Ep 76 – Before You Fire Your Marketing Agency For AI

Should you let AI run your marketing? Maybe? Maybe not?

This isn’t an anti-AI conversation. We promise.

This is a conversation about how AI can make your marketing smarter and more efficient, and where experience, strategy, historical data, and good old-fashioned human judgment still matter.

In our latest episode of Trades Secrets, we sit down with Dan Sundgren and Scott Freeborn of FreeGen Digital Agency to talk about a real-world AI case study that contractors need to hear.

Devon Hayes (00:00.844)
Wondering if an AI website can outperform a traditional WordPress or Webflow website? We’re gonna find out. Today we have the owners of Freegren Digital Agency out of Washington. They’re our buddies in the home services marketing space. We’ve got Dan Sungren and Scott Freeborn, I’m so used to calling them Freegren, on today to talk about a wild case study of a longtime client, nine and a half years, on a traditional WordPress website.

And what’s happened in just 30 days on a new AI built website? Are they still visible? Tune in to find out.

Amanda Joyce (00:00)
All right, welcome. We are so excited to have you guys here today. Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (00:03)
Thanks. We are happy

Dan Sundgren (00:05)
Thanks for having us.

Scott Freeborn (00:06)
to be here.

Devon Hayes (00:07)
Absolutely. It’s always fun when we get a talk to other agency owners, specifically other agency owners who are niche down in the home services. It’s where, you know, we we talk to you guys what a couple times a month probably. Share ideas, talk about what’s going on, what’s happening with clients, what’s happening with Google, what’s happening with AI. And we just could not help ourselves with this with this topic. We were I was like salivating, waiting for the results.

I know we talked about this in the intro, but just kinda you know, we’re not all dinosaurs, like we use AI in our agency. So maybe let’s like open it up and just kinda set the tone saying we’re we’re not anti AI. We love AI. It’s made I know Amanda and I like a way more efficient. And so I don’t know, like how are you guys using AI in your agency today?

Dan Sundgren (01:00)
we use it daily. we use

Devon Hayes (01:02)
Right.

Dan Sundgren (01:03)
it internally and for our client work. I think that’s kind of the two the two big buckets that we use it for. So

Devon Hayes (01:10)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (01:12)
what’s interesting with with my lens is I am like you guys super curious. I think you can’t be successful in the agency environment if you’re not the most curious person out there because it it is evolving and changing. Right now, I think it’s changing. I think I posted on LinkedIn a month ago, like I think.

You know, in twenty not to age myself, but twenty-seven years, fast as it ever evolved.

Amanda Joyce (01:35)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (01:36)
I mean, the incremental things we saw were like DSPs and new ways to buy media, and they were incremental shifts and then mobile. We’re remember we were in the mobile age for about seven years, like mobile’s coming. And then it and then

Devon Hayes (01:49)
Yeah. Yeah, look out.

Amanda Joyce (01:49)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (01:50)
eight years later it came, but you know, we were saying it for years. This is like AI’s coming. God, what what what this week? You know.

Devon Hayes (01:57)
I know.

Dan Sundgren (01:58)
Holy cow, what’s Claude’s

Scott Freeborn (01:58)
Just ruin us over.

Dan Sundgren (02:00)
best. next week it’s gonna be perplexity, you know, like holy cow. So we’re

Devon Hayes (02:04)
Totally.

Dan Sundgren (02:05)
constantly like trying all of them and

Devon Hayes (02:07)
Yeah, figuring

out which yeah platform is best for what and then obviously now measuring how it’s impacting our clients, like what does being recommended in these different platforms do? Where you know, I know we’ve all kind of talked about that offline, which I think is it is valuable and just kinda says a lot about all of us as agency owners just being smart, learning from each other because there’s there’s so much work out there that why not help each other? I know and I think Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (02:34)
Well you have to on behalf of your client. That’s what we’ve talked to you two
about. Like Dan and I are Frigorin’s a little unique where with most of our clients, we are the client. This is not their world. So they’re trusting us to learn about these tools and utilize them, which we’re doing, because they don’t have time to. They’re running their company.

Devon Hayes (02:52)
Yeah,

absolutely.

And

Amanda Joyce (02:52)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (02:53)
how it’s impacting them. And I I think that yeah, that’s a great way to put it is just acting as like an advocate or the ambassador of AI on behalf of your clients. Cause really

Amanda Joyce (03:03)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (03:04)
at the end of the day, you still need a human to make judgment calls, to

Scott Freeborn (03:10)
Hundred percent.

Devon Hayes (03:11)
judge the output, to

have a direction based on what you’re seeing. You can use AI to analyze the number, but who’s making the judgment calls and who’s kind of leading the ship, you still need that human yeah.

Amanda Joyce (03:21)
I still need that. And how

often d are you having a conversation with your favorite AI bot and it spits something back to you and you have to push back a little bit and then it apologizes and reverses course and gives you a completely different answer? So if you’re just just taking a lean just taking everything that your AI bot tells you at face value,

you could really put yourself in some trouble when it comes I mean, I’ve had it give me bad advice about Google ads and I know it’s bad advice because I

Scott Freeborn (03:47)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Joyce (03:48)
I do it every day and then I can

you know, even when I’m talking to Gemini and I push back and it it reverses course. And then we also hear from clients a lot who will maybe upload a report we sent them or upload their website into AI and ask for feedback. And then that that can quickly confuse them. And that’s another time you need a human who has the expertise in our field to kind of help them understand what it’s telling them. And in a lot of cases, it’s not nearly as dire as it looks or maybe it’s not even accurate.

Devon Hayes (04:16)
That’s a fantastic segue into exactly what we want to talk to Dan and Scott about. I’ll let you guys like Scott maybe give us the background on exactly what we’re talking about today and yeah, just share with our contractors out there listening this this this information

Scott Freeborn (04:31)
with the client

that we’ve talked to you two about. So I was a client

Devon Hayes (04:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Amanda Joyce (04:34)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Freeborn (04:35)
that was I’ll generalize it a home service heating cooling company that had been with client been with Freegrin for they were a launch client, Dan, so nine nine and a half years.

producing for them every single data let’s call it data silo rock solid and we’re not perfect nobody’s perfect but we were feedback from the client this is great results were great all the data that we’re collecting everything looked good we’re doing everything for them so we reas

Devon Hayes (04:59)
And you were doing SEO for them. Sorry, Scott. okay.

Scott Freeborn (05:04)
back backing up two years we went through a huge site rebuild really rebranding site rebuild six month project just for the site

two, two and a half years ago in WordPress

Zero drop in SEO like SEO big lift time on site average duration all the main metrics everything like it was textbook and we put a ton into it. That’s going back to like the human component. We utilize SEO in a site build for content and all the important things, but the back end, which is what you two do as well, to make sure that you’re not harming the SEO. We’ve all seen site projects, case studies, where it’s all AI and then boom, hockey stuff.

Devon Hayes (05:47)
yeah, even I was gonna say, yeah, not even like non AI sites, like you can just like take a dip when you launch a new site. Yeah, yeah.

Scott Freeborn (05:53)
completely. Completely.

So fast forward to in the fall, client this gets to the shiny object, kinda chasing the shiny object AI wise, asks Dan and I sends us a webinar and asks us to, hey, kick the tires on this. This lady’s kinda not really my cup of tea, but obviously our client listened to it. So Dan and I listened to it.

Gave our feedback on it. Fast forward, call it six months, Dan. And out of the blue, client says, Move in a different direction. I’m going AI. Like we’re gonna scrap what you guys built and what we asked you to build two years ago. And really didn’t involve us at all, which was really odd because we were deep with this client. Like monthly meetings,

Devon Hayes (06:33)
Yeah, nine and a half years.

Scott Freeborn (06:35)
yeah,

Amanda Joyce (06:35)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (06:35)
everything. And again, clients booked out. It’s not like clients said, Hey, I’ve been slow for

Four or five months, I need to try something different. Totally understandable. This case was I’m gonna try this just because I feel I need to try this. And then poof, rips and replaces the site that we had built with AI site. We went from what Dan, let’s call it 200 pages to 2000-ish.

Dan Sundgren (07:01)
Yeah, and I would I would throw in one little nugget, and that is when we build your marketing toolbox over years, we build it very purposeful. So SEO is that slow and steady wins a race. We’re constantly optimizing, we’re adding incremental small wins, but they add up, and that’s always on. And then that marketing component in your toolbox of the paid advertising, whether it’s LSA, PPC, Meta, even Yelp.

Lee gen, we have the ability to kind of crank it up and down based on capacity. So we always have once we get that optimized, we can use that PPC or the paid media piece to really kind of squeeze it up, squeeze it down. If hey, we’re getting slow and we got a couple guys out on it, you know, leave. Okay, we’ll we’ll kind of trim down our budget and stay tight. We’ll optimize the best keywords. man, we’re going into

A period where we’re gonna sell it in six months, let’s or whatever. We can crank, we can really crank the dial up because we see impressions here like you guys see.

Amanda Joyce (08:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (08:04)
so we had that toolbox optim optimized and built. And that and that’s kind of a big like macro thing, but I think it’s important that once you build that discipline, you can flex up and down for seasonality or business changes, or we’re adding a crew, or we’re losing a crew, or we can’t hire anyone. You know, we can do that.

Devon Hayes (08:25)
And

that’s the value of the agency, like your your partnership with your agency. That’s what they are doing on your behalf. You know when to pull those levers, when to crank it up, pull it back, which what are we being found for? all brand terms or is it service plus location? Like, you know, that’s what your agency partner should be doing for you. So so to go from something that, as you said, you’re producing, you’re working, they’re getting conversions, they’re staying busy, everything’s actually looking really good.

I wanna know like I mean what they shared with you, like what was the pitch that they were like we’re just sold on this? Like what was this client pitched that just sounded so good they had to go try it out?

Dan Sundgren (09:07)
Yeah, it’s there’s a I don’t know if there’s a better word for it than the world has been weaponized with AI. And when I say that I don’t I don’t say that lightly. So if we had the guns, everyone’s got a bazooka now. And what and what I mean

Amanda Joyce (09:22)
Ha ha ha.

Devon Hayes (09:23)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (09:23)
is at the tip of your fingers you can go ask the claws of the world in chat GPTs like, Hey, what are what’s my marketing program look like? And it’s gonna give you all kinds of

Different ideas and answers from the outside looking in, let alone, I mean, we train it on the actual data. So when we analyze a client, we’re feeding it Google Analytics and your PPC data and saying, what’s what are the tea leaves here? And then we layer on the qualitative stuff, right? On changes to the marketplace, et cetera. But when you ask it outside in saying, hey, here’s a website, what do you think is going on? And it comes back with, the sky is falling, or my God, your competitors are killing you, then there’s this.

Weaponization and freak out, and we’re seeing it more and more. And we’re even seeing

Amanda Joyce (10:03)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Sundgren (10:05)
we’re even seeing like teenage kids in the household of the owner saying, Hey, what’s your marketing team doing for you? Because I just looked it up on Flawed and it look at all this bad stuff. And you’re just going, Well, my God, what’s no? So

Scott Freeborn (10:16)
Well.

Dan Sundgren (10:18)
there is a bit of that weaponization that we’re having to address more and

Amanda Joyce (10:21)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (10:21)
In

this case, it’s your neighbor and your friends and guys you play golf with or you know, whatever the the group is that you’re in, men or women. Everybody’s an expert to Dan’s point. So the kind of red flag meeting with this client was Dan, let’s call it two months before they ripped and replaced. They had a a new general manager who we’d never talked to, was in the meeting.

And said, my neighbor knows the person that runs one of our competitors and told me that our site is not built out correctly. And Dan and I just shut up and let the guy talk. And think of how long you two have been doing this and how many client meetings you’ve been in and pitches and whatever talking to various subjects with clients.

We actually did an exercise where we right clicked and inspected the page source on this competitor and our client, and Dan and I just shut up and he told us the reason why this other client or the the competitor was ranking was because they had more source code on their site for SEO.

Hundred percent, I’m not making this up. And I’m not making fun of the guy or anything like that. He’s a

Amanda Joyce (11:27)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (11:28)
smart guy, but it’s that’s the the to me that’s the the problem, the big target that agencies have on their back, to Dan’s point, you two have talked about this, is CEO. My wife ran it through Cloud and said, This is why your agency can’t fix the Google issue that you have going right now. Completely wrong. That cloud spits

Amanda Joyce (11:48)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (11:49)
out, not the individual.

Or neighbor tells general manager this, general manager says, Well, it might be right because my neighbor’s a smart guy and works for Microsoft or whatever. And then we now are getting this fire hosed at us. And to me, it seems like on the agency side, we’re more in defense mode than production mode, because the amount of time we have to spend in defense mode.

takes away from what we’re actually doing that you’ve hired us for to drive business. With Dan and I, it’s

Amanda Joyce (12:18)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (12:18)
put form and phone, and we’ve told you two, like phone calls, people in your store, and chat widget or forms. And we’re spending a ton

of time on defense mode now. Ton of

Amanda Joyce (12:29)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (12:30)
time.

Amanda Joyce (12:30)
And I’m

sure our listeners can relate to that because we feel it as agency owners, every business owner out there has to feel that. I’m sure every homeowner that these people are talking to probably had a conversation before you walked in their door and they’re talking to you about how they’re suddenly the expert on it. So I’m sure this is relatable to just about anyone, but it’s important to keep in mind how off-based those homeowners often are after they’ve done their AI research. It’s it’s mirrored in our in in our our industry too. So there’s just danger there

with

with exactly what we’re talking about with the weaponization.

Scott Freeborn (13:02)
Yeah, let me clarify all I love questions.

Like that that’s the why we do

Devon Hayes (13:06)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (13:06)
it we do. I love educating

Amanda Joyce (13:07)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (13:09)
existing clients or potential clients or even clients that are going out the door. Like Dan and I from day one have said Free Grant is going to have an educational approach to digital marketing. And we talk to people, everybody says that. Like I tell CEOs, owners, whether it’s an eighty million dollar business or a five hundred thousand dollar business, you need to have a working knowledge of this.

Devon Hayes (13:31)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (13:31)
And

Amanda Joyce (13:31)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Freeborn (13:32)
we will spend all the time in the world

Dan Sundgren (13:33)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Scott Freeborn (13:34)
on educating you. But

Devon Hayes (13:36)
It helps. It really

it it helps to kind of give the background. This is the work. This is and this is how it’s tied to a business outcome. This is why this marketing activity matters. Because I think

Scott Freeborn (13:48)
and why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Devon Hayes (13:50)
I

Amanda Joyce (13:50)
Yes.

Devon Hayes (13:51)
think that’s what’s missed in this like AI boom for like AI websites replacing what we do is that you can have a mass amount of output in a very short amount of time.

But

just because you have more content, more pages, that does not mean that there’s any quality behind it. It doesn’t mean that it’s moving the needle and you cannot tie the quantity of pages to

like a a business outcome that is relevant that that you that you’re looking for. So just because you have what we’re gonna dive into now is this this great example, a real life example. We’re not just, you know, talking in conjectures here. This real life website that you had built was optimized, had been performing 200 pages. Then client swaps over to I’m going to this AI website.

The they’re gonna generate t almost two thousand pages for me in less than thirty days and and I’m gonna have all this visibility.

so the pitches

You’re gonna get a brand new AI website and it’s gonna have two thousand pages. We’re gonna do this with within seven days. The cost is gonna be a fraction of a traditional agency and it’s gonna be far less money than for what your agency could do this for in in a far shorter period. So that sounds like, my God, two thousand pages. This is where you need someone with some level of discernment to say what do you

What human is gonna read two thousand pages? Why do you think you need two thousand pages? Listeners, if just because there is more quantity doesn’t mean that there is more quality. So so that was the pitch.

Amanda Joyce (15:26)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (15:27)
Okay. So now let’s fast forward. We’re what? on this particular heating and plumbing client, they’re now what, thirty, forty days past the launch of their

Scott Freeborn (15:35)
No, it’s we’re still

inside of thirty.

Devon Hayes (15:39)
Inside of thirty days, okay, with the

Scott Freeborn (15:40)
think it was

the first week, was it the end of July or first chunk of August? It was the end of July. We’re we’re inside of thirty days.

Devon Hayes (15:50)
Okay.

Amanda Joyce (15:50)
Okay.

Dan Sundgren (15:50)
About thir about thirty. Yeah.

Devon Hayes (15:51)
Okay, so that’s the pitch. And I will and I just do another disclaimer here on this like two thousand pages inside of seven days, fraction of the cost of your traditional agency. Like who’s who’s at the helm of the strategy there? Like that’s who’s making judgment calls?

Scott Freeborn (16:05)
Well let me

make a correction. It’s not a fraction of the cost. It’s exponentially more from what we could see. And doesn’t matter if it’s cheap or expensive, like at the end of the day, and you two have the same type of clientele that we do,

is whether it’s two thousand pages or a brochure or five page site, what’s lost in all this isn’t this is the human component.

Is what’s the end user experience? Me, the homeowner, I’m

Amanda Joyce (16:32)
Yes.

Scott Freeborn (16:32)
looking for heating, cooling, plumbing, electric, roofing, windows, you name it, high transactional value.

Devon Hayes (16:39)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (16:40)
So am I landing on a page that has a very low probability of conversion because nobody has proofed it in answer just with Dan and myself? It’s

If we drive traffic to a page, that page needs to convey to me, the homeowner, the end user, who we are, what we do, where we do it, are you trustable, and how do I engage with you and get to post-click your side of the fence, your company, and you guys take over. You the home service company. And with with

Amanda Joyce (17:08)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (17:10)
the majority, what we’ve seen is, and we saw this long before this client example, you’ll see a page that’s ranking for a big company, and it’s garbage.

And then if you have access to the data, you look at it, and the the metrics are time on site 15 seconds, key events, very, very low, conversion rate nominal. Because again, you’re driving traffic to that page that’s not, as Dan says on Google, he used to work at Google.

Google is, I’ve got a fistful of cash and I’m looking for somebody to solve my problem. Are you making it easy for you, the the home service company, to take my money and solve that problem?

Devon Hayes (17:48)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (17:49)
And the answer most of the time is no. So

Dan Sundgren (17:52)
Yeah, and that’s I

would add that that conversion rate optimization component is a critical component to any website, how whatever flavor you’re building it in, right? So

Devon Hayes (18:01)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Joyce (18:01)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (18:02)
we call it CRO because we love acronyms. We’re acronym freaks in our industry. But

Scott Freeborn (18:05)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (18:06)
Yeah, we are.

Dan Sundgren (18:07)
if you really boil it down, it’s like is that page optimized based on years of understanding and and user behavior? Is it best optimized to get that user to engage with?

Devon Hayes (18:20)
Right.

Amanda Joyce (18:20)
Yeah.

And we’ve all been to those pages where we’re like, I don’t even know where to look, like I can’t get out of here fast enough and it

Scott Freeborn (18:25)
One hundred percent.

Amanda Joyce (18:26)
and it’s the last thing you need is two thousand of those. Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (18:29)
Yeah, I call it show up and show up and throw up.

Devon Hayes (18:29)
Yeah.

Yeah.

But but I think the the owners, you know, these business owners are getting sold like, we’re gonna do a city page for every single city and in your service area and and that’s that’s how you’re gonna get the visibility. But we all in in in this in this group here we know that’s not how it works. And now so that’s this actually kinda goes into the stats and what we found after so I guess less than thirty days then Scott is what I’m hearing, but

Dan, I know like I know you’ve geeked out on the data and and looked at this and I geeked out after you, you know, shared it with us and it’s and it’s wild. But let’s talk about, okay, this AI website has been live for however long. Even their I in the in the in this company that built it, I will say went through and looked over their website and looked over their their kind of pitch and it’s always like X amount more visibility in seven days, in fifteen days, in twenty days, in twenty eight days. So

We’re just going in line with literally what they pitch on their website in terms of your visibility online. So with that, let’s I mean, let’s just name what what was I guess what is what worked well within this time frame so far of this AI website that replaced a traditional website. What I guess what would you what did you notice that was working at least on on par with what you were doing?

Dan Sundgren (19:47)
Yeah, there’s a there’s a few nuggets to to extract. one I would think one of the most important ones

Scott Freeborn (19:52)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (19:53)
is important to know is they removed the existing Google Analytics tracking. And we had

14, 15 years of data in there. So not just year over year, I mean year over year over year over year, right? Loads of data. So we could really look back and see our our progress over a long time with seasonality and replaced it with their own. So that makes the benchmark very simple. Hey, we started at zero, look where we are. And they might not have probably understood that before what the data is. So we call that the old hide the pickle a little bit, right? Like that that

Devon Hayes (20:27)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (20:27)
gives me that gives me the creep because you should look at

You should p you should want all that legacy data to see what

Amanda Joyce (20:32)
Yes.

Scott Freeborn (20:32)
And add

to that, Dan, it was by design because the new firm had access to the existing GA4 console GBP, which

the approach we take is when we lose a client, we literally like hold their hand of the way out the door. Like that’s what you should do. And new new firm, I’m

not saying there’s anything nefarious, but they could have done everything they’re doing.

Amanda Joyce (20:57)
They have the opportunity

Devon Hayes (20:58)
Just use the property,

Scott Freeborn (20:59)
We were

Devon Hayes (20:59)
yeah.

Scott Freeborn (21:00)
we were proactive, this is going back when G A four rolled out. We put all of our clients we started collecting data ten months before it rolled out. So we have like from day one hit the ground running and they just lost all that.

Dan Sundgren (21:15)
Yeah. The other the other thing that’s a

Amanda Joyce (21:15)
Yeah, it’s a therapy.

Dan Sundgren (21:17)
red flag, just so everyone should be aware is the shiny object thing of, hey, we’re gonna replatform you with this AI system. WordPress is dead. these types of statements are are kind of scary, right? And not scary because we’re scared of losing our our business or our jobs, but scary because there I think I think there’s a lot of hooey there.

I mean, to say WordPress is dead is sort of insane.

Devon Hayes (21:43)
It’s gimmicky.

Dan Sundgren (21:44)
yeah, it’s it’s a little gimmicky, but you know, and it’s inflammatory a little bit. Like, so the questions you need to ask are, okay, so what are you platforming it on? What are your backups? What happens if the machine breaks? What happen what happens if you’re plugged into chat GPT and for some reason they go out of business, right? And it can’t feed the beast? Like what what is happening with your back end system? Those are super important questions.

We can tell you with a WordPress site, we back that thing up daily in a hard-coded database that’s secure and separate from the internet. We could always spin a site back up if you get hacked by, you know, China or something, right?

Devon Hayes (22:21)
Yeah.

Amanda Joyce (22:21)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (22:22)
we can always say like WordPress still powers sixty-five percent of the entire internet and it’s been developed on for decades. So yeah, there’s a

load of

Devon Hayes (22:30)
I w and

why wouldn’t WordPress it use AI also in its own platform? So it’s like you think that they’re just sitting there being dinosaurs? Of course they’re working on their technology and probably have different changes and updates to to stick with the times and try to incorporate AI into everything they’re doing, but you know, I I mean

Dan Sundgren (22:49)
Yeah. And I I

always make this analogy like ten years ago when we started, we could have spun up a two thousand page side. It’d been it would take a lot more work because you can honestly do it eas you know, quicker now, right? But there’s a reason we didn’t and we don’t is because it’s it it doesn’t look natural and that’s what you always want to be, right? Authentic and natural. We can the velocity is increased, but it spreads and dilute your SEO juice in a lot of ways, especially for a small regional player.

Amanda Joyce (23:18)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (23:18)
So

to go from 200 to 2,000 pages overnight is a very unnatural thing. And the the there’s been a lot of SEO practitioners out there that thought this worked. And you know what? The funny thing is sometimes it kind of does. But the devil in the details is one year from now, what’s it gonna look like?

Amanda Joyce (23:35)
Exactly. And even the most recent update, we’ve seen some of our clients that we’ve grown their library over five years and they have so many pieces of content that now we’re having to go, they’re too closely related and they were human written and they are strong and Search Console did like them. But even now we’re having to like figure out how to consolidate them and move them together because

Google’s like it’s all it’s too close closely related. I’m not gonna rank all this. And we’re talking about a a carefully curated library. So what i what’s gonna happen with two thousand a year from now? What’s Google gonna do to right size that? Because they don’t have the crawl budget for these two thousand page websites for a local plumber or a local HVAC company. So how it I

Scott Freeborn (24:13)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Joyce (24:14)
I’m scared of what that what the next twelve months looks like in in terms of how Google’s gonna right size.

Devon Hayes (24:20)
Well, and I will say that

Dan Sundgren (24:20)
I’m not quite.

Scott Freeborn (24:21)
I think.

Devon Hayes (24:22)
when we w when I was like diving into like this site that sold the AI website and you can watch these AI websites being built in real time, all of their case studies are very short term. They do not have one case study that’s over over like two months old. So why where are the case studies for ninety days, six months, a year? It’s interesting to me that there you cannot find that on on this particular vendor site.

It’s all about seven days, fourteen days, twenty eight days. Like so I find that I’m like, that’s interesting. I wonder I wonder when the long term case studies are coming because this is a this this company is older. It’s not like they’re a ninety day

Scott Freeborn (25:01)
for sure.

Devon Hayes (25:01)
old company. So anyway, that was interesting, but

Scott Freeborn (25:05)
I think the the the issue or why we care about it so much is I I keep saying this, you two are wired the same way, which is why we chat quite a bit. We want our clients to be successful even if they’re not with us. Like I want you to win.

Devon Hayes (25:16)
Totally. Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (25:19)
But in today’s world, particularly with home services.

When you have private equity, investment banks, local, regional, national, a lot of Wall Street, like big smart money dripping down. If you’re an independent company, you can do harm to that company if you put them on a platform that causes them to regress from where they are. Because in a major market, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle, you know, West Coast.

Home service companies are a commodity now. There aren’t five of them. There are 250 of them and new ones sprouting up all the time. You see brand new trucks, vans. So you’ve just potentially taken a company that was on a slow, steady, upward trajectory and potentially brought them down because you’ve either cooked or organic, given them a model or a mix that doesn’t work and won’t work.

And that’s the the hard part for us is looking at that saying, how do we prevent that? Not so much for our company or yours, but for the client, because there’s so much gobly gook out there, and

Devon Hayes (26:25)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (26:26)
everybody’s an expert. I keep coming back to that. Your neighbor, your teacher’s husband, soccer coach, doesn’t matter, whatever, everybody’s an expert.

Devon Hayes (26:35)
No.

Okay, so let’s I want to pull it back Dan to what you were saying though. So they

they didn’t put Google Analytics, an existing

Scott Freeborn (26:41)
yeah.

Devon Hayes (26:42)
account with historical data. They didn’t put that on the new site. They elected not to. They had full access. So now we’re not measuring against a solid historical baseline. We’re just delivering new data. what else?

Dan Sundgren (26:56)
Well, I mean, thirty ish days post mortem organic crack traffic actually didn’t crash necessarily. the average click

Devon Hayes (27:02)
Okay.

Dan Sundgren (27:03)
moved slightly, and their ranking position moved slightly, but it didn’t correspond to visibility. So church impressions are actually down two hundred a day over thirty days. So they’re indexing more pages, but the dilution’s there. And the new city page traffic generated no traffic at all.

five hundred and four city related pages in the report. and eleven of those had one click.

yeah.

Devon Hayes (27:28)
So five hundred plus city pages, and out of those five hundred city pages, eleven of them got one click and the other four hundred and eighty-nine ish got zero, zero clicks. So quantity is not quality.

Dan Sundgren (27:44)
Right. Mm-hmm.

Scott Freeborn (27:45)
Dan, this is from Search Console.

Dan Sundgren (27:47)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (27:48)
Summer, this is Search Console. Yep.

Dan Sundgren (27:48)
Yeah. Yeah, correct.

Amanda Joyce (27:51)
Mm-hmm.

Devon Hayes (27:51)
Wow. So yeah, that that really speaks to more it doesn’t mean more. Like more more

Dan Sundgren (27:58)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (27:58)
pages isn’t higher quality or more visibility. Wow.

Dan Sundgren (28:02)
So the

the tell there is Google indexed the pages, sees them, but doesn’t see enough different, right? And

Amanda Joyce (28:09)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Sundgren (28:09)
so it’s just a dilution game, right? that’s the the the less is more can be really powerful for SEO when you pick your your battles and go at them and and spend that that that qualitative time sculpting those pages, right?

Amanda Joyce (28:23)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (28:23)
Well,

yeah. And and tell us, Dan, and I I mean you and I know this, but just for everyone listening, talk about the impact of having five hundred pages that Google’s like, Yeah, I see but I’m not storing those. These are basically all boilerplate. Like what what does that do to like a site’s trust and authority in terms of like the Google Gods?

Dan Sundgren (28:45)
Well I think I think you need to flip back. I mean, when I worked there years ago, they always beat the drum at Google of the user experience. And we sometimes forget that.

the user

experience gets lost in I think the the noise here, right? and that’s what Google’s always they’ve said, and I think they still hold this pretty true over there, like that’s the obsession over at Google, right?

Devon Hayes (29:10)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (29:11)
In a lot of ways. And the user experience is important. So if you go to a site that tur has turned into, you know, a a giant directory, right? You’re you’re really losing and diluting that experience because people do have limited time in their in their day.

And they just wanna find X, Y, and Z and be clear about it and know that you are a real entity and you do good work. So

Amanda Joyce (29:33)
Yeah, and it goes back to the ultimate outcome. Who cares if

you’ve got all the impressions, if no one is actually coming to your site and taking action? Ultimately we’re trying to drive leads.

Dan Sundgren (29:43)
Right. And then outside of the site is the other piece of SEO we aren’t talking about as much right up to now. And that is all those extraneous extraneous things that really are starting to matter actually even more. Review velocity, right? Reputation. PR is now the hot new shiny object, which is funny because it was like, PR, you know, whatever. But getting links from little league teams that you sponsor and all these signals are outside of your website back to you, but also

giving you validation with the LLMs, the large language models, that, hey, we’re legit and we’re in market and we’re getting reviews like every week and we’re out in the field and we’re talking to customers, those signals, like, yes, they’re off site, but they’re becoming just as important as a lot of your on-site website things. So if you’re not coaching your clients through that toolbox, then you know, you’re really doing a disservice. And and those things last and they last a really long time and they matter.

Devon Hayes (30:36)
Yeah,

a hundred percent. Yeah, that’s part of our like coaching with Entity SEO. Like we’re like, no, no, it’s even if it’s not linked and your name is mentioned in Reddit, we’ve all seen Reddit pop up on the top of Google now. And that’s, you know, because it’s it’s UGC, like it’s not from the owner. It’s user generated content. So it there it it carries more weight than what we tell search engines, search engine crawlers and and AI crawlers, you know, L L Ms, what what

We want them to know about the business. So, okay, so we were so they didn’t use analytics, but we didn’t lose impressions on Google, meaning impressions meaning how many times the website was served or or it could have possibly been clicked on within the search engine results page on Google.

so they didn’t really lose that. and a lot of the AI pages were indexed by Google, meaning they were stored in Google’s library and they can be referenced for future queries, right? Future searches. okay, so all right, like that’s not all doom and gloom. So there was some things that the AI site did okay. let’s talk about what

Things

that break your heart for your former client that you saw after this like thirty ish days.

Dan Sundgren (31:52)
Couple things jump out. I mean, one was this new AI firm is pretty hardcore on we don’t do paid advertising because we don’t need to, because we’re gonna guarantee you they actually publish this, we’re gonna guarantee you a fifteen to forty percent organic growth within ninety days and ninety two percent of your target keyword will be on page.

Devon Hayes (32:13)
Which is funny ’cause that they say SEO is dead, but SEO is how you get on page one. So why is a KPI how many keywords are on page one? I don’t get it.

Dan Sundgren (32:23)
Right. And then

we were reached out to by a white labeled agency that’s not this agency for access to their Google Ads account because they wanted to use they wanted to light it back up. So we’re kind of wondering like, what’s so what do you what are you really standing behind here? is this do you need that band aid before you show lift? And then my other big fear, and we can kind of keep it tight,

We used to do a lot of stuff in the day and it’s there’s white hat, gray hat, and black hat SEO or optimization. And the really good white hat guys did all the black hat stuff because they know what what what not to do, right? It’s kinda like the government hires the best hackers that do really bad hacking, like really bad, because they want those guys on their team in Gallus. Right.

Amanda Joyce (33:08)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Sundgren (33:10)
we used to put white background text on pages and it would rank like crazy. We I could

I could increase a website’s traffic three, four hundred percent in like a week. And then guess what?

Amanda Joyce (33:19)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (33:20)
Google rolls out an update. So my my philosophy on that is we talk about these updates, they name them in our world, panda and all these different things. There will

Devon Hayes (33:31)
Sally.

Dan Sundgren (33:31)
soon come if it’s not already occurring behind the scenes, because Google updates their algorithm and Gemini too, right? And Perplexity and Claude have algorithms on what they’re looking for every day.

There will be a dragnet where this stuff might work and it might look great, but the day of reckoning will come and it will be very interesting to see when they start sifting out the noise and looking for authenticity. So that’s that’s my soapbox. And that’s a that’s a scary place

Amanda Joyce (33:54)
Yeah, absolutely.

Devon Hayes (33:55)
I I would and

Dan Sundgren (33:58)
to be if your if your livelihood depends on it, right?

Amanda Joyce (34:00)
Yeah.

And I was one of the other things that really stuck out to me in some of the metrics that you guys shared with us. For a little backstory, Devon and I were doing our research on their pitch on their website and a lot of it was really pushing towards their AI focus, their AI forward. You’re gonna you’re gonna rank an AI with all this stuff we’re doing for you. But then you’d notice something interesting with the robot dot text file in this new website that they launched.

Do you want to speak to that a little bit in contractor terms, what that even means and how it could impact their ability to even rank within the the very bots they’re trying to rank in?

Scott Freeborn (34:32)
Well what we see is it’s blocking it and in

Amanda Joyce (34:34)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (34:35)
SEMrush, and I was checking in console, my understanding is their AI visibility, which we can all track now, has gone next to nothing that we see.

Devon Hayes (34:46)
Yeah. So something I found too when I read that in your notes, I was like, well then I wonder what they’re doing for schema.

Amanda Joyce (34:53)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (34:53)
‘Cause schema is like, you know, an especially advanced schema markup is a great way to indicate to, you know, our favorite AI robots who a company is, what they do, where they do it, and robots speak. and you can do it

Search engine crawlers read it one way and LLMs, well I guess they read it the same way, but the output on anyways, they they read it the same way. It’s robots speak for who we are, what we do, where we do it. And you can get really nitty-gritty and granular and you can do a lot with advanced schema markup. So when I was looking at this site, I was like I was baffled. I think it does less than like a WordPress SEO schema plugin would.

It’s I mean, they’ve done very, very little on that front to help AI and search crawlers understand who the company is, what they do and where they do. I mean, it’s it’s l like the most basic schema I’ve seen. So I was I was like, this is really interesting that they it’s a it’s an entire AI website, but it has done very little to actually train AI models on what.

the company is, what they who they are, what they do and where they do it. There is very, very little there. So I found that really interesting to me. And maybe the appeal as like someone who’s kind of in the know on this stuff, I would think, my gosh, I bet you this schema is amazing because it’s built by AI and AI knows what AI is looking for to recommend my business inside of AI. Not so, not so. I mean, I it I would so anyway, that would that was one that kind

of

Amanda Joyce (36:31)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (36:32)
blew me away in a in a not a great way.

Amanda Joyce (36:35)
Which again goes back to like what they’re pitching folks on, because it really if you read the website and took it word for word, which who knows the website might be written by AI as well, it really implies that you should expect to just be dominating in AI and the fact that the schema’s weak and then that you guys found that they were even blocking what was it, ChatGPT and Claude from even being able to Gemini.

Devon Hayes (36:55)
And Gemini, yeah.

Amanda Joyce (36:56)
So you’re not gonna rank if if you’re explicitly blocking it.

Dan Sundgren (37:02)
Yeah, and I think

Scott Freeborn (37:02)
No, I’ll

add as a little disclaimer, that’s what our AI tools spit out to us because we don’t have access to the site, can’t look at the back end. So

Amanda Joyce (37:12)
Okay. But

Dan Sundgren (37:13)
Yeah, but when we have a we have a tool though that pops the hood under the code and shows us all the architecture. And in July when they launched, they they blocked ByteDance, Cloudflare, Amazon Anthropic, Apple AI bot, Meta’s external bot, common crawl, apple bot, google bar, jeep chat GPT, and they lit up and greenlighted LLMS tech dot txt, which we already have. The they implemented their own. So

Devon Hayes (37:41)
yeah,

got it right.

Dan Sundgren (37:42)
There must

be some methodology behind blocking those bots, but then going to one source of truth for LLMS

Amanda Joyce (37:50)
Mm.

Dan Sundgren (37:51)
and only letting it see that. So I I don’t know I don’t know the the the mindset. you know

Amanda Joyce (37:58)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Sundgren (37:58)
there there’s there’s a bunch of engineers thinking that that’s the right way to do it. Who who knows, right?

Amanda Joyce (38:03)
Yeah. Time will tell.

Dan Sundgren (38:05)
Yeah, who knows.

Amanda Joyce (38:06)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (38:09)
So it’s it’s an interesting world. What the other interesting twist is this this agency that replaced us is white labeling and selling this to agencies. So,

Devon Hayes (38:17)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (38:18)
which actually, and I’ll give them credit, that’s smart if if they can if they can prove some sort of model. But the other scary thing too is then the free grands and elevations out there are gonna be like, wow, this is the shiny thing that’s just the set and forget. We plug it in and do other things.

You’re gonna be running on the train with them if you put your client’s eggs in that basket versus the tried and true we know works, grind it out type thing. So,

Amanda Joyce (38:43)
Yeah. That’s

Dan Sundgren (38:45)
you know, it’s it’s pretty Wild West right now. I mean, honestly. I, you know, I I I will be the first one to say like if something comes along and it over the course of one or two or three years, it’s proven and some real known entities have blessed it.

we were we were not a fan of Nitro Pack in the early days. It’s this it’s this tool that lets your site go crazy fast, like so fast

Devon Hayes (39:08)
yeah.

Dan Sundgren (39:09)
that you just didn’t believe it. And of course they were they were built in Europe and then our Spidey Sense went up like, these guys in Bulgaria are doing this thing, like it can’t be legit. They came out with a presser with Google. Google said, This this company’s great. They’re doing all the right things to speed up websites. And we went, okay, we’re on board. Right? Like, cause

Amanda Joyce (39:26)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (39:27)
it was a known thing. we’re

You gotta kinda wait sometimes and not be the early adopter ’cause you can really blow up the house if you’re not super careful.

Amanda Joyce (39:38)
Absolutely. Yeah, and we just know

Devon Hayes (39:40)
I think so.

Amanda Joyce (39:40)
so many contractors that this is their lifeblood. Outside of their recurring customers and referrals, this is how people are finding them. And it’s just that’s why we all care about it so deeply. and we just don’t want anyone to to don’t allow yourself to be the guinea pig. It doesn’t mean we’re not we’re gonna tell you not to do it forever, but make sure that that you it’s tried and trusted before you put all those eggs in that basket, unless you can afford to ri to risk those eggs.

Scott Freeborn (40:07)
For us it goes back to and when we first started Freegrin nine and a half years ago, we did a webinar and I think it was with CallRail Dan. And the webinar, the the premise of it was you the homeowner, the homeowner, sorry, home service company owner, own everything in your digital landscape.

Don’t ever let somebody control your website. Own your website. Never rent a website. Own your data. Always be the primary owner in grant agencies and workers and vendors access to it, but you own everything. What we see in the environment where something gets spun up is you don’t. We’ve all seen horror stories with the big box companies that

They own the website, you rent it, when you want to leave, you have nothing. You don’t own your data. And in today’s world, this is kind of my lens from what I do here at Freegrant, is I look at data like Dan and I geek out on it. You lose your data, you’ve lost the ability to make educated business decisions about your market. And you’re literally, 2026, flying completely blind.

And you’re up against sophisticated companies, as I said, PE back companies or local companies that have their shit together, and you’re trying to compete against those guys. Like it your probability of winning is

Going down if that’s

Amanda Joyce (41:27)
Excellently.

Scott Freeborn (41:28)
the case. And it’s hard to see, because we know it, that’s our world. But and you can tell somebody, whether it’s a family friend that owns a business that has us coming in, or somebody we’ve done business with for a long time, or a short-term client, and you see them make a decision, you’re like, look, if we’re not the flavor for you, no harm, no foul, but the direction you’re going is not going to work out well.

Amanda Joyce (41:51)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (41:53)
And

I think something that to take I guess the takeaway is yeah, more content doesn’t necessarily mean more visibility. we’re not saying AI is bad, but something that this is making me think about is we as humans are look at what we buy from, look at the social media content you consume. More more and more people are doing those videos where they’re like walking and talking and it’s not curated and it’s not produced and there’s not an intro and an outro.

It’s authenticity. And what when you get an AI website with AI generated images and video and content, like what story are you telling about your brand and about your company? And what are you telling people about what it’s like to work with you? And what are you telling potential, you know, hires what what it’s like about your company culture? Like they can’t get a feel for your site that you wanted to hit the easy

button and so you spun up an AI site. You know, it’s just it’s hard to convey your originality and your authenticity as a brand when it’s spun up by AI. I mean you ha if good marketing it has a a a human, a trained human eye looking at it. There’s some judgment in there, but it’s compelling because you’re you’re telling a story and it’s not something that AI just, you know, made up. Like you are like the roots in the history of your company and and why you do things a certain way and and

you know, who you are in the community, like all of those things, I feel like they get lost. You can do it in a click of a button, but long term, like what’s the impact to your brand? Do do we know who your brand is? Do we just swap out the logo? And that can be any heating and cooling company. It can be any roofing company.

Amanda Joyce (43:28)
Yep.

Devon Hayes (43:29)
Like really, what is the content saying about you and your brand? And what is the long term impact? And I would I would say loss over time, loss of trust, loss of authority. and and how you measure that, it I mean

I

guess you can’t, but th it’s you have to consider that when you’re looking at an AI solution. And regardless of how fast your website was is spun up, half the work is getting in getting reviews. Yeah this does not work. Local three-pack visibility can’t be gamed with an AI website that matches, you know, your service plus location in the r all the right places.

No matter how smart an AI trained model gets to modify your website on the fly, no operational costs, work fast, we’re fast. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have real life customers telling people about their experience with you. So like there’s no easy button for that part of it. You you still have to get reviews. And so there I would I think that the appeal of an AI website sounds like, AI knows how to make me appear in AI, although in this case it’s blocking some AI.

But it’s not it’s not compelling and it it c still can’t get reviews for you.

Dan Sundgren (44:40)
Yeah, and you hit the nail on the head, Devon. And the disheartening part is all that really hard work we put in over six months, Scott alluded to earlier, is repurposed on the AI site, and that’s the gold. But it was all the work that we did. It the video production work that we did on their hero. Yeah, it all got pulled over because that’s the

Devon Hayes (44:57)
They took it all. It’s on there.

Scott Freeborn (44:59)
They own it. They have the right to.

Dan Sundgren (45:00)
gold. but we again we built those

Devon Hayes (45:01)
I guess I mean, yeah. Okay. So at least there’s that.

Scott Freeborn (45:03)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (45:04)
we built those assets with our client. They they spent the money.

To build that gold, right? Which is the picture of the rep the the technician shaking the old guy’s hand on the front porch, the video of the owner who’s been there for a really long time talking about their DNA of their company, the work they’re doing in the metal fab shop, like all those things they just sucked over, and that’s the gold. So yeah.

Amanda Joyce (45:30)
That’s what’s still making it sticky. Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (45:33)
But again, you know, like my parents raise me to say, like, if you ever borrow anything, whatever it is, always return it in a much better place. Whether you’re borrowing a car or a shovel or a lawnmower, clean it up, spit shine it, make it better. So when you return it, it’s even it’s even in better condition, right? Like we’re the stewards of our clients and their data. And we we take it very seriously, because you know, to your earlier point, we aren’t moving widgets for Microsoft.

or NVIDIA, in that, you know, honestly, those are big hairy projects that people chuck out all day and don’t matter. W these are people putting food on the table and it’s a very serious responsibility as an agency owner. So, you know, have fun of what you do and love it. But remember at the end of the day, this is a very serious business in that regard. So that’s kind of our you know philosophical on that is we

Devon Hayes (46:24)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (46:25)
did it we did a King Five interview two weeks ago to get a Google business profile back.

And that the reporter asked me, we went it w hit television, you know, why did you reach out to King Five? And I said, Well, talk to the owner Andy here, and he did. And Andy said, We had to lay some people off because we lost our profile. And Fragrant’s doing everything they can to get it back, and you’re our last hope to get on the news so we can get it back. I mean, we went full on Street Fighter mode to get the thing back and it, you know, because it meant that much.

Devon Hayes (46:52)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (46:53)
So these are very, you know, you know, big hairy things that matter.

Devon Hayes (46:58)
I guess do you think we’ll have

Amanda Joyce (46:58)
Absolutely.

Devon Hayes (46:59)
to like do you think your old client will will stay in touch with you and let you know about like leads or conversions or

Scott Freeborn (47:06)
They

actually said, I’ll have you audit this in ninety days and we’re babysitting it, but in ninety days we’re gonna have to tell them we can’t really audit it because your new firm set it up the way that they did. So if they grant us access, we can look at the new data and do a side-by-side, which we can still do, but you’ve lost the ability to just do a quick analysis of it.

Amanda Joyce (47:28)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (47:29)
And to be clear, it’s not just this other company, the other side of Free Grin, we see it as well. Client went with a different firm, reached out, this is a beautiful one. Thirty days after the client went with a different firm, reached out to us and asked, said, Hey, my reporting link doesn’t work anymore. And Dan replied back

Amanda Joyce (47:47)
Thank you.

Scott Freeborn (47:48)
and said

We have nothing to report on. They clipped us and they moved everything to different properties so that link doesn’t have any data anymore. okay, maybe I’ll reach out to the new company and see if they have anything for me. It’s it’s nonstop.

Amanda Joyce (48:01)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (48:01)
And honestly, to that point, Devon, one of the first things we did is we we zipped up the entire site that we’d spent months building and put it in an archive. So if we need to roll back, it’s lock and load. just because we want to make sure all that work wasn’t lost forever.

Amanda Joyce (48:16)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (48:17)
I don’t they wouldn’t have thought to do that, I don’t think.

Devon Hayes (48:19)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (48:20)
I wonder if the AI company takes a backup of the site in case they break or they need something to roll back to. I would guess probably not, because they have it all figured out.

Amanda Joyce (48:29)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (48:29)
Right.

Dan Sundgren (48:29)
But because WordPress is dead, but and and and paid advertising doesn’t work.

Amanda Joyce (48:36)
No.

Dan Sundgren (48:36)
so yeah, you kinda wonder, you’re like, all right, well, brave new world, let’s see how this sh this plays out kind of thing. And we have, you

Amanda Joyce (48:42)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (48:43)
know, like you guys, we got we have a lot of great clients that get it. And you know, I think what we’re really addressing today is the elephant in the room of shiny new object, you can do a lot of cool stuff, but what does that mean?

Amanda Joyce (48:56)
Yeah. Exactly.

Devon Hayes (48:56)
Yeah. Yeah, what does that mean? And

and what’s the long term impact? So I guess, yeah, to kind of wrap up the episode, AI is great, but you still need a human to judge the output, to guide the strategy, who’s determining what’s valuable or invaluable from the AI output. you you still need someone looking at that, you know, so and you still need someone getting reviews. So you can’t

Can’t

totally just click a button and and think it it that

Scott Freeborn (49:26)
And you can’t

game the system. That that’s to me that’s what it boils down to is

Devon Hayes (49:30)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (49:31)
y you can game it short term, but long term, and these are hyper competitive markets in big metro areas, you cannot gain the system. You can’t. And

Devon Hayes (49:44)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (49:44)
you will be penalized if you attempt to

And that’s what we keep coming back to, like the companies are going to be harmed long term if they don’t do it the right way.

Devon Hayes (49:56)
I feel like this is a good spot for an analogy. Like like maybe like a like a Tesla, you get you get fresh off the charger and then you you go super fast. You’re going like, I don’t know, a hundred for a little while, but you’re driving from Denver to Omaha and I don’t know, you get halfway halfway there and your car dies ’cause you spent all the juice in the beginning. Yeah, you get a little you’re starting to slow down. You’re you’re kinda you’re starting to let you’re

Scott Freeborn (50:15)
The gas pillow gets a little soft on it, doesn’t speed up anymore.

Dan Sundgren (50:20)
I I have an analogy

I have an analogy in roofing. Okay, you ready? Okay, so

Devon Hayes (50:24)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Sundgren (50:25)
Elon Musk is building the biggest

Scott Freeborn (50:27)
yeah.

Dan Sundgren (50:27)
factory in the world. And he’s build his new thing is Optimus Robots.

Devon Hayes (50:32)
Okay.

Dan Sundgren (50:32)
So Elon Musk comes out in two years, twenty-four months from now, with robot roofing, right? And you buy the roofing robots and they drive the truck, they go to the yard, they pick up the materials, they show up at your house and put a roof on.

And guess what? Your roofing business is completely revolutionized because it’s all and it’s pixel perfect. Every shingle is perfect. They’re up there crawling around. You don’t even need L and I anymore. Cause if the robot falls off, you just have the other robots fix it, right?

Amanda Joyce (50:58)
Ha.

Dan Sundgren (50:59)
All that liability goes away. You told that to a roofing company, they’re gonna replace you. The all your crews are not needed. They would what would they say? Like, that’s insane.

Devon Hayes (51:09)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (51:10)
We’re actually kind of in the hey, you just hit the easy button and all of your

marketing’s done for you and you don’t need humans anymore.

Devon Hayes (51:16)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (51:17)
Well, maybe you still need a form in there at the very least to say, well, here’s the material and this is what we need, and they showed up the wrong thing or whatever, right? Like, so maybe some

Devon Hayes (51:24)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (51:25)
of the busier work underneath, the actual making the donuts can be streamlined. But at the end of the day, you still need to have that super strategic do the thing right, talk to the human type piece, right? And

Amanda Joyce (51:39)
Yeah.

Dan Sundgren (51:39)
understand what’s really going on.

Devon Hayes (51:41)
Which channel is working? Like do I need to be doing all this social media content? maybe

Dan Sundgren (51:46)
Yeah,

I mean we’re we’re not taking crazy pills with AI. We know that it’s gonna change the marketing landscape like crazy. We can do so much more and cooler stuff, but we still need that voice of reason and that shepherd, right, through the woods because

Devon Hayes (52:00)
We can’t replace judgment.

Dan Sundgren (52:02)
yeah, yeah, and that’s the interesting thing. and that’s why they say the white collar worker force is gonna be d well, yeah. I mean, if you know, if you’re a court, you know, reporter and you’re

And you’re typing the transcript, okay, you know, yeah, maybe that job isn’t gonna last forever, right? But

Devon Hayes (52:18)
My best friend.

Dan Sundgren (52:19)
but the judge still needs to be up on the s I mean, until the robots are smarter than the judge, right? I don’t you

Amanda Joyce (52:24)
Here.

Dan Sundgren (52:24)
know, so it’s all unfolding, but that’s that’s kind of like the next thing. Like we’re gonna kind of see how this plays out, but meanwhile, we’re adopting the heck out of it and doing everything we can to embrace the heck out of it and do do as much as we can with it because it is really powerful and really cool.

Amanda Joyce (52:41)
Yeah, and it helps us better serve our clients and we it’s it’s such a it’s amazing.

Dan Sundgren (52:46)
The the data analysis alone is like this is old. I mean we

Devon Hayes (52:48)
It is awesome.

Dan Sundgren (52:49)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (52:50)
So let’s do this. Let’s chess check back. I don’t know, should we do like another ninety days and we can just do a short episode to say, hey, whoever listened to this one, like here’s the follow-up on how it’s performing and

Scott Freeborn (52:59)
Yeah.

Devon Hayes (53:00)
maybe we’ll we’ll, you know get some crow and be eating some crow on here, or maybe we’ll say, god, it got worse, you guys. Or, you know, maybe these these things got refined.

Scott Freeborn (53:09)
Well that’s not the intent at all.

Definitely, I want to make that clear. That’s not the intent. It’s just we see these things on a daily basis. Like that the cleaning company real quick. Sixteen-year-old kid spins up chat GPT site and lost eighty-six percent of his traffic in a week. Went from ten sessions of organic to zero. It’s a house cleaning company. My house cleaners are here. I was telling Dan I’ve added up over five and a half years. I paid forty grand, three hundred bucks a week times, you know.

There you go, do do the run the numbers. So the lifetime value of client, while it seems like a lone number, this guy just allowed his business to be cooked because he had a 16-year-old kid who told him, Your current website sucks, let me build you a new one and fried everything. Like

Devon Hayes (53:58)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (53:59)
You hear these stories over and over and over and over and they just make you cringe. Truly like, my it’s like watching a car crash, right? Like,

Amanda Joyce (54:09)
Yeah.

Scott Freeborn (54:09)
I know this is about to happen, don’t do it. There you go.

Amanda Joyce (54:13)
Yeah. All right, well let’s hope that at least a few people that listen today take heed and are a little more cautious as they’re making decisions about their businesses. And please comment, let us know if you have found if there’s something we’re not commenting on or if there’s something that some strategic business decision you’ve made where you really lean into AI that

other contractors need to hear about it. We want to hear it. And we can’t wait to keep revisiting this topic. We’d love to have you guys on all the time because this is just gonna keep changing. Like I’d it’d be fun

Scott Freeborn (54:41)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda Joyce (54:42)
to continue to comment on it and and talk about the wins and the losses and just help people make good decisions.

Scott Freeborn (54:48)
We appreciate it. Thanks for having us on.

Dan Sundgren (54:49)
Thanks for having

us. It’s always fun to geek out.

Amanda Joyce (54:50)
Awesome.

Devon Hayes (54:51)
Thanks guys.

Amanda Joyce (54:52)
Absolutely.

Devon Hayes (54:53)
Always.

Dan Sundgren (54:55)
Yeah.

Amanda Joyce (54:57)
Yeah.