one percent — that is the share of total visits AI assistants sent across the businesses we track. And one billion — that is how many monthly users Google AI mode now serves, funded by advertising. These numbers tell you where to focus and what to stop worrying about.

PushLeads offers a free search visibility teardown built specifically for roofing, remodeling, and restoration companies. We check whether your business shows up on Google, in AI Overviews, and in ChatGPT for the searches that matter most in your market. No obligation, no sales pressure — just a clear picture of where you stand and what to fix first. Get yours at the link in the description or call 828-348-7686.

If you run a local service business and want AI search tools to recommend you by name, your review profile is the single most important signal you control. This video breaks down exactly how AI systems like Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT use your reviews — not just the star count, but the text, recency, responses, and where those reviews live. Everything here is drawn from real data. Let's get into it.

Real quick — who am I to say this? I'm Jeremy Ashburn, and PushLeads is my agency. We work with local service business owners chasing AI visibility every single day. My first sites hit Google's first page back in 2007, and I never stopped.

In this one, we're walking through whether customer reviews directly influence AI search recommendations to buyers, with a mechanism-level explanation and action steps for local service businesses.

98%. That is the share of consumers who read online reviews for local businesses, according to BrightLocal's 2024 survey. AI tools are trained on this same web. They treat review content as ground truth — written by people with zero financial stake in making your business look good. That is precisely why AI weights review content above your homepage copy, your service descriptions, and anything else you write about yourself. Reviews come from the outside. The AI trusts the outside.

Every time an AI reads one of your reviews, it pulls four layers of signal simultaneously. First, the star rating — the initial filter. Second, the review text: service types, staff names, job descriptions, outcome language. Third, the date — recency tells the AI whether you are still operating at that quality level. Fourth, your owner response. The AI reads that too, right alongside the review. Miss any one of these four and you are leaving a signal gap your competitors may be filling.

Here is the gap that costs most businesses the most. A generic five-star review — "Great service, highly recommend" — gives an AI almost nothing to quote. Contrast that with "Fixed a burst pipe at 11 p.m. and was done by 1 a.m." That is a verifiable, specific claim with a service type, a timing detail, and an outcome. When a buyer asks "who does emergency plumbing near me," the AI has vocabulary from that second review to recommend you by name. The first review gives it nothing. Same star rating. Completely different outcome.

Search Engine Land has reported that AI Overviews increasingly pull direct quotes from review content when describing local businesses. Your customers' words literally become your advertising copy inside the AI's answer.

Here is the part you can influence. The question you ask after a job shapes what they write. Instead of "Would you leave us a Google review?" try "Would you mind mentioning what we worked on and how it went?" That one change produces review text with real service language — the kind AI systems match to real buyer queries.

Three mistakes appear repeatedly in local review profiles, and each costs you name-level AI recommendations every day. First, collecting stars without stories. Volume with no specificity is deadweight. Second, skipping owner responses. "Thanks for your business" wastes indexed public content the AI is reading. Third, letting recency go stale. No new reviews in six months tells the AI your business may be declining or inactive. These are not minor issues. They are the difference between being recommended by name and being skipped entirely.

The fix is a process, not a one-time effort. Send the review request within 24 hours of job completion — satisfaction is highest and memory is clearest. Ask a specific, open-ended question, not a generic one. Train whoever sends the final invoice to send the review request at the same time. When a review comes in, reply within 48 hours. Mention the service type and location when natural, and keep the response under 100 words. Collect across platforms — Google Business Profile first, then Yelp, then one industry directory. Tools like Birdeye and Podium handle timing so recency never lapses during busy stretches.

BrightLocal identifies specific benchmarks for businesses that consistently appear in AI-generated local recommendations. Aim for at least four new reviews per month. Aim for 70% of recent reviews to mention a specific service type. Aim for a 100% response rate on new reviews. Aim for at least one review mentioning your city or service area each month. Aim for an average rating of 4.3 or above. Run the scorecard on the first of every month — about 20 minutes. If you score under 20 out of 30 on the full checklist, you have a gap the AI sees too.

Think about what these benchmarks add up to. Four new reviews a month. 70% with specific service mentions. 100% response rate. 100% city mention rate. A 4.3 average. Each represents a commitment, not a one-time task. Businesses that hit all five consistently are the ones AI tools pull from when a buyer asks for a recommendation. Businesses that fall short on even one tend to get passed over in favor of whoever is filling that gap.

Your website is an AI input too. When you embed a relevant review excerpt on a service page, the AI reads it in context alongside your service description — corroborating evidence from two independent voices. Put the review near the claim it confirms. If your roofing page describes same-day emergency response, place a review mentioning same-day service immediately below that paragraph. Use schema markup so AI crawlers classify the content as genuine customer feedback, not marketing copy. Rotate featured reviews every six months — recency signals matter on your own site just as they do on Google.

Your reviews are also a research tool. Paste 50 recent reviews into an AI tool and ask what service types appear most often, what concerns customers mentioned before hiring, and what outcomes they praise most. That output tells you exactly what buyers worry about, in their own words. If 12 of your last 30 reviews mention pricing transparency, build an FAQ entry addressing pricing directly in natural customer language, answered in 60 to 90 words. Add FAQ page schema to each entry. That structure matches how AI tools serve conversational queries, and when a buyer asks about your pricing, the AI has something specific to cite.

Your full review history is a data set you can aggregate into credible statistics. If your reviews average 4.7 stars across 180 responses over three years, that is a track-record number. If 83% mention response time, that is a quotable statistic. Put these numbers on your about page and relevant service pages, tied to your real review data with the date range — "Based on 180 Google reviews from 2022 to 2025, 83% of customers mention our response time." That is a specific, verifiable claim AI tools will use when buyers ask about reliability. Never publish a number you cannot verify. Fabricated statistics are increasingly detectable by AI systems cross-referencing public data.

Here is the clearest way to understand what all of this builds toward. AI tools assign something like a confidence score when deciding whether to recommend a business. Higher confidence means the AI mentions you by name. Lower confidence means a generic answer or a competitor's name. Your review text specificity, recency, response rate, and multi-platform presence all feed that confidence score directly. The goal of everything in this video is to raise that score high enough that you get named.

Here is the full action map. Recent reviews signal active operations — ask after every job. Specific service text gives AI vocabulary — prompt customers to name the work. Owner responses signal professionalism — reply within 48 hours. A consistent rating above 4.0 signals sustained quality — resolve complaints before they become reviews. Multi-platform presence signals credibility — collect on Google Business Profile, Yelp, and one industry site. Review schema markup on your website signals authenticity to AI crawlers — implement it on every service page. Run this as a monthly checklist: 20 minutes, first of the month, every month.

Your review profile is making a decision for buyers every single day — either sending them to you or to a competitor. PushLeads audits your review text specificity, your recency, your response rate, your schema implementation, and your multi-platform presence, and shows you exactly what the AI sees when it looks at your business. Get your free visibility teardown at the link in the description or call 828-348-7686.